The Ron James Show

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trimming some of the old show fat ("This Hour Has 22 Minutes", "Rick Mercer Report") instead of adding more shows with outdated comedy aimed at our grandparents?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.

The Ron James show is terrible, I'm not sure if it is still on the air but if it is they should cancel it right away. The jokes are terrible, his stand up comedy is the best thing on the show and even that is annoying with the way he waves his hands around and talks in a shrill voice using way too many words. All he does is use word play he doesn't have any real jokes. I don't know who actually likes this stupid show. The rest of the show is also all Ron James and all of it is terrible. I have to write more lines before they will let me submit this review so I will just say again I guess how much I think this show totally stinks up my TV.

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.

Unfortunately this show is just not very good. I wanted to like it and I tried to like it but there was just nothing in any of the episodes I saw that made me like this show even a little bit. Some of the stand up comedy that Ron James does on the show is OK but it is very short, has nothing to do with the rest of the show which is all made up of sketches, and just makes it more obvious how completely awful and void of jokes the rest of the show is. Ron James is not a very good performer outside of doing his stand up comedy sadly and the other acting is very bad too. The writing of the sketches is terrible. The jokes are like they come straight out of a child's how-to-write-a-joke book with jokes you can see coming like a freight train.

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.