An examination of Adam Corolla
There is a place for you, Adam Corolla, I'm just not sure where. I've watched a few episodes of his show, Too Late with Adam Corolla, and while I think I understand what he's trying to do, which is have a very laid back show without a lot of bells and whistles, it doesn't quite work. Corolla came from radio, and his knack for having an opinion about anything thrown at him was prefect for that format, and translated pretty well to the televised version of Loveline, where he played a kind of Oscar Madison to Doctor Drew's Felix Unger. Then The Man Show happened, and Adam was paired with pal Jimmy Kimmel, who also shared Adam's love of being brash and delving gleefully into scatological humor. The show was successful, thanks in part to Adam and Jimmy making themselves the butt of the joke rather than the show being the exercise in misogyny it appeared to be on the surface. If one follows his path from Loveline to Too Late, the problem seems to be that there's just too much of him to take, and I say that as someone who likes the guy. At the center of my issue with Too Late is that Adam isn't really a comedian. The funny segments are rarely funny, and it's for the simple reason that despite being a funny guy, Adam can't ACT funny. His best moments come when he's projecting his laid back everyman image, and the occasional gem comes from his mouth simply because stream of consciousness took him there, not because he spent all day trying to write it. There's regular Adam, and there's "irregular" Adam I guess, the one that tries too hard to be something he isn't. Too Late spends too much time bouncing between these two personalities, which is a shame, because regular Adam's lack of pretense provides a nice respite, even if it is lost within the fog of late night basic cable.

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