"Waiting for Gumball" Review

"We've run out of marzipan!"

For some reason, cartoon shorts are always hard for shows to pull off.

And generally speaking, it's easy to see why. Cartoons already have to work within the limitations of an 11-21 minute block to tell a cohesive narrative with a start, middle, and end, and they have to relish every second they can get. Rob them of a huge chunk of that time, and the chance for meaningful storytelling often ends up painfully incapacitated.

The extent to which "Waiting for Gumball" suffers, though, far exceeds that, thanks to a few more frustrating variables thrown into the mix. First and foremost, the entirety of "Waiting for Gumball" was the creation of Joe and Becky, the folks behind "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared" whom you probably recognize from "The Puppets." As you probably know - assuming you read my stuff - one of my largest issues with the episode was its inability to bridge the gap properly between TAWOG's and DHMIS' sensibilities, with both ultimately being woefully watered down, trapping the episode in a mediocre in-between that teetered on the unnerving but without the ability to truly commit. "Waiting for Gumball" is that, but even more watered down; rid of the show's appeal, we only get that subdued DHMIS half, but without anything to really justify how dull it was, and the result was a weirdly unnecessary compromise.

The lack of a distinct Gumball charm is further compounded by the short, uneventful Gumball and Darwin segments, which were so short and underbaked I could've sworn that Becky and Joe could only get ahold of the VAs for five minutes and were forced to improvise. There's a lot of potential to the characters against their new, puppety universe, but rather than playing around with a more interesting sense of bewilderment or awe of the circumstances, the characters instead perform brief non-sequiturs with little to no pay-off. Some of the segments even mock the notion of being pointless - "Weird Food" involves Gumball eating the food of his dreams, hallucinating briefly, and giving it the ultimate verdict of "meh" - but self-awareness of being aimless doesn't make a bit any less aimless. It's a constant trap that shows fall into, but one that TAWOG's generally been great at avoiding, but strip the show of its staff and the comedy all but dissipates for the sake of fulfilling the tedious clause that random = funny.

It does not. Glass put it best: "Becky and Joe cannot do humor."* They excel at what they do in conjuring the surreal and the macabre, but when you impair their vision and force them to work beyond their niche, this is what you get. But what of the segments featuring (looks up names) Frank, Howdy, and (looks up names again) Grady, their own creations?

Well... they don't fare much better. The fun of the characters originally was in them being put in contrast to Gumball and Darwin and being able to exercise their quietly sadistic tendencies upon them, but here, there's nothing for the characters to bounce off of each other but themselves. There's a phrase for this type of thing - putting a hat on a hat. It's combining too much manic, comedic energy without any underlying groundedness, and the result is that everything is too loud, directionless, and woefully tryhard. (You could argue that Grady serves as a sort of de facto straight man, but against everyone else, he doesn't perform the job nearly well enough.) That's never been too great of an issue with DHMIS because it used cheesy comedy as bait before flipping the script, but here, no flip happens, and we're stuck in that rut of weird, convoluted writing being presented as comedic in its own right.

The ultimate result thus becomes material that presents itself as comedic without possessing even the faintest bit of incision, both out of limitation and misplaced ambition, and we get something both entirely forgettable and ill-representative of what makes TAWOG such a great show.

Hilariously enough, "Waiting for Gumball" pretty much described itself:

"Sorry, fellas. Looks like your tactic of being incredibly weird backfired somehow."

Please hire me, Ben

For more puppet talk, check out my review of "The Puppets" HERE.

*NOTE: It has been brought to my attention by Guillaume Cassuto, one of the show's writers and kindred-spirit-in-residence haunting the Gumball Wiki Discord, that the minisodes were, in fact, written by Joe Markham, one of the show's main writers, as opposed to being a solo venture from Joe and Becky as I initially thought. Even though this renders some of my specific complaints null, I still stand by my general remarks towards "Waiting for Gumball."

Love you, GC.