Clarence, the sock puppet. If Triumph is the Insult Comic Dog, then Clarence is the conceptual sock puppet. Here he explores the idea of Patience by…getting on people’s nerves. (Warning: The ads on the MTV2 site may try your patience).

A little background: One of the most radical shows ever to grace television in the last decade was Wonder Showzen. The things its neo-Situationist writers got away with, I can’t ever remember even having seen on TV before. It’s hard to believe they got child actors to do and say some of these things on the show. For example, their recurring sketch featuring a child reporter asking Marxist revolutionary questions to various business-people was called Kids on the Beat–or, for short, Beat Kids. For this show on Patience, mid-way through the show, they apologized for trying viewers’ patience with the show and said they’d apologize by taking it back. So what they did for the final fifteen minutes of the show was literally run the entire show backward. Headache inducing, but genius.

Clarence on patience.