From what I saw watching the clips from episodes way back when the show started, this show was very funny. I highly recommend getting the older episodes from iTunes, where they are not so expensive, since they are basically a laugh factory. But recently like the title of this review states, this show has lost it's thunder. Don't get me wrong, sometimes it's still laugh out loud hilarious, but those episodes come few and pretty far in between. Mostly it's because of the fact, that on some weeks they couldn't manage to find some funny clips from TV shows, so they fill the 30-minute time slot with boring skits that are worse then the ones from MadTV (I have no idea how they've managed that).
Other annoyances include "guest stars" that for the most part are simply not funny, so whatever momentum the show has gained through awesome clips in the beginning of the episode is quickly lost when you have to watch a celebrity read lines from a teleprompter that were supposed to be funny, but in reality they fail big time. Most of the guest spots end with shooting the imaginary, too overused lately, gun at the intern Matt and with plugging of the new TV show of said celebrity. In the history of the guest spots only two have worked- Bryan Cranston's when he was promoting season two Breaking Bad and Michael Emerson's when he promoted the last season of Lost. And there was around 1,5 year gap between the two, filled with badly read jokes by the Kardashians or The Hills alums. But I guess that they have to get the budget of the show from somewhere.
The host- Joel McHale- does a pretty good job. He's especially funny when he's ad-libbing, not so much when he's reading lame jokes from the teleprompter. What's amusing that even if he reads a totally unfunny joke, the audience (which is composed of friends and family of makers of the shows) goes crazy like monkeys in the zoo. It's basically the equivalent of a bad sitcom, where no matter how bad the jokes are, the audience laughs anyway.
In conclusion, if you have nothing else to do, I recommend watching The Soup. Maybe you will be lucky and the week that preceded that episode had some actually funny clips, otherwise you're stuck with 30 minutes of filler material.
Other annoyances include "guest stars" that for the most part are simply not funny, so whatever momentum the show has gained through awesome clips in the beginning of the episode is quickly lost when you have to watch a celebrity read lines from a teleprompter that were supposed to be funny, but in reality they fail big time. Most of the guest spots end with shooting the imaginary, too overused lately, gun at the intern Matt and with plugging of the new TV show of said celebrity. In the history of the guest spots only two have worked- Bryan Cranston's when he was promoting season two Breaking Bad and Michael Emerson's when he promoted the last season of Lost. And there was around 1,5 year gap between the two, filled with badly read jokes by the Kardashians or The Hills alums. But I guess that they have to get the budget of the show from somewhere.
The host- Joel McHale- does a pretty good job. He's especially funny when he's ad-libbing, not so much when he's reading lame jokes from the teleprompter. What's amusing that even if he reads a totally unfunny joke, the audience (which is composed of friends and family of makers of the shows) goes crazy like monkeys in the zoo. It's basically the equivalent of a bad sitcom, where no matter how bad the jokes are, the audience laughs anyway.
In conclusion, if you have nothing else to do, I recommend watching The Soup. Maybe you will be lucky and the week that preceded that episode had some actually funny clips, otherwise you're stuck with 30 minutes of filler material.