The Best of Crank Yankers Uncensored

Posted by Danny Gallagher (danny@filmschoolrejects.com) on December 12, 2007

If you’ve spent the last three years building up your “Crank Yankers” collection, Comedy Central just totally boned you.

That’s not to say the show is bad, but they’ve cut through all the bad calls to bring you the best in one disc that costs considerably less than all of their season box sets. Eh, it’s no big loss. If you’re saving up your nickels and dimes to buy all the “Crank Yankers” episodes, chances are you were going to blow it on either beer, blow or both.

They’ve released a new “Best of…” compilation of their best crank calls and puppet mysogeny in one new DVD set that’s a steal for fans of the series or people who remember one or two calls that made them laugh.
“Crank Yankers” is the short lived brain child of Jimmy Kimmel, Adam Carolla and Daniel Ellison, creators of their earlier sophomoric hit, “The Man Show,” which makes this show look like a Greek tragedy performed by seasoned actors with Oxford training. The premise is they invite celebrities to make crank phone calls that range from the clever to the unclean and then re-enact the whole thing with puppets and set the entire series in the fictional town of Yankerville.

This DVD set cuts through all the fat of the show and gets to the heart of the best stuff. It even cuts out that annoying theme song and useless musical appearances with the exception of their only memorable one to date, Tenacious D’s “Friendship.”

The producers obviously tried to pick the calls with the most outrageous premises or responses from the Yankers’ victims, and the calls are hit and miss, but the ones that do hit strike a bullseye nine times out of 10. Wanda Sykes, who plays the sassy Gladys, easily has the best call when she phones up a towing company to tell the manager that one of her worker’s left a “special visitor” in the backseat. I don’t want to say what it is because it’s hilarious and the traffic that we would generate from Google would just be too weird to comprehend.

There’s also plenty, if not all, of “Special Ed” calls, the show’s mascot. He’s a helmet weird, buck toothed retard, voiced by comedian Jim Florentine, who basically calls people up and repeats a phrase over and over and over and over until the person has the sense to hang up. At first viewing, these are very funny but they tend to drag the whole thing down after the fourth or fifth viewing and you might find yourself skipping past them or just saving them to show your friends when you’re both really really drunk.

There’s also only two calls with Elmer, a cantankerous old man with a hearing problem voiced by Kimmel. The voice is the funniest in the bunch and the style of the puppet makes it that much funnier, for some reason. Unfortunately, there’s only one call on the whole DVD. Maybe he didn’t make as many people laugh, but he’s the funniest old man I’ve ever seen if you don’t count every old person you’ve ever seen at the mall.

Grade: B+

Release Date: December 4, 2007 Rated: Not Rated Running Time: 180 minutes Number of Discs: 1 Directors: Adam Carolla, Jim Florentine, Jimmy Kimmell, Tracy Morgan Studio: Paramount Home Video

Read more articles by Danny Gallagher