Community, the tv show

that episode has the on-screen vers of:

in my experience calling a girl annoying is guy for "im gonna try and fuck that chick". its an instant break up in my book.

-- sunny successor, Wednesday, March 5, 2008 1:47 PM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

"I was raised on a trout farm!"

The Farscape references were hilarious, and I do agree w/Abed's theories about wormholes.

they're really going all out in making pierce as pathetic as possible, to the point where it's almost not funny - no one really likes him or wants him around

emphasis on "almost"

+ lol at imagining Chevy Chase sitting in a wheelchair trying to say lines while Community crew members remote-control spin him around and slam into things

this is pure conjecture but chase is known to be a total dick IRL and I wonder if the writers/show producers are taking revenge on him with what they're doing to pierce

I remember Joel McHale was on twitter talking about how cool Steve Martin was when he met him, so Joel and Dan Harmon had this joke about how they picked the wrong amigo.

xpost yeah definitely, it's hilarious to picture — all calling in favors from big-name hollywood types with longstanding grudges against him

"22 minutes? yeah, sure, we can do that for you. but I'm gonna need a lock of Chase's hair, and I plan to keep the clay model of him when we're done shooting..."

^^^^ jokes I gave up on and posted as-is because I couldn't quite get them to work

doodely doo.

The pictures of Shirley were priceless.

i know i am the sucker we all hate for wanting things to go a bit friends but i was so disappointed nothing came of annie and troy at the door. i think that would be a hilarious storyline imo.

supposedly starburns is in charge of the stop motion episode as he used to do moral orel for adult swim..

i wonder what misfit toy he will be

The little tease after last night's epiode made me so excited. I briefly felt like a kid again, anticipating the annual showing of Rudolph. I <3 this show so much and am going to be heartbroken when it gets cancelled.

they already discarded the annie/troy thing nicely i thought

they're really going all out in making pierce as pathetic as possible, to the point where it's almost not funny - no one really likes him or wants him around

― congratulations (n/a), Friday, December 3, 2010 8:48 AM (13 hours ago) Bookmark

i agree with this, i find i don't really enjoy watching his character very much

hard to root for annie/troy when annie/jeff have so much chemistry omg i'm a shipper

re: pierce; was wondering if chevy had injured himself again or something, thus his character being placed in the wheelchair.

yeah it's not so much that he's been less likable than before, he's just not been in it. no stories, basically no lines. pretty sure they knew he was an ass before they hired him though. i figure he's pretty much like this all the time irl:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dKKcJdKorA

anyway, latest episode was great with the guy throwing his drink in abed's face and all.

funny guy

i was so disappointed nothing came of annie and troy at the door.

I actually thought it was great that they seemed to build up to it and then not go there at all, giving us Jeff's and Britta's sloppy drunken makeout instead.

Btw, Abed was never actually diagnosed with Asperger's, right?

neither was Sheldon Cooper

Ha. I mean, Sheldon's pretty genuinely disconnected and baffled by social interactions whereas Abed is mostly just too rational and self-possessed to care about some things. Sheldon actually had no concept that grad students were throwing themselves at him. Abed realized the guy was hitting on him; He just enjoyed talking about Farscape.

I apologize for that capital "h" btw. The episode from s1 where everyone was trying to 'Can't Buy Me Love' Abed is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. It showed more about the rest of the group's hangups than than it showed that Abed has any disorder. That said, there are episodes (e.g. the 'mean girls' episode) when I start to wonder if the show's writers are all that clear on the distinction themselves.

yeah i was mostly kidding. i think Abed has a kind of refreshing amount of perspective compared to the average sitcom's one "weirdo" character whose behavior usually hinges on them being too dumb and/or un-self-aware to realize when they're acting strange -- and even when he does go really far out there either Jeff punctures it or Troy goes along with it to hilarious results.

he's just a student of human character with a buttload of self-esteem.

with all that self-esteem you mention you would think he would have a girlfriend :/

j. OTM.

Abed has had girlfriends, as the s1 episode I mentioned showed. Many women find him attractive. Besides, having high self-esteem can mean that you have less of a need to be in a relationship for the sake of it. He seems pretty content doing his thing.

he's had a few, including dennis from it's always sunny in philadelphia's real life ridiculously hot wife. they probably overplay (esp in the first season) the 'this guy is actually amazing at everything' abed as much as they do dorky, slightly aspie abed (though decidedly not aspie right? abed's got way to strong a sense of humor and he's frequently insightful about social mores around him).

the having of a romantic partner is probably always going to be off the table on this show anyway, since it's organized around plots about the group's stability and cohesiveness, which are threatened by a) outsiders trying to get in, b) insiders becoming attracted to outsiders, and c) complications in internal relationships that lead to imbalances or departures.

(compare to a lot of 'buffy' plots)

a big part of abed's character is related to his attraction to the world of imagination. a big part of the show involves the comedy of people who aren't yet fully formed (educated / grownup) seeking out individual identities within a community of equals (itself always set inside larger and larger groups that bump into each other and cause people to momentarily falter in how well-formed they've managed to become so far)—especially via the medium of assuming roles and performing them, and imagining/investigating roles that they could assume. so abed's character is special because he's most connected to the most general conditions the whole show takes place under and investigates. part of its conceit is that people primarily imagine what kinds of people they could be or how they could live their lives in terms of made-up stories and characters that they take, nowadays, from tv and movies. abed recognizes that and makes it more extreme, partly because he sees those stories as more understandable and attractive than the disappointing world around him, and partly because he sees the stories as a way of relating to others on a more idealized terrain that lets them repair the defects of their ordinary lives.

