We’ll set the stage: A bunch of plucky German comics get together and, for lack of a comedy club circuit in their native land, start producing gigs at laundromats (sounds familiar!), and eventually they produce a television show based on the gigs called Nightwash.

The show is aired on regional local access television and it gets a following. We’ll let “German standup king Klaus-Jurgen ‘Knacki’ Deuser” pick up the story from there:

“It was a strange thing. We were on late and WDR kept moving us around, but the ratings were always great,” Deuser says. “We were on a regional channel, but traveling around the country, I noticed everyone knew Nightwash. We had become a brand.” A brand that seemed tailor-made for Comedy Central when it launched a German-language channel last year.

“Comedy Central was looking for something unique that would make them stand out, give them a name in Germany, and give them access to the latest new comedians,” Deuser says.

Now, instead of moving from wash salon to wash salon, Nightwash has a swanky home in Cologne’s Gloria theater. It is bigger than ever and can boast of being the launching pad for a new generation of Teutonic comics.

Emphasis ours.

Jaw-dropping!

TV execs in this country do stuff like this all the time. We recall that NBC pulled a similar move when they greenlighted the idea of broadcasting a freewheeling standup and music show that had been ongoing at L.A.’s funky, neo-Bohemian Largo then taped it at the cavernous, studio-like Knitting Factory, stripping it of its charm and transforming it into a tightly formatted standup show that was virtually indistinguishable from any that had preceded it.

They can’t help themselves… it’s what they do.

Part of the fun of Nightwash, writes Reuters’ Scott Roxborough, “was seeing the puzzled stares of night owls passing by outside. It soon became the favorite of insomniacs.” Part of the fun? It was probably as integral a part of the show’s charm as the comedians themselves. Now, with the helpful meddling of clueless German TV execs (no doubt with some tutoring from New York and L.A. suits!), Nightwash will have been laundered, dried, starched, ironed and folded– making it just like all the others that have come before it.

Regarding that ill-fated Knitting Factory show on NBC, it is helpful to check out this article (second item, scroll down), which appeared in the New York Observer on Dec. 10, 2000– just 20 months after we first launched SHECKYmagazine.com!

(The item provides valuable insight into the state of comedy affairs in late 2000. And it also might give readers who haven’t been with us since the beginning some insight into why we are like we are, and why we decided to fire up this magazine in the first place.)

The quote from NBC’s executive vice-president of casting, Marc Hirschfield is particularly galling/enlightening (depending upon your mood):

Mr. Hirschfeld said the NBC show will deviate from that tiresome mike-and-a-punch-line format, spotlighting the creative, sometimes arch alternative comics who have popped up with increasing frequency in recent years at places like the Luna Lounge in New York and Largo in Los Angeles. Mr. Hirschfeld described the kind of comedy the show is seeking as “free-form, a little less joke-telling and a little more storytelling.”

Of course, Hirschfield’s network ended up producing a standup show that was rather similar to standup shows of the past.

Mind you, we rather like the standup shows of the past– three, maybe four, standup comics doing what they do best– standup comedy! We just wonder why they feel the need to bash the format (and the performers) when they set about pitching, greenlighting and subsequently promoting the venture.

And, in the case of the Largo show and our German colleagues’ Nightwash project, why do they meddle to the point of destroying that which attracted them to the show in the first place?