'Crossballs' hilarity to begin

The show blurs lines between truth and fiction, simultaneously pranking stars.
NEW YORK (AP) -- Pity Corey Williams. The actor is on a contentious talk show, sparring with a guy who practices for reality TV by eating cow patties, another who's begging to get on air, and a professor who thinks The Next Big Show is a "real-life Hogan's Heroes" set in a concentration camp run by neo-Nazis.
But while Williams believes he's debating real people, he's ostensibly been ensnared in an elaborate web of deceit and in-your-face rhetoric -- as if Bill O'Reilly had done "Candid Camera."
In the genre-bending and often hilarious "Crossballs," which premieres Tuesday for an eight-week run on Comedy Central, the real is the fake, the fake is the real -- and nobody knows which end is up.
Fact vs. fiction
Fiction, they say, is the lie that tells the truth. But what if it's half and half? What do the truth and the lie -- served up together, blended into something that keeps everyone guessing even as it keeps the laughs coming -- tell us?
"Crossballs" addresses this, hovering on the razor edge of plausibility (and, this being cable, body-function crudeness). As the show puts it: "Comedians posing as experts ... debating real people who don't know the show is fake."
Its talk-show format -- "Out of the 'Crossfire.' Beyond 'Hardball,'" as the announcer intones -- says it pits real guests recruited to debate real issues against improv actors portraying other "real" guests with audacious, often obnoxious opinions. The shows end without the con being revealed to the dupes, and a little nagging doubt remains -- even for viewers.
Consider the episode on whether reality TV is a pursuit worthy of humanity. On one side you have Williams, the actor, brought on to defend his craft, and Stacy Vatanapan, who has worked on the production end of reality television.
"How much talent does it take to hang upside-down with a cow patty in your mouth?" Williams snaps.
On the other side is hard-core reality-TV vet Matthew Henson (played by Matt Besser), sporting a sleeveless, skull-festooned shirt and insisting that all professional actors are liars. "I'm not going to put words in your mouth," he tells Williams. "You let scripts do that for you."
Star qualities
Besser, the executive producer and one of those who dreamed up the idea, steals the show. His entirely un-PC characters (including the owner of the "Ozark Mountain Driving School") exhibit a simplicity and regular-guy tendentiousness that is exactly the Red America stereotype so feared by those on the coasts.
"Ever since 9/11, America's kind of changed. People, they're sick of the phonies in the world. They're sick of liars," Besser says to Williams. Under him appears the classic one-line TV identifier: "MATTHEW HENSON -- REALITY TV BUGEATER."
The superimposed text is one of the show's funniest characteristics, riffing off the weird things people say. Among them: "'Wizard of Oz' midget orgies?" "Knowing in advance: Ruins surprise?" And the classic "Bilingual drivers: Dangerous or peligroso?")
Host Chris Tallman, with an appealing combination of John Goodman's bluster and Albert Brooks' manic disbelief in the world around him, acts as the linchpin, moderating between his fake guests and the real ones and making sure no one can elaborate too much on an idea.
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