'Soup' host McHale dishes it out

LOS ANGELES - Joel McHale makes a living out of saying the meanest things he and his writers can think of to say about people on television.

He hosts "The Soup," which airs lightning-fast highlights from the worst that the boob tube and YouTube have to offer. He has special scorn for people like Tyra Banks, the Kardashian family, Miley Cyrus, and, most of all, his E! network colleague, the height-challenged Ryan Seacrest.

Having McHale notice you, and snark about you - it is not a negative thing. In fact, it's the best thing that can happen to a quasi-celeb. The worse he disses you, the more likely you will get on his show and let him say it to you in person.

McHale is whip-smart about nonsense, which becomes somehow attractive. He is 6 feet 4 and built like a handsome, high-wattage street lamp.

Women (and a few men?) slobber all over his MySpace wall. He is about to turn 37. His hair is beginning to thin. He is married and has two sons, a 3-year-old and a 7-month-old. He grew up in Seattle, and was on the University of Washington's football team. He was an altar boy. He moved to Los Angeles and got little parts in TV shows. E! hired McHale and some other writers to breathe new life into an old idea - the clip show formerly known as "Talk Soup."

"The Soup" was relaunched in 2004 ; it airs Friday nights on one of cable's junkiest channels. "The Soup" is not like "Talk Soup," which E! aired in the 1990s and early '00s, and was hosted by Greg Kinnear (and others who followed).

Back in the day, "Talk Soup" assembled the most shocking moments from daytime talk shows. To look at old clips of "Talk Soup" is to be struck by how slow and simple and innocent it seems, even with Jerry Springer and Morton Downey Jr. supplying the raw fodder.

Today "The Soup" is the capital planet of we-watch-so-you-don't-have-to. Six million or so viewers watch it each week (according to the network).

"So much of pop culture is awful, so much of it, and unless they cut electricity to the world, it will never stop, there will always be more of it," McHale says. "Ninety percent of what's on television is not good and 10 percent is a little better. We show the 90 percent."

Because why would anybody watch something good anymore?

"It's an ideal job because I used to yell at the TV when I was alone at home and now I can yell and be paid for it," he says.

McHale is every bit the aloof jerk you would hope he'd be. The show starts taping in a half-hour and he must be as cocky as humanly possible. He is sharp and stinging like a paper cut.

It's all so simple, so cheap, here at E!, where the hallways are lined with the grotesquely smiling visage of Ryan Seacrest. An episode of "The Soup" involves McHale standing in front of a green curtain in a no-frills studio, trashing the week in schlock.

McHale puts in three days a week on "The Soup," and this makes time for movie offers - next year he'll be seen as an FBI agent in "The Informant" with Matt Damon, directed by Steven Soderbergh.

E! pays him only "enough to support my meth addiction," McHale says. So he added a stand-up routine - he had never done the comedy circuit - and took his show out on the road, which has been a surprise hit.