Summer's Back!

After watching just a few of the episodes on the Son of the Beach, Volume 2, one wonders how anyone can say comedy is dead on television. Oh, it’s alive and well — and available on DVD.

This week, 20^th Century Fox and Shout finally release the last two seasons of the FX comedy, Son of the Beach. Back in 2002, before fledgling network had nary a hit to call their own, Howard Stern’s first television foray hit the airwaves — a high-spirited, irreverent spoof of Baywatch, starring Timothy Stack as head lifeguard “Notch Johnson” and his band of misfits whose job it is to protect the beaches of Malibu Adjacent.

Created by Stack, David Morgasen, and James R. Stein, Son of the Beach plays out like a bastard child fathered by Mel Brooks and the Zucker brothers. Each episode is a no-holds-barred laugh fest, chock full of inappropriate humor on every level.

Jaime Bergman plays B.J. Cummings, a buxom blonde who’s not afraid to play the dumb card. Leila Arcieri plays Jamaica St. Croix, a hot African American lifeguard with enough curves and racial stereotypes to make Spike Lee shudder. Kimberly Oja plays Notch’s right-hand lifeguard, Kimberlee Clark, the only one of the group to offer a reaction to the insanity that constantly ensues.

The chemistry between Stack and his co-stars is obvious, evidenced by their constant ability to make fun of themselves and the characters they portray, like pseudo-Nazi, Austrian-born, muscle-bound lifeguard Chip Rommel, who’s forced playing as if he were part of the Hitler youth.  Chip: “It is as easy as attacking Russia in winter.”

The guest cast ranges from the absurd — Angry Drunken Dwarf, Joey Buttafuoco — to the absurd Frank Sinatra, Jr. in a Bond parody called “You Only Come Once.” Sinatra’s evil character, named Stinkfinger, walks around saying, “Smell my finger” — lines that would certainly never make the Chairman bored.

In “The Gay Team,” a villain named “Heinous Anus,” played by RuPaul, is making young men at the beach disappear to a place called the “Gaytrix.” When Chip ends up captured, it’s up to Notch’s army buddy (Alan Thicke) to help save him. Notch Johnson to Heinous Anus: “Anus, prepare for Johnson.”

Laden with every sexual innuendo imaginable and pop references galore, each episode of Son of the Beach plays out like a seventh grader’s wet dream. There’s never a gag too gross, too off color, or politically incorrect. With episodes titled “Saturday Night Queefer,” “Empty the Dragon,” and “In the Line of Booty,” it’s as if the show’s patron saints were George Carlin and Don Rickles.

Not to be underestimated, the glue that holds the whole show together is Stack’s deadpan, Notch Johnson. Stack just doesn’t play the character — he owns it — giving each episode just enough backbone and heart to keep the gags from ever petering out.

Sadly, Son of the Beach was canceled on FX way before its prime, after incoming President Kevin Reilly decided the show would end its run in 2002, opting instead for edgier fare dramas like Nip/Tuck and The Shield. But to quote the legendary genius, Jerry Lewis, “Drama is easy; comedy is hard.”

A cult favorite when it first aired, it’s finally available this week on DVD. Why it’s rerunning on Comedy Central is a mystery. There never was a more fertile time than now for a comedy as rich as Son of the Beach to find its way back to the airwaves the way Fox revived Family Guy.