Familiar comedians animate 'Shorties'

A lot of familiar Boston voices turn up on Comedy Central's new half-hour animated series "Shorties Watchin' Shorties," debuting tonight. The show features animated clips of stand-up, stitched together "Beavis and Butt-head"-style, as two precocious 14-month-olds (voiced by Danvers native Nick DiPaolo and Roxbury native Patrice O'Neal) flip through the channels.

The show, which airs at 10:30 p.m., is produced by Denis Leary's Apostle production company, and those with keen ears might recognize bits from Jay Mohr and Dane Cook from another Apostle production, "Comics Come Home VI" at the Orpheum in 2000. They might also recognize local veteran Joe Yannetty and Boston expatriates Bill Burr, John Pinette, Janeane Garofalo, and Mike Birbiglia in the mix with acts by the likes of Gilbert Gottfried and Brian Regan.

But aside from showcasing Boston talent, what "Shorties" does best is repackage lost nuggets of comic material in a fresh environment. The formula is similar to "Short Attention Span Theater," the Comedy Central show that helped break names such as Jon Stewart and Marc Maron 15 years ago -- archived recordings pasted together in short bursts that don't give viewers time to get bored with any one voice.

The animation ranges from amusing to gross (more traditional than "South Park" but stealing a trick or two), and gives a uniform look to all the clips. That allows a 10-year-old routine from Leary's "No Cure for Cancer" album to stand next to a more recently recorded bit about slavery from up-and-comer Dwayne Kennedy without dating either one.

But the show fails to capitalize on what could be its greatest strengths in DiPaolo and O'Neal, two of the most brutally funny comics to come out of the Boston scene in the past decade. They're at their best jabbing on their feet, as they do as frequent guests on "Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn." Here, they are too often saddled with obvious potty humor (OK, they are babies, but still . . .) or stiff prefab dialogue.

The funniest scenes -- as when DiPaolo and O'Neal argue about who will be more gay when they grow up, after a Greg Giraldo short about how gay men look like bodybuilders -- fit the characters' voices and still sound like DiPaolo and O'Neal. If Comedy Central can capitalize on that, this show might learn to walk.