Todd VanDerWerff Contains Multitudes

Does he contradict himself?  Yes.  Yes he does. 

I like a lot of the individual elements in tonight’s episode of Community, but I’m not sure it works all that well as a whole. 

Fine, it seemed like a strong episode, but certainly not as good as the Law and Order one last week that you found so unsatisfying.  But prepare yourself for a review in which Community can be judged by the standards of Lost, and mayhem is not the most fundamental essence of comedy.

I’m still not a fan of the “Chang takes over the campus” storyline, and too much time is spent on that and its form of broad comedy. 

“Broad comedy”: as opposed to, say, doing a full-on parody of Law and Order.  That whole premise: kind of broad as well.  This isn’t a light and witty Noel Coward drawing room comedy.

Broad humor can work in this show, but I’m never going to be someone who thinks the best solution for comedy is a crazy riot setpiece that goes on and on and features kids breaking out the pepper spray. 

Oh yes, me neither. I’m never going to be the kind of person who thinks aimless craziness is going to be a good idea, because comedy needs “solutions.” Comedy needs to be about order. It needs to be about decorum, about falling in line. We wouldn’t want—what’s the word? Oh yeah, mayhem. We wouldn’t want mayhem in comedies! Not like, “a crazy riot setpiece” over a blown up meth lab and unrestrained rage against authorities! We wouldn’t want bland and forgettable characters whose only job is to produce mayhem like Falstaff or the fucking Marx brothers. 

Yes, yes, we need to keep our humor from getting too “broad,” gotta make sure all its elements stay in their proper place so it can all multiply into a mathematical “solution.”

In theory, I like the idea that this episode tests the group’s reactions to Greendale first dicking them over, then tossing them out. Greendale is the heart of the show, a place that both forgives and rejects, and the stuff with the characters getting tossed out is an intriguing direction for the show to go.

Again, the Vanderwerff school of comedy: broad humor (still waiting on your definition for that, Todd), crazy setpieces, these are bad (despite these being exactly what characterize Community as a whole).  Good: “testing reactions,” “intriguing directions.”  Community: not a comedy, but a science experiment. 

Also. Greendale is not the “heart” of anything. It doesn’t “forgive” or “reject.” Are you trying to get a Varsity letter there or something? Trying to be a booster? Greendale is just a setting, a situation. A situation for comedy. Let’s see how can I make that shorter for clarity.  Uationedy. Hmm.  Seems a bit hard to pronounce.  Comsit. No, sounds like something from 1984.  What else?  Sitcom! Got it, by jove!

But if we’re being honest, the last act of this episode just proceeds too rapidly, especially when compared with the Starburns memorial that makes up the entirety of the second act, or the sequence cutting between the study room and the Dean’s office that makes up the first.  . . . It’s very, very fast, and I’m not sure a single one of the emotional payoffs lands because the show is so anxious to get on to whatever’s next. Presumably it’s setup for something, but what?

So now you’re so quick to criticize the “emotional payoffs” that you seemed to be craving last week?  What gives, Todd?  Not up to your level of pathos?—tears weren’t welling up?

But let’s step back for a second.  Let’s imagine that we hadn’t read any of your previous recaps, that we didn’t know the Vanderwerff worldview (and how much happier we would then be!).  What are you actually arguing for here?  Seems like you’re saying that the emotional aspects of this show don’t necessarily work.  Ok—let’s see where this goes.

It is, in a way, the equivalent of a serialized drama’s “moving the pieces around on the board” episode. Episodes like this place a lot of weight on whatever comes next, because if the conclusion to all of that piece-moving is suitably moving or devastating, it will make everything that came before seem better in retrospect. (The example I always like to use is Lost’s “Follow The Leader,” which is a messy episode of television, but it leads into the absolute insanity of the fifth season finale, so all is forgiven.  . . ..) I haven’t been entirely sure about Community’s experiments in serialization this season, but I’ve been playing wait-and-see. This is the first episode that makes me think such elements were probably did more harm than they were worth, but, of course, if the final four episodes are any good, they’ll make all of these concerns moot.

