Hey Wisecrack, Michael here. As you’re likely aware, the city of Philadelphia has had a
pretty great 2018; the Eagles won the Superbowl, Gritty emerged as the anti-hero of working
people everywhere, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia returned for its thirteenth
season. And while they missed out on the golden opportunity to have Gritty beat the s**t out
of Charlie’s green man, this season managed to do something very few sitcoms can do after
thirteen season: not suck. So to breakdown exactly why this season was so much fun, we’re
going to see what happens when a melancholy Dane, a crotchety German, and a chain-smoking
Frenchman walk into a south Philly dive bar.
Welcome to this wisecrack edition on Always Sunny: And in case you still don’t know
what happened to Dennis, spoilers ahead.
One
of
the most impressive things about the recent season of It’s Always Sunny is that it’s
remained fresh after all these years, something not many sitcoms are able to pull off. Take
a show like How I Met Your Mother, while it started off as a funny Friends remake for
old millennials, "Look at you, you beautiful bastard. You suited up! This is totally going
in my blog." by the end of its ninth and final season it was a mess of recycled tropes and
plot lines. "That woman is half your age. Haven't you changed even a little?"
And don’t even get us started on that trainwreck of a finale, where the main character finally
finds a wife, who then dies so that he can be with the woman we all knew he was meant
to be with since nine minutes into the first episode. And lest we think that How I Met
Your Mother is the exception, let’s not forget how Scrubs tried to reboot itself inside
itself, "Part of me hates how familiar this seems, I hope I can find a way to make this
all feel new. oh my god, the first day of med school, everything is so new." or how
Two and a Half Men milked out three more seasons after the departure of Charlie Sheen by hiring
Ashton Kutcher to play a slightly less gross playboy. "What's upstairs? I don't know, probably
a bedroom. Why don't we go find out? Uh okay."
So how does Always Sunny do it? Rather than avoiding repetitive plots and themes to stay
fresh, It’s Always Sunny has embraced a creative form of repetition that recycles
ideas while injecting them with something new. This formula has left the show feeling
like the perfect mix of familiar and surprising, like a golden retriever that barks the lyrics
to Who Let The Dogs Out. "Who, who who who!?"
And if you are currently working on gene splicing technology, please make this a reality. In
season thirteen Always Sunny literally reboots a full episode "Dee slow down, you're on pace
to drink 130 beers." to offer a critique of our cultural obsession with reboots, "Godammit,
this is my own female version. You're not supposed to be here. Well, in every reboot,
you gotta have somebody from the original to make a cameo."
In another it explores the ways in which the repetition of memory changes how we remember
things to subvert the traditional clip show format, "What are we gonna do without our
phones for 30 minutes? Well, we don't need the phones. What if we just kick back and
remember some of the good old days? No!" and most impressively, it takes the worn out jokes
about Mac’s sexuality to new heights in the show’s most genuinely moving episode
to date, "Alright, I just don't know if I can do this, Frank. I don't get it and I may
never get it, but I do know you gotta do this."
But to better understand this repetition, we need to get back to the worst “walked
into a bar” joke I’ve ever told. The concept of repetition has been explored by philosophers
ever since Socrates kept asking people “Why?” so many times they made him drink poison,
but it really picked up steam in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Søren Kierkegaard,
our Dane, argued that true repetition occurs when we continually strive to live out our
ideals in real life, and our German, Friedrich Nietzsche, developed a theory of eternal recurrence,
which asks us to imagine that our life will repeat infinitely as a way of determining
if we are living the sort of lives we’d want to live again.
In the twentieth century, our Frenchman, Gilles Deleuze, built upon their work to develop
a new concept of repetition to help us understand creativity in both metaphysical and existential
terms. We’ll get back to Paddy’s in a second, but let’s first take a quick look
at a distinction Deleuze made between two types of repetition.
The first, called generality, describes events that are connected through cycles and laws
in a scientific manner. The sun rises every morning, it gets cold every winter, and chick
fil a is always closed when you want it most. These are fixed laws that always repeat and
never change. The other type, aptly called repetition, describes when an attempt at recreating
previous works or events leads to a unique and creative act that is not a precise replica
of what happened before.
Whereas Nietzsche imagines a universe in which everything repeats, Deleuze says that everything
repeats, but with creative differences. For example, in the criminally underrated documentary
The Act of Killing, a filmmaker asks Indonesian warlords to re-enact their crimes for a movie.
But in this wholly new repetition, they confront the horrendous nature of their deeds for the
first time. Deleuze thought that true humor and irony were created via this second type
of repetition, as it creates a critical distance from the laws and norms of the initial thing.
"I'm talking about the last memory where Mac turned the lights off to the bar. Yeah, what
about it? Well, that never happened. I turned the light off." And as we’ll see, it’s
this type of repetition that can help us understand what makes Always Sunny so special.
Season Thirteen immediately teases us with the news that Paddy’s has moved in a new
direction from this "Your son just does not look latino. Oh, well, I mean that, that's
a bit of a disappointment for us. That makes me sad. Yeah, because we're truly trying to
give him a future. Is there anything that we can do? Well, not unless you can change
the color of this babies skin." To this, “This place has changed, you know, it’s really
evolved. And it’s been so welcoming of this brown skin girl and her liberal ideals”,
only to have the rug pulled out moments later, “You think those liberal morons bought it?”
And while it seems that Mindy Kaling’s character is replacing Dennis, we soon see a symbol
of this Deleuzian repetition in an open-mouthed sex doll. The introduction of sex-doll Dennis
puts the gang back on their regular path of spiraling out of control. Oh, and the waitress
sleeps with it. “Oh, I f***ed him.” A call back to this in season Season One.
