You've Been X-ed!!!

Okay, so Jamie Kennedy annoys me. Something about his facial expressions just seem wrong. His voice is snarky, he resembles an aardvark, and ... well, he acts just like that one irritating dude in your high school chemistry class.

Yet, whenever I come across his show, JKX: The Jamie Kennedy Experiment, I'm transfixed. Not by him, but by the elaborate schemes the show thinks up to trick people.

In one episode, the victim, a guy who speaks Japanese fluently, was lured to a sushi restaurant by friends. The owner, played by Jamie, was a bumbling, LA, sissyfied, fussbucket. His wife, a Japanese woman, was having an affair with one of the sushi preps (played by the same guy who plays Hiro on Heroes, incidentally), and openly oversharing embarrassing tidbits (in Japanese, of course) about her husband. The victim, thinking he was the only one who understood their exchange, was then put on the spot to clue the owner in. Not only was it a cruel trick, but it also tested the ethics of the victim.

See, what bothers me about The Jamie Kennedy Experiment is his power to embarrass you, severely, for the rest of your life. And something unnerves me about that power being in the hands of Jamie Kennedy and his bunch of clever pranksters.

This show is more complex and probing than a show like, say Punk'd, which essentially does the same thing for a younger target audience. Working in the tradition of Candid Camera and really stretching the boundaries seem to be Jamie's order of the day. Unfortunately, like a wrecked train, I can't take my eyes off the show whenever I come across it!

Sifted: 7/10