In its first year, the show has proved to be less like a kiddie-show spoof and more like a version of "Caligula" staged by the 4-H Club. The cast members include a band of foulmouthed, surly and abusive animals known as Anipals, along with the well-meaning human named Doug, whom the Anipals generally ignore. So far this season, the Anipals have taken debauched road trips to places like Tijuana, Mexico, and Atlantic City, N.J., and have managed to engage in garden-variety degrading and deranged behavior. Can TV this good possibly last?

The cartoon show parodies you've become famous for, like "The Ambiguously Gay Duo," are so accurate in look and detail that one starts to suspect that you did a lot of serious TV time as a kid.

I did, I did. I wouldn't say I was a latchkey kid, but my parents let me spend a lot of time staring off into escapeland. Yeah, I'm a nerd when it comes to certain kinds of television. I know about the shows Bob Denver did after "Gilligan's Island," that sort of thing. I'm ill. I've been ill for years. I collected TV Guides. I told TV Guide this and it couldn't even print it; it was too disturbing for a family magazine. For some reason, I hungered for that kind of information about TV. It's the kind of stuff that's now omnipresent and repellent. You know, all this media information that you can't get away from now that obscures whether a show is good or not. Now they publish the Nielsen ratings in the paper every week -- and that was the kind of information I was just desperate to know about when I was 8 years old and found such things interesting.

Any special shows that still have a resonance for you?

"Mister Ed" was the first show I remember wanting to watch every week. I hear Alan Young has since become a man of the cloth and now swears that Mister Ed didn't get shocked or have an electric prod up his ass or anything. I had a Mister Ed record too. That was amazing -- he started talking about the Bible. They must have licensed the rights to use Mister Ed's likeness to some Christian fundamentalist.

I read somewhere that Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" also played a major role during your rare forays away from the small screen as a child.

It was fantastic. Growing up it was a revelation to me. Now it's been copied a million times, but rarely as well. Even though there's plenty of shows and comic strips now with wisecracking kids, they always sort of have to win. They try to have it both ways in shows like "Doug," where the kids are wiseacres and have personality quirks, but at the same time, there's always some morality play. The beauty of "Peanuts" was that there was none of that. It was clearly for adults, and I just reacted to it profoundly because I couldn't stand cartoons that talked down to kids. When Schulz died all the obituaries focused on the dark elements that he brought to comics. And that's very important and very significant, but he also brought a lot of surrealism to comic strips that he really never got the credit for. You know, Snoopy resting on top of his doghouse and pretending to fight the Red Baron and that kind of nonsensical imagery didn't exist in comics either.

Any favorite old cartoon shows that have stuck with you through the years?

Well, there are certain Hanna-Barbera voices I can never get out of my head. I love the fact that this guy Don Messick did the voices of both Bobo and Ranger Rick, so that even though one was a tiny bear and the other was a human, they both said "Yogi" the same way. They're very lax about things like that. I guess they wanted to save money.

In your "X-Presidents" animated shorts, it's great to see them spontaneously perform as a rock band, much in the tradition of those great hack cartoon shows of the '70s. How did you match up the ex-presidents with their instruments?

I just wanted Jimmy Carter to play the tambourine because I wanted to feminize him as much as possible. Because he's the only Democrat there, it's fun to imagine that the three kick-ass Republicans think of him as a big pussy. So I had Carter play the tambourine because you never see a guy play the tambourine, and I had [Gerald] Ford play the drums because he seems to be the least capable of making music and just good for beating on something.

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