in certain ways that makes abed very socratic/platonic. he's got one foot outside of reality (i.e. the everyday world out of touch with imagination), which makes him seem stunned and bewildered by it in comparison to other people, even though his immersion in the world of imagination gives him insight into everyday life. he's self-possessed and controlled, apparently without the kind of neediness for social and romantic relationships that other people have, even though he still appreciates them. his primary relationship (with troy, who is the 'learner' in the relationship to abed's 'teacher') is homoerotic but based on a shared love of imagination rather than on any worldly goods (sex, pleasure, wealth, fame, status). and his love of imagination is in the service of improved human community in which people can be their best selves, even though it is occasionally at risk of becoming detached from reality, mainly because its exuberance and intoxication with the imagination (e.g. abed's vampire self, his god-movie).

pretense is closely related to playing a role and to playing make-believe, which is why there are characters that are more pathetically funny because they're based on attempts to make themselves out as something they're not, even though no one else accepts it—like chang or pierce. or, like in the dean's case, their primary social identities are based on their role of constantly trying to coax pretensions about their shared social life into being fully convincing and participated in by everyone involved even though people are generally cynical, apathetic, and uninvolved, which is why the dean is like a) a kindergarden teacher and b) saddled with every administrative-leftist/political-correctness-joke trope there is.

'mainly because of its exuberance', i meant.

the pathetic characters also have ways of forcing / enticing people into putting up with their pretenses anyway, like chang's authority as a teacher, pierce's money, or the dean's administrative power. now that chang doesn't have that authority he's more pathetic but also more hilariously abusive.

holy shit dude

I can't even...

j. out of curiosity are you writing your thesis on 'Community' by chance? :)

ok but troy and annie go against that a bit, no? they are p much willow and oz if you go back to the buffy thing, not a relationship born out of all of that but instead actually liking each other and mutually being able to help each other connect, grow etc. (Willow and Tara being the only other relationship in the show not coming out of dire circumstances?)

holy shit dude

― It's Long Like Donkey Dong (some dude), Sunday, December 5, 2010 10:04 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark

just spillover from the life of the mind yo

willow and tara's relationship is attractive to willow because it lets her pursue, with recognition by tara, full expression of her developing self (i.e. as a witch, as someone with power of her own contra her primary social group which is dominated by buffy), which was rebuffed by the shallow pretenses at identity formation of the campus wiccan group; but it's also forged in dire circumstances when mortal danger becomes the excuse for them to show and admit to intimacy.

troy and annie have a special capacity for recognizing one another since they knew their past selves as well as their present ones—which is special in this group since the general premise is that people are trying to overcome/escape/leave behind their past selves. i don't know where they're supposed to be going, though. it seems like annie's arc should be away from her past via realization that her past fantasies about happiness were just that. but they've also done a bit to indicate that e.g. her pill addiction was tied up with her ambition and that her acknowledgment of the value of her present social relations puts something of a check on her ambitions.

where that fits in with troy depends on his arc, too, and i'm less clear on what it could be. i thought his part in the troy-turns-21-everyone-goes-drinking story was really interesting—not just because of the stuff about how stupid adults actually are, but because the action was focalized around him, so that peoples' drunken behavior (not extreme, just boringly normal) was shown as unappealing in the same kind of way that abed is shown as regarding unimaginative reality. he would rather have interesting, genuinely absorbing interactions with others rather than obliterating ones that bring out how people who think they're opposed don't even realize that they share something in common (i.e. britta and jeff, in the car ride home). but even though troy and annie have special opportunities to know each other because of their past, i think the whole arc set up by the show's premise would have them establishing separation from each other.

part of annie's past self involved her ugliness—acne, no boobs—and so the fact that she is now attractive to her past object of idealized affection, now that she has become hot, should stand as an obstacle to her self-realization, because it could easily become the wrong reason that anyone who knew her before is attracted to her now.

This thread now needs a Kindle app

also, speaking of people seeking their identities in the human community—

given the first season's awesomely drawn-out jokes about the dean becoming a furry ('i hope this doesn't awaken something in me…'), his voice memos played over the PA in this year's halloween episode are really disturbing.

after the greg kinnear movie he reminds himself to check for something called 'human cent—', and then it's cut off. this movie? a saw someone tweet: 'it's all about bringing people together'.

naw, probably something else

j. yr posts here are awesome. wish I had something to add to the conversation but uh I mostly just watch it for the jokes >_>

snowy otm

J., although I haven't read Socrates or Plato, I think I basically agree with your first long post except for the characterization of Troy's and Abed's friendship as 'homoerotic' in any sense. It's a close friendship but I don't see any reason to attribute eroticism to it: If anything, it makes me think more of a pre-sexual sort of childhood friendship, like the bond I had with my best friend when I was 10. (These are often also based on love of imagination, of course.)

ya i think it sort of speaks to the uneasiness in our culture that we have about close male relationships that the "homo-erotic" modifier gets appended to describe that kind of friendship

they hold hands which is p gay

they should totally make an episode where Troy realizes he acts gay around Abed so Troy purposely avoids Abed and acts like a jerk when he does see him... (dot dot dot)

oh, surely—if i were being more careful i would have said 'homosocial', and of course a lot of the in-show jokes are about it being misrecognized as (proto-)homo-erotic by others. (and of course, troy's got a thing for butt stuff.)

the stuff about childhood is good—and it's connected up with the contemporariness of the show (a culture of adolescents staring at fart videos on youtube instead of actually learning about human culture) and the romantic-artist-imagination-self-creation stuff that i mentioned above. the end-show bit with abed fooling troy with the wall mural was amazing—especially troy's sad closing repetition about not being taken in by the prospect of a return to childhood wonderland.