Vote for the Best Sight Gag!
Today’s category in the Yahooies!, Yahoo TV’s awards honoring the best of the 2014-15 TV season including summer shows, honors those sly series that know both the power of a good visual joke and that comedy is in the details.
The nominees for Best Sight Gag are…
BoJack Horseman:The worker bees
When you need to build a Disneyland knock-off out of trash and spare parts, who ya gonna call? Worker bees! That’s the kind of genius executive decision one can expect from BoJack’s couch-crashing pal, Todd (and from this series, which is full of hidden visual gems). Due to the fact that they’re working with wood, these specific stinger-equipped employ-bees may be of the “carpenter bee” variety. — Ethan Alter
Inside Amy Schumer: The ever-growing wine glass
Throughout “Football Town Nights,” which is nominated for the Best Sketch Yahooie!, Amy Schumer’s version of Friday Night Lights’s Tami Taylor is seen drinking wine. The joke: The glass she’s holding keeps getting larger and larger until finally, it’s more than half her height. As the show’s head property master John Udell told Yahoo TV of her final round, “It was meant to be used as a display centerpiece for wine bottles and beers on ice, not to be actually drunk out of. We could only fill it with about 4 gallons of watered-down white grape juice before it became unmanageable. It probably weighed 40 pounds in the end — almost too heavy for Amy to lift on her own, but we did manage to get a few takes of her chugging it. Can’t wait for the wine glass twice her size for Season 4!” — Mandi Bierly
Last Week Tonight With John Oliver: The ongoing map trick
One minute you’re feeling all superior for spending Sunday night hating on sexist beauty pageants, tsk-tsking drone usage, and learning about current events in Uganda on HBO’s Last Week Tonight, and then the next, bam!, John Oliver knocks you down a peg with his recurring incorrect map graphic gag. Capitalizing on the generally weak geography skills of Americans, The Daily Show alum will start a segment on a country, say Uruguay, and a corresponding map of South America will pop up to his left with said nation highlighted. Except it’s often the wrong part of the world that is highlighted and Oliver cracks giddily, “a country you think about so little that you didn’t even notice that’s not Uruguay.” And lest you think the joke would only work with faraway lands like Bolivia, Oliver once subbed South Dakota for Nebraska adding, “C’mon, it’s your country. That’s not OK.” To keep the hoodwinking fresh, the LWT team isn’t afraid to switch it up by passing off the Caspian Sea as Azerbaijan or correctly coloring within the right borders, then admonishing viewers with two not-Venezuela corrections before admitting it was right the first time. It is a rare talent that can make you fall for the same stunt over and over again and get you to laugh while simultaneously making you feel stupid and question your schooling. — Carrie Bell
Silicon Valley: The adult entertainment conference nameplates
We loved the Let Blaine Die SWOT board, but the paper nameplates IDing the execs attending an adult entertainment conference that Richard had crashed in hopes of stealing one film company’s business from a rival were the subtle, surprise gift that kept on giving. And yes, these were the least NSFW examples. — MB
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: The fancy ice
When Kimmy asked her rich boyfriend, Logan Beekman, to pick up some ice on the way to her birthday soirée, she was probably thinking a plastic bag of drink-coolin’ cubes from the local bodega. But that was like a foreign concept to Snooty McSnooterson, who instead went to an “icery” and arrived at Kimmy’s with this: Breukelen Artisanal Frozen Water (say the name real fast… it’s another fine entry in the history of Tina Fey’s marvelous mockery of all things hipster). And what, exactly, is artisanal frozen water? A fancy wooden chest — velvet-lined, natch — filled with four perfectly-shaped cubes, a set of tongs, and a booklet detailing the artisanal ice-making process. — Kimberly Potts
Winners will be announced the week of Sept. 14.
There’s still time to vote for more Yahooies! categories, including Best Sex Scene, Most Memorable Line, Most GIF-able Moment, Best Late Night Host, and Character You Love to Hate.
