The stupidity antidote

By Joe Brown

Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Last week was a good one for comedian Joel McHale.

Judge Judy was all shook up in that earthquake. Ryan Seacrest was bitten by a shark.

“That was bigger than the earthquake at the office,” says McHale, who hosts the E! network’s “The Soup,” a weekly half-hour recap of the best of the worst on TV. “People were running through the halls screaming, ‘Seacrest got bit by a shark! This is awesome!’ It was a gift from the gods.”

McHale watches bad TV so you don’t have to. Lucky man — we’re currently in a golden age of bad TV.

Seacrest tops the list of McHale’s favorite targets. And it’s a long, constantly growing list: Tyra Banks. The Lohans, Hogans and Kardashians. The Hills gang. Denise Richards (McHale enjoys calling her reality show “Denise Richards Colon It’s Complicated”). “Flavor of Love,” “Rock of Love” and “A Shot at Love.”

He’s not likely to run out of bad examples anytime soon. As “The Soup’s” current ad campaign puts it: “As long as bimbos compete for love ... As long as celebs have a driving license ... As long as there are rock stars and hot tubs ... dancing handicapped celebrities ... men willing to wear sequins ... there will be good ‘Soup.’ ”

McHale introduces each shameful nugget and sends it on its way with a grin and the charmingly sarcastic manner that has made “The Soup” a must-watch show and earned him a cult following. Many “Soup” devotees consider him the antidote to the nation’s rampant and worsening stupidity epidemic.

McHale, 36, is pretty green at stand-up — he plays the Mandalay Bay Theatre on Friday — but sounds pretty confident about it.

Then he hears that Jerry Seinfeld is playing Caesars Palace the same night.

“Let’s see, who’s gonna win the night?” McHale jokes. “Hmm. Who has been doing stand-up longer? Ha HA! Oh wait ...

“OK, who has a successful show on cable? Oh wait, he does. In reruns ...

“Who has a car collection? OK, I keep painting myself into this corner. Well, I’m stumped. I don’t even know I’m gonna show up now.”

McHale figures that doing “The Soup” for four years, averaging 65 shows a year, is pretty good preparation for stand-up. And he says his onstage act will stick fairly close to his “Soup” shtick.

“Well, I won’t have a teleprompter, which I gotta tell you, is totally inconvenient,” he says, on the phone from his Los Angeles home. His stand-up is “kind of a behind-the-scenes look at ‘The Soup’ and how I feel about television, but there’s also a lot of jokes about my family and things that I find funny. And I talk about who I’ve pissed off. I’ll be talking a lot about that.”

Since McHale took over “The Soup” in 2004, the show’s viewership has jumped to more than 6.6 million per week (tops among cable programs in its 10 p.m. time slot on Friday). He joins an impressive lineage of hosts, beginning in 1991 with Greg Kinnear (when it was called “Talk Soup”) and continuing with John Henson, Hal Sparks and Aisha Tyler.

“That was one of the reasons I took the show, because the pedigree is so good,” McHale says. “They all have gone on to do huge things: Kinnear getting a freaking Oscar nomination and being a huge movie star, and Aisha being a big TV star. Of course, I’ll be the first to fail at it.”

His 4-month-old son, Isaac, starts crying, and McHale interrupts the interview to pick him up. “Oh Buddy, just relax,” he murmurs, and the baby quiets down.

“We call him Ike,” McHale says. “I was shooting a movie right after he was born. My wife was thrilled. ‘Yeah, this is working out great, jerk. I’ll be here with your children. I’ll be raising them.’ ”

That movie, Steven Soderbergh’s “The Informant,” happened to give McHale his first big film role. He plays an FBI agent tracking a corporate titan turned bipolar villain, alongside Matt Damon and Scott Bakula.

The talk turns back to “The Soup,” which McHale has called “the CSI of finding (crummy) television.”

He’s not kidding: The weekly half-hour is the result of a weeklong forage for footage. McHale says a staff of about 14 spends all day watching TV, TiVo-ing everything and combing the dregs for usable moments.

“When the show started, I used to watch it all,” McHale has said. “But now I force production assistants to do it. And I laugh, and laugh, and laugh at them. There is a person on our staff who has to watch the ‘Today’ show. All of it. Every day. Well, it’s the fourth person to do that. The first three committed suicide.”

Somehow it doesn’t come across as mean. Well, not gratuitously mean. Well, mean only to people who richly deserve it.

“We let the clips and the people roast themselves, and then we make a comment,” McHale says. “You’ll never see us just going after someone for the sake of going after someone. They have to have done something ridiculous. You never see us going, ‘That Daniel Day-Lewis, what a putz.’ You’ll never hear that, because he never does anything to call attention to himself. And he’s tremendously good at what he does, and he sticks to it. He doesn’t try to run down his assistant in his SUV.”

McHale calls the E! network “the CNN for useless entertainment news. Which would make him the Walter Cronkite of reality shows and scandal-bound celebs.

It’s a sweet gig, but there are occupational hazards. McHale has to check to make sure there are no Kardashians or Hasselhoffs around before entering a room. And like it or not, he is immersed, simmered and stewed in pop culture, most of it wretched.

In that trusted position, a grateful nation turns to him in times of trouble.

Like when a TV host is bitten on the toe by a sand shark the size of a cat.

“I think Keith Olbermann said it best,” says McHale, who has heard everything anybody has had to say about the subject. “ ‘We’re gonna need a bigger Seacrest.’ ”