Even in comedies that don’t use a laugh track or aren’t filmed in front of a live studio audience (not really a step up), most actors on TV seem to suffer from an internal laugh track. Each joke is preceded by a coy smile and pause that means, “Watch out, audience. Something clever coming your way.” The wisecracker’s smirk is as clear as an applause sign.

Stella is about three apartment mates who have no clue when to smirk. They can’t keep jobs, they jump up and down when excited, they mope when sad, they give themselves away when trying to be clever (Wain: “Prince Machiavelli himself couldn’t have orchestrated a more murderous coup.”), they make awful jokes, they love nothing more than receiving the take-away prizes given to losers on game shows, they have a disastrous asexual friendship/competition with the girls upstairs, they look at the camera as much as possible, and their lives turn to crap whenever they deviate from the usual plan of hanging out.

Stella was Comedy Central’s risk of the summer, 2005. The network has learned that it pays to take risks: South Park, The Daily Show and Chappelle’s Show turned the station from an SNL reruns channel to one of the biggest networks in cable. But this particular risk tanked after ten episodes.

After my first episode of Stella (“Campaign”), I was hooked. I was laugh-crying, it was so good. And yet the same friends who’d watch a whole disc of Arrested Development in one sitting — funny friends — would walk into the room when I was watching Stella, scrunch their faces and say, “What is this?”

Consider this dialogue:
Wain: You know what kind of scream therapy I like? Ice cream therapy. I’ll take Rocky Road.
Showalter: I’ll take Pralines and Cream.
Or this:
Black: I think fanny packs look dumb.
Wain: Excuse me, do I look dumb?
Black: I do think you look dumb, David. You look like a dumb dodo bird.
Wain: You look like a dumb dodo bird.
Black: You look like a dumb-ass dodo bird. You’re a dumb, flightless dodo bird.

Stella tends to alienate because it reads like it was written by an eighth grader. A lot of shows that don’t catch on in the mainstream can at least claim a subtext or social commentary that went over the heads of the masses. Problem is: there’s not an ounce of subtext in Stella. Instead, Stella relies on sight gags, funny voices, fake moustaches in the vein of Monty Python. There’s no Michael Bluth to Stella’s Tobiases, No Tim/Jim to Stella’s David Brent/Michael Scott, no Jon Stewart to Stella’s Stephen Colbert. And that makes some people very uncomfortable.

But a big part of the joke is that no one ever calls the guys out on their idiocy. When Michael Ian Black says, “I believe in Heaven. But I don’t think it’s a city on a cloud. Like, to me, Heaven could just be the sound of a child’s laughter,” Michael Showalter should hit him. Instead, he jumps in: “It’s like: I believe in God, you know. But it’s like… I’m not sure God is an old man with a long white beard.” They’re made for each other.

As a DVD, “Season One” is pretty heavy on content for two discs. Ten episodes, a “History of Stella” feature, commentary on every episode, and, best of all, a comedy special that the guys put on before the show began. The commentaries show the guys’ fondness for immature jokes and further blur the lines between the real-life Michael, Michael, and David and their on-screen alter egos. They’re your three funniest college buddies who stuck together long after everybody else lost touch.

Stella is like playing with a child: You’ve got to let go of a lot of posturing, restraint, and vocabulary to meet the child on his own level, but afterward you realize you’ve just had more fun with the kid than you ever could have had hanging out with adults.