Colin Hogg: Fooling around pays off for Jono and Ben

Left to right: Guy Williams, Ben Boyce, Jono Pryor and Rose Matafeo provide the gags on Jono and Ben at Ten.

Friday night duo provide the laughs in an eels-in-your-undies way.

Maybe I'm just deranged from all the politics I've had to look at on television lately, but I watched Jono and Ben at Ten on TV3 on Friday night and I laughed like I've never laughed at those fools before.

And when I say fools, I mean it in the nicest possible way because Jono Pryor and Ben Boyce are fools in the old comedic sense.

Rather than operate on the ever-popular understated and enigmatic side of New Zealand comedy, they're more the eels-in-your-undies sort of comics.

And though eels actually did feature on Friday's opening episode for their new series, the eels were in a tank - along with Pryor, though just briefly.

And while undies also made an appearance on Friday, it was buckets of ice that were going into them, during a supposed try-out the show's stars took for the Royal Guards in London.

The first episode of the new series of Jono and Ben at Ten turned out instead to be Jono and Ben's OE Special, a combo of their regular studio show with the added exotic glamour of awkward, embarrassing and unseen bits and pieces from their Overseas Experiment series.

There were several memorable moments, one of them being the hapless Pryor protesting, during a feast of challenging traditional French food, "I can't eat anus". Though, being a fool, he tried, and promptly threw up - all this at a picnic with Boyce at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.

In Spain, in the midst of bull-jumping lessons Pryor, who seems gifted with a natural clumsiness, was mauled twice by small bulls - calves really.

In Portugal - as you do - they played bino-soccer, which, as the name suggests, is soccer played by teams wearing binoculars. It's spectacularly stupid.

And, back in England, in Jono and Ben's recent piece de resistance, they went on The Graham Norton Show in the red seat spot, where failure to tell a funny story fast enough to Norton and his sofa of stars results in ejection.

Pryor had no sooner lowered his butt and opened his mouth than he was gone, but Boyce won the day by taking off his silly blazer and telling a folksy tale about the time he accidentally super-glued his grandad's eye shut.

In studio, Jono and Ben's MC-style third star, Guy Williams, opts for that deadpan approach without ever quite being funny, though I imagine he'll keep trying.

But I did like the bit where Pryor and Boyce auditioned before two bemused dancers at the Moulin Rougein Paris. They were desperately bad, but at least they kept their clothes on.

"Is the dream over?" one muttered as they departed.

"Not only is the dream over," came the response, "but so is this awful segment."

Jono and Ben at Ten, the regular new series, will be on this Friday, though not at 10, but 10 past, which could be some sort of joke in itself. It's hard to know these days.

In search of further laughs, I couldn't resist a show called Meet the Sloths (TV One, Sunday, 5pm), though it turned out not to be another show about a lazy fat family but rather about a sloth sanctuary run by a group of crazy sloth-loving American women in Costa Rica. "It's not all about snoozing," the voice-over chirped, going on to mine a thin vein of somnambulant humour. The show is the first in a series of documentaries on animals. Next week, koalas.