About Me
Imagine if in the Theory of Evolution, one part of the missing link were not missing. That another species of man had not died. That they were alive and amungst us today. Imagine they lived in a comedy universe.
"Cavemen"
Cavemen is an American television show created by Joe Lawson and set in San Diego, California.[1] Inspired by the GEICO Cavemen advertisements made for the American vehicle insurance company GEICO that were written by Lawson, the show is described by the network as a "unique buddy comedy that offers a clever twist on stereotypes and turns race relations on its head."[2]
Produced by ABC Studios and Management 360, the series began on October 2, 2007 and continues to air on Tuesday nights at 8:00/7:00c on ABC.[3]
Synopsis:
In the series, Cavemen (i.e. Neanderthals) never went extinct through competition with ancestors of modern humans, but integrated into Homo sapien civilization as a separate ethnic sub-group. Cavemen are a small but widespread minority group that have been present in every global civilization since the dawn of recorded history (a montage scene in the opening credits shows Cavemen in Egyptian hieroglyphs, when George Washington crossed the Delaware River, standing with Abraham Lincoln, participating in the space program, etc.) Effectively, Cavemen form another ethnic minority (actually, a different species and genus) in the modern world, which faces several prejudices from Homo sapiens (sometimes referring to humans by the derogatory term "Smoothies" in reference to their relative lack of hair).
Cavemen have prominent brow ridges and more body hair than Homo sapiens, but beyond their appearance they actually are not that much different from modern humans in terms of behavior or physical abilities. Male Cavemen are very hairy, have thick long beards and wear their head-hair shoulder-length. A Cavewoman that was appeared on the show also had a prominent brow ridge and comparatively more body hair than a human female.
The central humor of the show is that Caveman characters are not brutish primitives, but fully-integrated into white-collar jobs; the central Cavemen characters are effete modern city-dwellers.
The series focuses on three Cavemen who are roommates that share a condo: Joel, his brother Andy, and their cynical and self-absorbed roommate Nick.
Characters:
Joel - The responsible straight-man of the group, a successful assistant-manager at a fashionable Norwegian furniture store (a parody of Ikea). However, in the pilot episode, Joel starts dating a Homo sapien woman named Kate, and through subsequent episodes Joel tries to handle hookups that come with inter-species dating.
Andy - Joel's weak-willed and childish, though well-meaning, brother. Andy is a trained accountant but is typically between jobs during the time period of the series, and he is perpetually morose about being dumped by his ex-girlfriend and hoping she'll take him back. Andy is very timid, but ironically he is prone to outburts of road rage when he is driving.
Nick - Joel and Andy's roomate, is cynical, self-absorbed, and narcissistic, as well as pathologically lazy. Nick has no real job, though he claims to be "working on my dissertation", and tends to just mooch money off of Joel. The theme of Nick's rambling dissertation is essentially to prove that modern popular culture is all just a rip-off of things Cavemen already did, and appears to have no real merit. Nick doesn't even spend much time actually writing his dissertation, and "tends to just sit around watching TV and editing wikipedia" (sic). Nick has very effete and cultured tastes, believing himself to be intellectually superior to most people he meets, and overlooks the fact that he is simply lazy and doesn't believe in doing real work. Typically, Nick will blame his own failures (which are due to his innate laziness) on Caveman-based prejudice; case in point, when he filed an unlawful-termination lawsuit against Joel's furniture store when they fired him after he worked there a few days, claiming that they were prejudiced against him as a Caveman, but the store then revealed security-camera footage which shows that Nick sat around listening to music all day and not working.
Kate - Joel's Homo sapien girlfriend who he starts dating in the first episode. Joel is initially worried that she doesn't like him because he is a Caveman, and then is left with the fear that she might like him simply because she has a fetish for Cavemen. Nonetheless, Kate and Joel seem to have developed a stable relationship.
Kate's mother - Kate's eccentric mother is not on good terms with her husband, and each of them is actually cheating on the other without Kate's knowledge (Kate's father with the local weather-report girl, Kate's mother with a pool boy). Kate's mother is also the landlord of the condo complex that Joel, Andy, and Nick live in. A running gag is that in a parody of stereotypes of racism, Kate's mother cannot tell the difference between individual Cavemen. She doesn't try intentionally to be racist and is embarrassed that she appears to "think all Cavemen look the same", but nonetheless she does.
Maurice - another Caveman-about-town who is a friend of Joel, Andy, and Nick and frequently plays squash with them, as well as cruising around in his sports-car trying to pick-up women. Maurice is actually played by the actor (Jeff Daniel Phillips) who plays one of the cavemen in the original GEICO Caveman commercials from which the series was spun-off.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavemen_(TV_series)
The Geico Commercials:
The GEICO Cavemen are popular characters in a series of television advertisements for the auto insurance company GEICO, that aired from 2004 ..to 2007. The campaign was co-created by Noel Ritter and writer Joe Lawson among others, of The Martin Agency. In 2004, GEICO began an advertising campaign featuring Neanderthal-like cavemen in a modern setting.[1] The premise of the commercials is that GEICO advertises that using their website is "so easy, a caveman could do it"; and that this slogan offends cavemen, who not only still exist in modern society but live as intelligent, urbane yuppies. Jeff Daniel Phillips and Ben Weber played the two earliest cavemen and continuously reprise their roles. Actor John Lehr appears most frequently as the caveman. A fourth caveman is played by Ben Wilson.
In an online interview with Esquire Magazine,[citation needed] writer Lawson said one of his purposes for the ads was to comment on political correctness.
-Wikipedia-
LINKS...
tv.yahoo.com
caveman's crib (http://cavemanscrib.com/)
