Failure to Grow

Community is back, and good again!  Not great, so far at least, but at least on a level with a slightly subpar episode of the first three seasons.  Compared with last season, those first two episodes were King Lear (a funny King Lear). 

Unfortunately, with Community comes the Werff.  You’d think a year of seeing Community at its worst would enable him to appreciate what makes Community good again—the vastly sharper writing, the infinitely smarter jokes.

Let’s see:

I do like some of the ideas the episode plays around with, though, particularly in the scene where Jeff tries to convince the study group to sue Greendale because of how their personalities were warped and destroyed by going to the school.

That was quite funny. Dark and funny, like the show at its best. 

Sitcoms generally turn their characters into cartoons because that’s what’s funniest, and this is a nice reminder of how far all of these characters—not just Jeff—have come from who they were in the pilot. Jeff paints it as a devolution, because he needs to, but it could just as easily be seen as growth and change.

Oh, God.  Here we go again.  There are so many problems with this. Again, sitcoms are not about growth and change.  They are about funny, usually warped and slightly unlikeable people doing funny things.  And just look at the contortions you have to go through to fit this scene into your atrocious comedy paradigm.  Really, what these characters describe is growth and change?  Sounds more like failure to me.  They’ve failed!  That’s the point.  That’s why they’re back in the same fucking place.  It’s Schmuck Bait:  if they’d succeeded, if they’d moved on, there wouldn’t be a show.  And I’m kind of glad there is a show. 

The show has always posited Greendale as a place where fucked-up people could come together and do great things.

Really, the characters do great things?  Have they cured cancer?  Written the Great American Novel?  Name me one. 

That’s always been its chief appeal to me, even beneath the meta-commentary and jokes about TV shows.

Of course it has.  The togetherness.  The hugging.  The learning (which, of course, doesn’t actually happen).  Not the things that make the show unique—the meta-commentary and the brilliant jokes. 

The best scenes on the show—and in this episode—are the ones where all of the characters are seated around that table, and that’s both because those scenes are often very funny and because they provide the most opportunity to examine those very questions of self-improvement and healing.

My wife just screamed when you said the word “healing.” Now she’s too hysterical to milk Bessie.

I’ve said it a million times, but I’ll say it again—you show me a sitcom about healed and improved people, I’ll show you an unfunny waste of my fucking time. 

Greendale is a place where people come together to heal themselves and get better, but everybody’s a fuck-up, and nobody stops being a fuck-up. That means Greendale isn’t a place that one emerges from fully formed. It means it’s a place that one stays at as long as one needs, until one feels well enough to face a crueler, less loving world.

This after an episode that underlines just how shitty Greendale is—it’s repeatedly called a “toilet,” for God’s sakes.  There’s a fucking riot in the episode! 

Your analysis, if I can deign to call it that, is just so damn weird.  The show is not about healing and self-improvement.  Again, sitcoms are about stasis.  It’s true, more than other shows, Community foregrounds the emotional struggles of the characters.  But just because the show is more emotional doesn’t mean it’s about personal growth.  Those two things are not the same.  The show is fucking dark.  The characters don’t improve.  They may try to, but they don’t.  They fail.  And, as a result, they remain funny.

Again, Mel Brooks: “Tragedy is I cut my finger.  Comedy is you fall into a manhole and die.”