Programme profile: Tosh.0

Daniel Tosh
Daniel Tosh
What it's about: Viral videos replayed, rehashed, ridiculed and righteously elevated to pop-culture prominence.

Reason to watch: Lots of other people are viewing it.

How they do it: Genial comic-host Daniel Tosh stands in front of a studio audience and riffs on web laughers, like the teen who freaked out - throwing a physical fit - when his mother cancelled his World of Warcraft online gaming account.

Surely you've seen this viral video - just one YouTube upload among many that has tallied 31 million views.

The Comedy Central website's Tosh.0 take on it added another 210,000 views (see it at comedycentral.com/tosh.0).

But Tosh went beyond host commentary that "the video didn't add up". (C'mon, whose mum knows how to log on to cancel a WoW account?) He flew the teen to Hollywood to grill him to admit the footage was fake, "to find out if I need to punish him, in our first-ever web investigation".

His attack got zanier from there, in indescribably quick and clever ways, through a stream-of-consciousness sketch that managed to both mock web junk and recognise its big-deal place in today's media landscape.

My say: Tosh's (mostly) good-natured joshing is sharper than it has any right to be, turning a clip of neck-to-neck giraffe combat into topical riffs on Animal Planet, Toys R Us and Michael Vick.

His bouncy demeanour wears well, making seriously scatological discoveries seem near wholesome.

That jaunty attitude helps him glide through even controversy-courting zingers - buff black men dating fat white girls, The Daily Show's recent sexist-workplace accusations - without seeming to intend offence.

At least not to people like me who don't mind watching a guy using a bike pump to prime himself for explosive gas-passing.

Bottom line: Tosh.0 takes web junk only as seriously as it deserves to be.

Watch his zippy 30-minute lampoon, and you've spared yourself hours of YouTube brain drain.

- Tosh.0 screens weekdays at 7.30pm, Mondays at 8pm, Tuesdays at 1.30am and Sundays at 10.30am on Comedy Central (Sky digital channel 10).

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