The Ron James Show

As an enthusiastically devoted fan of Ron James' coast-to-coast specials, I was looking forward to a continuing series with the same earthily crisp, yet lavishly elegant writing.

This series reveals just how much work Ron must have devoted to his hour-long specials, and how difficult it truly must be to produce high-quality material for a weekly series.

Other fans of Ron's work will remember 'Blackfly' and join me in headshakingly similar disappointment.

His specials have provided me with dozens of gifts, this series, just another federally funded (unfunny) joke.

This show is just very bad. The sketches are really lame including scenes where Ron James (who is in real life about sixty years old or so) plays a little kid and another where he voices characters who are supposed to be his family in animated short sketches. I guess we are supposed to just laugh because an old man is pretending to be a kid? I don't know what they are thinking but it fails miserably this is some of the worst comedy I have seen in a while on Canadian TV. There is also a lot of stand-up comedy on the show where Ron James tells jokes, this is much better than the rest of the show (the sketches etc) but it's still only for real fans of Ron James, personally I find his comedy might work for older people like my parents but he's pretty whiny and his comedy is a bit too basic for me.

This show is painful to watch. It is not at all funny. I really have nothing else to say because I don't want to think about the show at all to write about it! It is an old guy telling really bad jokes and doing really bad skits. There is animation that you watch for a few minutes then it ends and you say why did it end? How can you tell it is even over, there was no middle even, just him talking for a while and then the skit ends, no jokes or anything. What is the point of this show? Can anyone have a show on Canadian TV? Where's my show, I would like a show where I don't even try to tell jokes and just put in the sound of people laughing when obviously no one in real life would actually laugh at this useless stuff.

This show is awful. Just when the CBC finally makes it look like they are doing something right and like they are trying to appeal to more of an audience than just our grandparents by finally cancelling that lumbering unfunny dinosaur "Royal Canadian Air Farce"... they go ahead and replace it with another dinosaur. Ron James is not a bad comedian I guess but this show is awful. Most of it is Ron James doing stand up comedy but it just gets old even though he gets a smile out of me here or there. Every show has a theme and sketches etc. The animation is not bad quality wise but the writing in this show is a major flaw, I don't know if Ron James writes everything himself, or just his stand up comedy, or if it is all written for him, but I suspect maybe he writes everything and that is why it seems so thin. The sketches are really bad. I give it a 3 because some of his stand up comedy is okay but the sketches especially are terrible and like I said even the stand up wears real thin real fast. When will the CBC learn they need to start trimming some of the old show fat ("This Hour Has 22 Minutes", "Rick Mercer Report") instead of adding more shows with outdated comedy aimed at our grandparents? They will have no audience left pretty soon.

Watching this show is exactly like watching my gram-pa try to be funny and failing miserably. We all grin around the table and maybe even force a laugh here and there when he talks louder and louder and waves his arms around to emphasize whatever the hell he is talking about and then when the joke/story is done (and the only way to tell when the endless stream of nonsense is done is that he stops talking and flailing his arms and looks around the table at the rest of us waiting for us to burst into laughter while he sits there with a huge grin on his face trying not to be the first one to laugh) we die a little inside because he is trying so hard but just isn't funny at all. Should we laugh to make him feel good or in the long run is it better for all of us if we don't humour him and let him know that his jokes need a lot of work? Anyway the Ron James show is like being trapped in a room with my gram-pa for half an hour while he tells one painfully unfunny joke after another. I don't know when CBC dove head first down the toilet but when they finally got rid of Air Farce then replaced it with an abortion of a show like this I lost all hope for original TV in this country. Seriously Ron James might be even less funny than This Hour Has 22 Minutes has become and that show is pathetic beyond belief. If you read this gram-pa sorry you are not really less funny than Ron James or This Hour Has 22 Minutes I was just joking to make a point.