Then there's "Death by Chocolate," an episode that would make even McCaffery (who argues that a "bleak, absurdist comedy permeates the epistemological skepticism" of postmodern enterprises in "The Metafictional Muse") blush, this time starring Yogi and BooBoo Bear. While the plot line confirms Richter's assertion that "Harvey Birdman" is interested in telling straightforward stories, the episode is one extended, hilarious hallucination. Yogi's trusty (and usually much brighter) companion has metamorphosed into a Ted Kaczynski-type radical called the UnaBooBoo, and is nabbed in a government sting reminiscent of the Waco and Elián González debacles. The Waco jab may be a sly one; the government gives BooBoo 10 seconds to come out -- before launching an explosive at the count of two. But the Elián jab is more like a haymaker, replicating Alan Diaz's famous Associated Press photo of the closet invasion, with Yogi and BooBoo in the starring roles.

That satirical revision is literally over in the blink of an eye, but the same can't be said for the episode's absurdist ending: BooBoo and Harvey make love after a successful acquittal, only to have Birdman discover that the UnaBooBoo was indeed guilty of terrorizing his victims with booby-trapped gift baskets. If watching Birdman scrub himself silly in the shower to clean off his complicity doesn't cause heart-attack laughter, perhaps the slow-dawning realization that the entire finale of the episode duplicates the ending of the 1985 courtroom thriller "Jagged Edge" will.

While the show's conventional comedy is top-shelf, it is also these smartly satirical allusions that have earned it such a devoted audience, even when its own cast -- like Stephen Colbert from Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," who plays Harvey's boss, Falcon Seven -- has no idea what the inside joke may be.

"The beautiful thing is that I don't think Colbert had seen 'Jagged Edge,'" Richter says. But he had no problem understanding why his character would say, 'That's all right, it's over, baby,' to Harvey. Therein lies the secret. These guys don't ask many questions, and still get it. But what really shocked me more than anything is the various and sundry things that people respond to. Weird, unexpected things. It kind of illustrates the facets of the human mind, how people look at things. Not to call this art, but everybody's seeing something different. I guess that, initially, people got the 'Jagged Edge' reference. Michael and I have talked at length about this, just how funny it is that people have watched and responded to the show, as well as what they respond to. Some hate one thing and love another, and it's never the same thing that they hate and love."

"It makes sense and it doesn't," adds Ouweleen. "That's a goal. We're pretty conscious about making sure we're not just ripping structure apart for the hell of it or to be destructive."

Richter agrees. "We don't set out to be ridiculous. And yet there's some line between silliness and sense that's OK to cross. And we want it to make sense. It's weird, because we're squashing what normally -- probably on television -- would have been an hour format into 12 minutes. And we're always kind of struggling with it. It's an actual case of, how much of the old 'Perry Mason' convention do we stick to? And how much do we veer off into the 'Jagged Edge' thing? That's a constant discussion."

What doesn't seem to be in constant discussion, however, is the show's transgressive (and, many would argue, progressive) subject matter. Minute for minute, it's hard to find more sexual entendre on television, to say nothing of cartoons, than in any given episode of "Harvey Birdman." Its first episode features Race Bannon and Dr. Benton Quest, paternal figures to Hanna-Barbera's "Jonny Quest," as gay lovers suing for custody of their fair-haired charge and his Indian sidekick, Hadji.

The second episode, "A Very Personal Injury" finds Birdman defending minor Superfriend, Apache Chief, who loses his powers (unlike the flying Superman or the swimming Aquaman, the Chief can only "grow large") after he spills a cup of hot coffee in his crotch, rendering him, er, "small," as Harvey testifies. Birdman not only ends up in bed with the UnaBooBoo in "Death by Chocolate," he is summarily "man-kissed" in "The Dabba Don" and sexually embarrassed in an episode called "Shoyu Weenie" (rather than give graphic details, Ouweleen and Richter make a courtroom clown creep behind Harvey, blow up a phallic balloon and hand it to him).

OK, so the idea of exploding so-called sexual norms is found everywhere in postmodern intertextuality and metafiction. But -- other than the random Bugs Bunny drag scene in "What's Opera Doc?" -- it's rare on Cartoon Network. Which raises the question: How do they get away with it?

"The network doesn't ask 'Why?' an awful lot," Richter says. "We're in awe sometimes, to an amazing, astonishing and inspiring degree. The notes we'll get back are general. Like, 'Even for these shows, this makes no sense, so you might want to work on it.' Or, 'Just explain this a little bit more to make the leap easier to understand.' Or, 'I can't hear this line of dialogue.' But other than that, we don't have to explain much of anything to anyone. I watch a significant amount of television, and it seems to me that that is a rare and wonderful thing. Because there are many places where we would have to argue for things like this."

"From a standards perspective, they're trying to be very careful," Ouweleen adds. "They're trying to be on the safer side of 'South Park,' and that means we have to be smarter. We can't say or do certain things that they can do on that show, so we try sophistication. But what I'm more amazed by is the atypical stuff that we're allowed to do. Like the man-on-man kissing, which isn't so much a standards issue in my mind. It's more that they allow us to do it because it's just so weird."

For a show that invests so heavily in opening up what are fast becoming stagnant artistic conventions, especially in animation, the absurdly metafictional exercises of "Harvey Birdman" are, above all, deeply entertaining and decidedly surreal. That is, after all, what animation is all about.

"Anywhere else, you would have a conversation on how unacceptable this is," Richter explains. "But a fan of the absurd would say, 'Where do we start?' I would say the absurd begins with a lawyer walking around with wings poking out of his back. It's totally unexplained, like Harvey kissing a prehistoric cartoon caveman. In the end, they're all characters that straddle two worlds, that have human neuroses and cartoon problems. Is Harvey a real guy with problems that we all have, or is he an old superhero? He can be either at any time. And it's fun to bounce back and forth between them. It's a weird embarrassment of riches."

Recent Stories