Pay a Visit to Bordertown

I’m liking the amount of top quality adult animation we have at the moment – although nothing will ever top the grad-daddy that is The Simpsons, sometimes I like things to be a bit darker and bit cruder. Previously, I would have turned to Family Guy or American Dad!, but now these two shows have given birth to a new kid on the block – immigration comedy Bordertown.

The show, set in the fictional border-town of Mexifornia, follows a United States border agent, Bud Buckwald (Hank Azaria, of everyone in Springfield fame), and his Mexican neighbour, Ernesto Gonzalez (Nicholas Gonzalez, who also voices Ernesto’s nephew, J.C, and Pablo Barracuda, the biggest drug lord in the town).

The two are polar opposites – Bud is stupid, selfish and patriotic to the point of absurdity, whereas Ernesto is friendly and happy to be in the USA. They are surrounded by a supporting cast of madcap characters, such as Reverend Fantastic, minister of the MegaChurch, and El Coyote, a Mexican smuggler and Bud’s nemesis.

You can tell that the show is related to Family Guy in its style of humour – it merges cultural references, and black and surreal humour to create a bizarre and very funny world, one in which the frame of a story is just a basis for telling jokes and skewering deserving targets.

The most obvious slight is Bud himself, a racist and narcissist who is laughable in stupidity- such is the basis for all great comedy characters (I must pick fault, however, with Azaria’s voice, which is pretty much a lazier Comic Book Guy). In the character of J.C., though, we also see a satirising of the pretentious liberal type, and there is fertile ground for humour.

Many of the best bits stem from the more random moments. Each episode has a cold opening, in which El Coyote outsmarts Bud – one of these scenes sees Bud transform his border station into a mecha to fight off a kaiju. It truly comes out of nowhere, but is a piece of absurdist brilliance.

If you prefer darker touches, the opening episode sees local man Bryce continuously being abducted by aliens for anal probing, to the point where he must carry a probe whistle. The situation then becomes even crazier, as he starts to develop Stockholm syndrome upon seeing another man be taken away.

It plays on all the Family Guy randomness, but stops short of employing cutaways, for which I am very thankful – it instead helps to layer the town, even if it is layers of insanity.

The main issue with Bordertown is that it can be a touch lazy. It has a premise that would allow for some very cutting humour, but it instead relies more on toilet humour and stereotypes. I’m not saying this is entirely a bad thing, but it seems a bit of a missed opportunity. No doubt we’ll have folks whining about how it’s not politically correct and all that garbage (because of course), and it certainly isn’t, but it is very silly and very funny. I recommend you take a visit to Mexifornia soon.