UK Bubbleblabber: TripTank Spin Off “Jeff & Some Aliens” gets British premiere

Jeff & Some Aliens first started as a series of gags in the Comedy Central animated sketch show TripTank and it was turned into a sitcom a few months ago. Luckily for British TripTank fans, Comedy Central UK has just acquired the rights to the show and Brits can see it’s premiere early next month.


The sitcom follows the adventures of an average man called Jeff (voiced by Brett Gelman), who lives with three awkward aliens named Sammy, Jimmy and Ted (voiced by the show’s co-creator Alessandro Minoli). These aliens wish to study Ted to see if humans are worth keeping alive. It’s a very pitch black comedy that taps into some pretty dark places to achieve its laughs, its first episode has Jeff being stuck trying to satisfy some angry aliens with human sacrifices but each one is never good enough.

But is this the kind humour for Brits? Oh totally! We British have always loved our comedy to be macabre and grim! Just look at the success of Psychoville and Monkey Dust. I mean, doesn’t my description of the first episode remind you of a League of Gentlemen sketch? Can’t you just imagine Steve, Mark and Reece coming up with something just as sardonic?
We’re a rather mean-spirited country thanks to the mucky weather and pale faced politicians looming over our lives. So we’ve always relied on comedy to deal with the miserable rain and the follies of the Tories and because of this, I’m confident that Jeff & Some Aliens” will slide comfortably onto our television sets quite nicely.

I’ll admit that black comedy is a tough nut to crack because if done wrong then it’s all black and no comedy, which is just gloomy viewing. Heck, some black comedy shows like Family Guy fail simply because they want to be both comedically spiteful AND make you care about its horrible characters but you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Thankfully, Jeff & Some Aliens doesn’t sugarcoat anything and embraces its bleak sense of humour while noticing the blackly comic irony of Jeff’s situations.

Sure, not every Brit will get into Jeff & Some Aliens because we’re not all the same, I can imagine that the bleak humour and weird overly-detailed character designs will be too sickly for more sensitive UK residents, but our faithful dark comedy fans will really enjoy what the show has to offer. If my description of the first episode got a guilty chuckle out of you then get ready to switch over to comedy central for the show’s premiere in April.
Interestingly, this isn’t the first American Comedy Central cartoon to be sent over to the UK this year, TripTank itself and the urban comedy cartoon Legends of Chamberlain Heights were both picked up just a few months ago (Click here to check out our report on this TV event). Sure, this means that TripTank has only been airing on UK televisions for a couple months but that’s enough time to develop a fanbase who will be excited for the spin-off.