“Element,” “Experiments, “Solution”: I would really like to hear your scientific method of comedy reviews, Todd.  God knows it would be more logical than whatever the hell’s going on here. 

And again, Todd, you go with Lost as a comparison point.  As we all know, Lost IS A FUCKING DRAMA.  About. . . who the hell knows.  Also, you like the “insanity” of the last episode of Lost but you don’t like the “crazy riot setpiece” of Community.

Serialization in comedies is a hard thing to pin down. Since television comedies need plot so little, serialization—which is very, very dependent on plot—has been the sort of thing they haven’t tried much of. For the most part, TV comedy serialization is done via very loose character and story arcs—Sam and Diane start dating; Dunder Mifflin is having financial troubles; Jerry and George are doing a TV pilot. There’s nothing there as ambitious as anything you might see on a serialized drama. Even the most serialized of them—that Seinfeld plot—is something that was more an overriding concern for the season than it was an ongoing arc. It dropped in every few episodes, and when it wasn’t present, nobody seemed to care very much about it.

True.  Comedies tend to be stand-alone episodes.  Wait—my cognitive dissonance detectors are beginning to buzz!

I find it fascinating that both Community and Parks & Recreation have launched intricate, season-long storylines this season, and that those storylines have created situations where the shows struggle under their weight, even as they allow for all manner of forgiveness from fans. For instance: Last week’s episode featured several scenes where Troy seemed irritated with Abed taking the lead in the Law & Order scenario they were playing out. Finally, the show was dealing with the repercussions of the pillow fort episodes! Or was it? Did anybody intend for us to read things that way, or were we just reading into it because we could? Serialization is kind of a crutch in that way, because it allows TV writers to hand-wave away stuff we might otherwise wonder about.

So you now don’t particularly like the emotional aspects of this show, and don’t like its experiments with serialization.  Wow, we agree, sort of, which I never thought was possible after last week (but then, I never thought that the VanDerWerff method would be so inconsistent—er, incoherent). I too am not a big fan of serialization in comedy, but two points:

one, everything you say above is bullshit.  Actually that’s my only point. My math skills begin to fade when I have to wade through your tortured logic. 

Why is it bullshit?—you go on and on about how Community is moving in a serialized direction, but is that even true?  A couple of to be continued style episodes, a few sustained conflicts between characters (which, as you say, are then just dropped), and that’s about it.  What I’m saying Todd, is that the entire premise of your argument (did I just call it an argument?—that’s going much too far) is specious.

And let’s not get started on that last sentence about serialization as a crutch, which aside from the unfortunate crutch-hand-wave mixed metaphor, is just blatantly false.  Serialization doesn’t wave stuff away, it connects episodes together.  Stand alone episodes, by contrast, do exactly what you claim serialization does.  On Seinfeld for the most part each episode exists in a hermetic world of its own; if something happens in one episode, there are no consequences for it in the next.  I’m not saying that only using stand alone episodes is necessarily the ideal situation—Arrested Development is able to sustain interconnected storylines across episodes without sacrificing comedy—I’m just saying that you have no idea what you’re talking about.

I don’t want to sound too down on the episode.

Again, the only thing that you sound is incoherent.

There’s plenty of good stuff in the non-Chang scenes, though the group’s sheer anger over having to attend summer school on a technicality felt a little forced. The first act was some strong stuff, with Britta’s attempts to help the group cope mostly going very awry (in amusing fashion) and the Dean’s realization that he was going to have to break more bad news to “Jeff and the group” being one of my  favorite gags of the episode. I also liked Garrett singing “Ave Maria” and the content of the final scene in Troy and Abed’s apartment, even if the story placement of it was a little wacky. And it’s hard to go wrong with a Starburns death montage using entirely greenscreen footage.

Good stuff.  Funny stuff.

But even here, I find myself wondering just what we’re trying to get at.

Again, “getting at” something is really not the point of a comedy.

