'The Eric Andre Show' Is (Still) Peak Comedy

Imagine yourself walking down the street, minding your own business. Then—suddenly!—a guy in a bright orange safety vest crawls out of some rubble and tells you he's been there hours. He’s incredibly dirty—and thirsty, brandishing a six-pack of beers. Before a good samaritan like yourself could ever call 9-1-1 and get this man some help, he's somehow convinced you to pour the beers in his mouth and help him try to stand up for the sixth time. "You gave me too much beer," the man says. "You f***ed my ass up!" Then, another guy sticks his arm out from the rubble and you jump backward like you've just seen a ghost. Comedy achieved.

That, my friends, is the Eric Andre experience.

You know, there hasn't been enough humor in the TV landscape nowadays, with today's popular shows following a high school soccer team that eats each other in the wilderness to survive (Yellowjackets), a medieval world full of dragons (House of the Dragon), and a post-apocalyptic America overrun with infected zombies (The Last of Us). I was beginning to question where the funny people had gone—until the return of Adult Swim's The Eric Andre Show, the adrenaline-fueled, late-night prank series that has had me laughing so hard that my body has been hurting for nearly a decade. With Season Six now here, Andre is back and better than ever.

The genius of The Eric Andre Show is that it's the kind of prank show you can’t prepare for—because it’s constantly changing. One second you're looking at Andre try to eat his desk, then a man dressed as a ginormous bug is running straight at you. The Eric Andre Show may not be everyone's cup of tea, but Andre has excelled at this particular brand of chaotic, gross-out humor for ten years, five seasons, and a 2021 film titled Bad Trip. He even has another upcoming series with Jackass legend Johnny Knoxville called The Prank Panel, where contestants will pitch the practical comedy gods their craziest ideas to perform. "We’ve gotten in a little trouble," Andre told Uproxx, citing the 33 emergency calls made this season of The Eric Andre Show by unassuming passerbys afraid of their pranks. "You got to break a few eggs to make an omelet."

Hell, even Andre's celebrity guests can't really anticipate what he's going to do at any given moment. From what Andre has told interviewers over the years, the thermostat in the room is turned up so high that you instantly break a sweat. The crew continually offers you marijuana and ayahuasca before you go on set, and isn't afraid of shocking you early on, by having naked personal assistants walk around behind the scenes. Once seated, he’ll ask you questions about fake, damaging tweets you "allegedly wrote." Felipe Estrada, another comedian, is standing right behind you... and he may even drip miscellaneous goop onto your nice outfit. The chair you’re sitting on? Well, that's just a guy wearing a big chair costume. No one is safe!

Still, that hasn’t stopped guests such as Lil Nas X, Jonn Hamm, Denzel Curry, Natasha Lyonne, Donald Glover from braving the show in Season Six. Clearly, like Hot Ones, there’s a small amount of torture celebrities will subject themselves to for an experience as good as The Eric Andre Show. There may be no better honor nowadays than sweating in a room as hot as a sauna while Eric Andre launches a ping-pong ball at you from his crotch. "We don’t let publicists into where the stage is and we’ll show them like fake monitor feeds and stuff," Andre told AP News. He even had the show's assistant director purposefully lead a publicist down wrong turns throughout the building. "Outside, back in, pretending he didn’t know where we were," Andre joked.

For Season Six, Andre upped the ante once again. He transformed his body to be ripped like a Marvel superhero—a feat he claims, as he strips in the first episode—is thanks to steroids. Andre's house band is involved more than ever before, and his pranks have had to escalate to insane degrees so that no one recognizes him. Now, the comedian is disguising himself as an ambulance driver who is clearly transporting body bags of people who are still alive. He involves other paid actors (who play cops that fail to stop him), and even drives an Uber that picks up passengers and veers off the road. If it was scary to be caught in an Eric Andre prank before, it's downright nightmarish. Thankfully, I just get to sit on my couch and enjoy from afar.

(For now, at least. If you're reading this, Eric? Please leave me alone.)

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