Site of the week: TV for smart asses with WTF Comcast
For those of you who have ever flipped through Comcast’s On Demand choices and found yourself bewildered by the flippancy of the synopses, WTF Comcast has a whole slew of them for your amusement. As straightforward as any niche tumblr, the blog is simply a collection of pictures of TV screens containing the offending Comcast synopses, occasionally with some accompanying ironic observation from the site curator.
While the concept may sound a little boring (especially if you haven’t witnessed the absurdity yourself), the entries are hilarious for wildly different reasons. The majority of the posts get their humor from the incredibly succinct sum-up phrases used to close the synopses, like closing a synopsis of The Specialist with the line: “Tedious in the extreme," or summing up the entirety of Seinfeld with just one line: “Friends living in Manhattan obsess over little things.” However, others prove how bored — or possibly even drunk — the copywriter was, such as the internal dialogue seen in the description of an episode of Exes & Ohs that drips with bitterness: “What’s the best way to find out about a new girl? Interrogate her ex-boyfriend of course — I’m sure they’ll be open, honest, and partial (just like I am about my ex-the whore).”
Often the more sardonic descriptions are for obscure movies and TV shows (usually horror films or fluff dramedies) like calling The Burrowers “a masterpiece of the Cowboy/Carniverous Worm People genre”—the punch line being that no one watches these movies (and perhaps the copywriter didn’t expect anyone to read the description either). Others still contain such scathing criticism and thinly-veiled judgment of the film itself that it’s a wonder no one edited it, such as the opening sentence to the Ace Ventura: Pet Detective description: “Jim Carrey milks laughs from a one-joke premise in his star-making vehicle about a sleuth searching for a football team’s missing mascot.”
With such a wealth of casually sarcastic one-liners, it’s unfortunate that the site isn’t updated as frequently as it was when it began in 2009. Still, the archives offer a series of comical quick-reads that run the gamut from the typo-ridden to the tongue-in-cheek to the downright critical. Get a kick out of the blunt-but-true descriptions of popular and unpopular movies alike, and maybe look into future employment with Comcast's copywriting department.
