DVDFile

BBC / 350 Minutes / 2010 / Unrated / Street Date: January 10, 2012

If we are to believe our eyes, the title of this new DVD release is not disingenuous: Karl Pilkington is an idiot. Affiliated on screen (at least) with Ricky Gervais from the Extras days, Karl is the kind of person one is simply dumbfounded by. Whether it's all a gag or if he truly is moronically acerbic, he's a car crash of a television talent - you can't take your eyes off of him.

Part of this draw in An Idiot Abroad, however, has to be trailed back to Gervais and his partner in crime, Stephen Merchant. The shtick of the show is that these two comedians send dipshit Karl to the seven wonders of the world, but they get to dictate exactly how the guy experiences them. They pick his lodging (often not five-star, to say the least), they populate his menus, they dictates his modes of travel: In short, they pull the marionette strings of Mr. Pilkington, hoping to jostle up some comedy, but to egg him on to make sure his "Are you kidding me?" dingbat qualities never get switched off.

The end result of this first season of the show - originally aired in 2010 - shouldn't be as funny as it is. I'd even argue that there's a certain genius to its design, both letting the Jackass-quality moments of its dumbshit humor to be countered by the surprisingly earnest tenet that travel and exposure to diverse peoples really has the power to inform and illuminate on a very personal level. Yeah, a lot of the material here takes the form of unbearably off-color racial jokes, but there's something else to An Idiot Abroad than just its outlandish buffoonery.

This isn't game-changing television, by any means, but Gervais knows how to exploit the form, and An Idiot Abroad is another in a long line of his successes. It's hard to heap praise on an on-screen personality so banal and hideously uninformed, but Gervais knows that Karl Pilkington is funny, and that's enough to fuel the show's engines. It's not exactly the kind of thing you want on yourself to revisit and enjoy again and again, but as a convivial Anglophilic travelfilm, An Idiot Abroad is not without its charms, askew as they might be.