April 4 — What always bothered me about “South Park,” the infamous and obscene cable cartoon series, was that its creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, seemed more determined to make the show offensive than to make it amusing. With “That’s My Bush!,” a criminally insane new live-action sitcom, they have mercifully flip-flopped on the issue and put humor first.

THEY’RE STILL AS recklessly tasteless as ever, but here and there, they’ve made “Bush” painfully funny as well.
The series, premiering at 10:30 tonight on Comedy Central, zooms around like a runaway rocket, quirky and berserk.

In veering wildly from sappy slapstick to political satire, it suggests a collaboration between, oh, maybe the Three Stooges
and Norman Lear. Actually not so much a collaboration as a wrestling match — with the Stooges, not surprisingly,
winning each time. Still, the Norman faction puts up a helluva fight.

Stone and Parker envision the Bush administration as a corny old-fashioned situation comedy, and stage it that way. Their series spoofs sitcoms as much as it spoofs Bushes. It’s TV’s first Bush.com. George W. is portrayed as basically the same well-meaning, cloddish, half-witted boob who has captained innumerable domestic sitcoms, while wife Laura is the long-suffering smarty who really rules the roost.

While the standard sitcom boob is traditionally also a daddy whose kids repeatedly make an idiot of him, Comedy Central executives reportedly nixed the notion of having the Bush daughters lampooned in the show. Thus George W.’s role is restricted to that of bumbling husband — and, of course, bumbling president of the United bumbling States.

“Bumbling” is obviously the operative word here. It’s an ideal term to describe the slapsticky election that landed Bush
in the White House, a place many people still suspect he doesn’t really want to be. Portraying this in sitcom terms is
in itself a satirical act, which is to say “That’s My Bush!” is never as dumb as it looks or as the president sounds.

Although the opening mock-credits list the Bushes as the show’s stars, actors play the roles, and winningly. Timothy
Bottoms has the president down pat, especially the panicky-eyed gaze of someone who may be in way over his head.

Carrie Quinn Dolin is delightful as Laura Bush, a descendant not so much of other first ladies as of many other put-upon
sitcom wives — too many to count. The producers trace her ancestry all the way back to Alice Kramden, wife of bus
driver Ralph in Jackie Gleason’s immortal “Honeymooners,” because whereas Ralph repeatedly and impotently
threatened Alice with “One of these days, pow, right in the kisser,” George W. chides Laura with “One of these days,
Laura, I’m gonna punch you in the face!”

The studio audience — artificially manufactured, of course — repeats the catchphrase along with him and also utters
“Aww” during each episode’s token Tender Moment.

In the role of Maggie the White House maid, Marcia Wallace wreaks exquisite revenge, ridiculing her role on the original
Bob Newhart show: sex-starved wisecracking dame, yet another sitcom staple. There are also traces of the all-knowing, smartass housekeeper played by wide-bottomed Ann B. Davis on “The Brady Bunch.”

As Princess, a White House secretary, Kristen Miller deftly sends up the sexy dumb blonde. John D’Aquino plays with
suitable obnoxiousness Larry the wacky next-door neighbor. (Does he live in the Old Executive Office Building or the
Treasury Department? The idea of a next-door neighbor to the White House is pretty cute.) And Kurt Fuller is a lone
voice of reason as the president’s top adviser.

The most tasteless thing in the premiere? Portraying the leader of an antiabortion group as a tough-talking, malformed,
blind fetus who had almost been aborted himself. Before he appears, the adviser explains his condition and notes to Bush,
“He hates to be canceled on.” Unfortunately, the creature talks with a “South Park” kind of voice, making some of his
dialogue unintelligible.

To attempt political balance and perhaps discourage the kind of hate mail that only antiabortionists can write,
the producers make the leader of the pro-abortion group a harsh caricature as well. Bush is trying to bring the
two opposing camps together but naturally that effort ends in violent chaos.  In the second episode, airing April 11
(written, like the premiere, by Parker and directed by Jeff Melman), bad taste is used to a greater satiric advantage.
To entertain boozy visiting fraternity brothers from his Yale days, Bush presides over what he thinks is a phony execution — staged, he believes, as a prank by actors.

But then, gosh darn it, wires get crossed and what Bush thinks is fake turns out to be real. After serving so many times as
de facto executioner in Texas, Laura notes, Dubya finally gets to whack some poor soul himself. To make matters worse,
he does a “gas chamber” flatulence joke prior to the lethal injection, and sings “Another One Bites the Dust” after the
prisoner expires — much to the shock of the proverbial horrified onlookers.

Boy is his face red when he finds out he made a booboo and the guy is really dead! One obvious problem with “Bush” is
that it satirizes a kind of situation comedy no longer in style. And yet the formula seems permanently imprinted on the
American consciousness, and Nick at Nite keeps it alive with its endless reruns of reruns. Is “That’s My Bush!” offensive?
To many viewers it will be, but its creators consider that term a compliment.

This time, though, they’ve taken offensiveness to some absurd delirious hilarious new level. In the process, the sublime and the ridiculous become indistinguishable. “That’s My Bush!” is tasteless, appalling and funny as hell.