Britta’s been shown to be at least semi-competent in several earlier episodes, so why is she suddenly the worst grief counselor ever? What’s up with Jeff’s emotional overwroughtness this season? You can say that both of these things are isolated gags that are there to drive comedy, and I’d mostly agree with that.

Great—true, you don’t want the gags to contradict the characters that have been created on the show (as even Seinfeld is occasionally guilty of), but, as this quite sophisticated “you” that you set up as a straw man argues most persuasively, for the most part gags are just “there to drive comedy.”  Because the genre of Community is, again, a comedy. 

It’s funny to watch Britta screw things up, and it’s funny to see the normally cynical Jeff realize how much he cares about something—even if he cares about it in the sense of not wanting to have to do it.

Uh oh, he just called Community funny.  Must be preparing to shit all over it.

But you can’t introduce these one-scene/one-episode ideas, but also suggest the whole season is building toward something. That makes it seem more suspect when Britta was bumbling but basically competent in previous episodes, but is now getting everyone to envision puppies on fire. It’s funny, but for what?

The classic encapsulation of the VanDerWerff aesthetic.  “It’s funny, but for what?”  For world peace, presumably.  For a better tomorrow.  The Vanderwerff way: utilitarian humor.  Soon we’ll all be asking, what’s the cash-value of that joke? 

But at the same time, I found myself wanting more space, wanting everything to feel less cluttered. I opened this piece up by talking about death, and I think it’s telling that in an episode in which a somewhat major recurring character dies, his death is almost incidental. That’s a really funny idea if handled properly, but it gets buried under a bunch of plot mechanics. There’s a reason that TV comedies so rarely do heavily plotted stuff, and that’s because every second you spend laying out the plot is a second you spend not telling jokes. Comedy arises from spontaneity, and having a rock-solid plan is the enemy of that. I wanted more time to breathe. I wanted more time to not mourn Starburns.

So let’s get this straight.  Your criticisms of this episode: too much plot, too much serialization, too many unearned emotional moments. I seem to remember someone who liked serialized elements in comedy series, or at least what they provided for.  I seem to remember somehow who was all about emotional payoffs, and what they taught us about the characters.  Oh, right.  His first name started with T, and his last name rhymed with Ramberverff.

It’s actually kind of sad, Todd.  Underneath it all, you know what works and what doesn’t in Community.  You know, as you say, that “every second you spend laying out the plot is a second you spend not telling jokes.”  This despite the fact that you were criticizing last week’s episode for being too funny and this week’s for being funny for nebulous ends.  (I can’t believe that that’s actually what you’re arguing, but hey, it’s there, you wrote it).   You know that the big moments of emotions, all of Jeff’s speeches, can be warm and cheering at times, they can even serve a purpose, but that basically they’re a little pat, a whole lot repetitive, and at heart just a distraction from the comedy.  You know this, but you seem unwilling to acknowledge it. 

Well I’m here to tell you, Todd, that it’s not your fault.  Or only partly your fault.  It’s the fault of the discourse you propagate, which distracts the writers and creates damaging audience expectations. Like Frankenstein’s Monster, it’s returned to revenge itself upon its creator.   You can’t demand from a comedy that its highest goal be to teach us something new about the characters each week, and then criticize it for being too serialized.  It’s only possible to do that “character work” as you so precisely put it in last week’s writeup, in a serial format.  What’s the best example of a stand alone show? Amusingly, it’s Law and Order.  There is no character development, ever.  Lennie Briscoe may have talked about his ex-wife a grand total of twice.  As far as we know Sam Waterston’s character was a eunuch.  So if you want character development, whatever that means in the context of a comedy, you have to like serialization.  Don’t call the show out for the very aspects that your brand of criticism has helped to create.  This is why I’m criticizing you, Todd.  You’re style of reviewing is poisonous, because it demands from comedies the very qualities which, against your will, you’ve diagnosed above as being dangerous to comedy.  Remember last week when you talked about the burdens of the sitcom?  That burden, when it comes to Community, is you.