Tea-bagging America

Chicks dig Joel McHale. And why wouldn’t they? The 39-year-old actor-comedian is tall, dashing and makes gleeful mincemeat out of pop culture’s lamest and inanest. He’s like Kathy Griffin with a Y chromosome and two extra feet.

This past Saturday, McHale brought his traveling snarkfest to the polished stage of the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium, where the host of E!’s latest iteration of The Soup and star of NBC’s sophomore meta-com Community crushed infotainment softballs to a swooning, mostly female audience.

Dressed down in a black, long-sleeve crew-neck tee and form-fitting jeans, McHale had the near-capacity crowd at “Hello, San Diego!”

“I’ve never been to our state’s capital before,” McHale announced to the still-buzzing audience members. “It is really underwhelming.”

After taking the perfunctory jabs at Sacramento and apologizing to all the boyfriends missing the Sacramento Kings-Miami Heat game, McHale essentially performed what amounted to an extended episode of his weekly clip show, mixing in behind-the-scenes anecdotes and snide commentary on all the awful crap that modern celeb culture shoves down our willing throats.

McHale best summed up what he and the crew behind The Soup do each week when he described television as “a huge river of steaming sewage, and we’re the crazy old man who’s worked at the sanitation department too long, pulling out shit and saying, ‘Look at this one!’”

His big easy targets included a “Who’s that?” of C- and D-list celebrities familiar to anyone with a subscription to Us Weekly.

McHale certainly enjoyed a smoother relationship with the crowd than opener Brooks McBeth, whose largely well-received act hit an early speed bump when he left himself open for a heckler’s zinger.

“I’d like to try something a little different right now,” McBeth said, pausing.

“Try a joke!” came the balcony-delivered retort.

“Thanks, Dad,” responded a slightly flustered McBeth, who recovered with schoolyard ripostes and later polled the audience for support. “How many of you guys like me?” he asked.

While McBeth exited the stage to respectable applause, McHale emerged from the scarlet curtains to a rock star’s ovation and had back-seat necks craning to catch a better glimpse of his 6-foot-4 frame.

He called MTV’s Jersey Shore a “bigger disservice to the Italian-American community than the mafia and Olive Garden combined” and feigned disbelief at news that Oompa-Loompette Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi would be inside the iconic New Year’s Eve ball as it dropped over Time Square.

“She is tea-bagging America!” McHale exclaimed. “She’s winning.”

McHale cheekily tasked his own network for producing some of the most heinous examples of reality television—“Bridalplasty,” anyone?—quipping that E! had recently changed its motto to “Hey, you’re the ones watching it, so who’s the asshole?”

He left the stage to resounding applause, if no standing ovation, but one of the harder-working people in showbiz seemed to accomplish his goal. Said one young woman to her female companion: “I think I like him even more now.”