Timmy Williams, Sam Brown, Trevor Moore, Darren Trumeter and Zach Cregger are "The Whitest Kids U'Know," a sketch comedy series premiering tonight on cable channel Fuse.

By Rob Owen, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Every emerging television network needs one big hit to make a name for itself. Comedy Central became a brand thanks to "South Park." The WB achieved a certain cachet after "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek."

		'The Whitest Kids U'Know' When: 11 tonight, Fuse. Starring: Trevor Moore.

Little-watched music channel Fuse is poised to break through with a fresh, funny sketch comedy series, "The Whitest Kids U'Know" (11 tonight). It's a program that will easily appeal most to teen and twentysomething guys or anyone with an appreciation for impolite and coarse but (mostly) clever humor.

Fuse is available on Comcast Channel 148, on former Adelphia systems as Channel 138, on DISH Network as Channel 158 and on DirecTV as Channel 339.

The "Whitest Kids" premiere begins with a pregnancy-test blunder sketch and segues into a rap video featuring Adolf Hitler, who's now reformed his evil ways.

"Now I'm down with the Jews, the gypsies, homosexuals and retards, too," Hitler raps. "I've stopped burning people, started burning CDs. Stopped battling the world, started battling MCs."

Yes, some people are bound to be offended, but the lyrics are surprisingly sharp ("There's a party up at Schindler's, and I'm on his A-list") and the sketch doesn't attempt to rewrite history or lessen its impact -- it's just a goof based on the absurd notion of Hitler as a rapper.

Head writer Trevor Moore, who plays Hitler and assorted other characters in the show, acknowledged that the troupe -- whose members met in a college dorm in New York City in 2001 and have been performing in clubs since -- doesn't consider many topics off-limits.

"We'll do a sketch about a sensitive subject matter if it's kind of lighthearted and not malicious," Moore said at a January press conference in Pasadena, Calif. "Some of our sketches will be about darker subject matter, but we just try to take it as childlike, kind of an innocence to that subject."

As for the show's title, it was applied to them by a friend.

"We were doing something really stupid, and one of the people who was in the group just said, 'You know, you guys are the whitest kids I know,' " Moore recalled. "And that was kind of, like the, oh, we'll-make-that-the-name thing."

Although the show begins with a viewer discretion warning -- "The following program is intended for adult audiences and may be of a sexual nature or express points of view and use crude language which some people will find offensive ..." -- it's still surprising how disappointingly immature these guys, ages 25-to-27, can be. I'm sure charges of misogyny will be hurled, and not without cause. In one particularly unfunny sketch that bombs, a husband can be heard whipping his wife with his belt off-camera after she dares to serve him pizza bagels for breakfast.

Sometimes the profanity and poop jokes are quite funny -- in the grossest sketch, a guy pulls a piece of excrement out of his pants during a business meeting -- but only if the viewer has an appreciation for the comically crude.

Much of the time, "Whitest Kids" hits the Monty Python-Kids in the Hall bull's-eye. There's even a Three Stooges-esque, slapstick skit that's based on grammar humor. A guy gets smacked by his buddy as part of new rules they made up.

"We only slap people after they use sentences that are questions ending in a one-syllable word," the slapper explains.

Later the slappee learns another new rule: "If you use a contraction before a preposition, you get hockey punched!"

A future episode showcases the same mix of high and low humor, including a sketch about British soldiers in the Revolutionary War who insist on fighting by the rules. It's silliness that's smart, requiring some knowledge to be funny -- in other words, it's the Whitest Kids at their best.