I’m not sure what’s so twisted about Twisted Metal

polygon.com:

Allow me to free associate for a moment.

Twisted Metal is a funny show. Not ha-ha funny, like a clown. But there is a clown. The kind that thinks murder is funny. This is also the premise behind famed Batman villain the Joker. He laughs at things that are not funny, like murder. This is why we say he is “twisted.” You would think, because of this, that Twisted Metal is also twisted. The transitive property and all. But the Joker has a logic to his humor. He really wants everyone to find comedy in the same thing he does (society). Twisted Metal, and its clown Sweet Tooth, have no such logic. They are just laughing. And I would like, occasionally, to laugh with them.

Based on the long-dormant PlayStation franchise, Twisted Metal is a violent action-comedy in the Deadpool mold (Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick are among its executive producers) but lacking Deadpool’s secret sauce: Ryan Reynolds, or a Ryan Reynolds equivalent. Someone in front of the camera with an excess of charisma and a creative stake in the project’s tone, who can tell a joke and also sell it. Instead, it offers scene after scene that the show’s creative team clearly thinks is funny, and could be funny, if, like an actual comedian, there was a bit more time spent workshopping the jokes here.

And jokes are what set this apocalypse apart from the many others on offer. Twisted Metal follows John Doe (Anthony Mackie), an amnesiac “milkman” — Twisted Metal parlance for couriers who deliver packages from walled city to walled city across the Divided States of America. Milkmen are not permitted to enter the cities they deliver to, so they live a lonely and itinerant life, bonding only with their cars (Doe named his “Evelyn”) and getting paid in