Whereas simply rehashing old stories would mark the generality kind of reiteration for
Deleuze, turning Dennis into a sex doll puts it into the realm of Deleuzian repetition
- repetition that stresses difference. It also injects a new meaning, as the show provides
a metacommentary on the challenges of running a show for 13 seasons. "And Dee, what is this?
Oh, it's just a new lighting set-up, it washes me out, it's a better look."
This episode is littered with other repetitions too. Mac brings back the duster, but this
time he’s ripped - an inversion of him becoming inexplicably fat earlier in the show.
The waitress relapses back into drinking, “do you have any more of that wine?” and
the gang ends up back at a strip club, "we always go to the strip club!" Mac then notes
how hard it is to stay relevant after all these years, “I think the problem is we’re
trying to do things that we used to do, but things are different now.” As if establishing
the philosophy of the season, this happens, "your guys are played out, you're basic. Uh
oh. You know what, you already said that. A second ago, You run out of insults. Recycling
your material?"
By the end of the first episode Dennis is back and the show is seemingly back to normal.
"Keep doing what your doing, playing a dolls a**hole with your mouth, and talking to something
that's never going to talk back to you. Or will it? Oh S**t! Kill it!"
The most blatant use of repetition is The Gang Beats Boggs: Ladies Reboot, in which
an entire episode from season ten is replicated except this time, it’s all women. Well,
almost all women, "this is an all female flight on the way to the women march, but I don't
give a shit about that."
Dee’s description of the stunt is Deleuzian repetition to a T, "it’s the same exact
thing, but it's with women, right, so it’s a new idea." Artemis, to put words in her
mouth, suggests it falls more into the generality camp "Okay I just that if it’s all with
women then it should be better. Why can’t we just do the same thing? Because if we do
the same thing then why are we doing it all?"
And thus functions as a clever jab at lazy Hollywood reboot culture. They even throw
a quick critique at the way in which the media uses diversity as a guise for selling more
crap no one needs, "I'm gonna make big money in California. With this crap? Yeah, it's
a land of sad, lonely, desperate women willing to pay any price for fake spirituality and
clean orgasms."
And of course, they top it off with another spin on the original Boggs episode: ayahuasca.
"I’m pulling the plug on your male hand me down plot. As women, we deserve better,
we deserve our own story!" What is happening? The tea that I served was spiked with ayahuasca."
One of the philosophers that inspired Deleuze, Søren Kierkegaard, thought that it was impossible
to literally repeat a given experience. In his book on the topic, creatively titled Repetition,
Kierkegaard tells a story of a man who enjoyed a trip to Berlin so much he attempts to see
if he can recreate it, with wildly underwhelming effects. Kind of like how the bars we love
in our early twenties are sticky floored hellscapes when we go back in our thirties.
We see something similar happen in the episode Time’s Up for the Gang, where a seemingly
coincidental example at a sexual harassment workshop "This waitress is being harassed
by one of her customers, he's following her home from work, digging through her trash,
and calling her repeatedly until she complains to her boss about it." Casts Charlie’s history
with the Waitress in a horrifying light, "Maybe she like, only thought she wasn't into him,
but then 15 years later, when she needed a baby like really bad and she'd been in and
out of a women's shelter, he banged her."
Simply repeating an older plot line in the social context of 2018 "He ought to ask for
your hand, so if you want to marry man will you marry me?" provides a new perspective,
and scares the hell out of Charlie. It’d be like if Kierkegaard’s guy went back to
Berlin ten years later only to realize that technically he’d killed a man. Oops.
Another layer of understanding repetition is memory, which for Deleuze is a disruptive
and non-linear force, unlike habit, which is passive and linear. So while you can carry
out habitual tasks like going to the bathroom in the middle of the night without much active
engagement, to remember is to connect the present to distant events, breaking with otherwise
linear time.
Put differently, when we remember something we stop moving forward and mentally repeat
something that’s already happened. And we see this idea of memory creating something
new in one of the more bizarre episodes of the season, The Gang Does a Clip Show. While
at first it seems like Always Sunny is doing one of those crappy clip show episodes used
by long running sitcoms that need to kill time, “That’s what you do when you start
getting old. You start reliving the glory days because you can’t think of anything
new to do.” it soon turns into an exploration of the way in which the very act of remembering
is itself a creative act, as each time we access a memory we imprint it with something
new. “Hey every-time you misremember something you run the risk of altering reality.”
Most importantly, this means our memory has the creative power to turn even the most mundane
experiences in to something new, or in this case, into our own personal episode of Seinfeld.
"I'm out!"
And while we might not be able to use memory to have full heads of hair and cartoonishly
long legs, the act of remembering can alter our memories
and inject them with our contemporary perspective.
The most thrilling use of repetition takes place in the finale, Mac Finds His Pride,
in which one of the tropes that has aged the worst, i.e., Mac’s sexuality, becomes the
vehicle for the most profound moment in the show’s run. While the episode begins with
a storyline that seems like it’s going to once again use Mac’s homosexuality as fuel
for crude jokes. “I mean, one false move these fairies could poke me full of holes!
Fairies? What year is it in your head?” including some insanely dark gems from Frank.
“You don’t know what’s going on inside of me. I’m sure there’s at least five
or six super viruses eating out your insides. No!” The episode slowly reveals itself to
be a truly creative and contemporary repetition of Mac’s sexual journey.
What could be a crass generality, instead enables the show to highlight the evolution
of both its overall tone and of Mac’s character in particular. By the end of the episode we
see that what sounded like typical Mac gibberish "There’s like this storm inside of me, and
it’s been raging my whole life, and I’m down on my knees, and I’m looking for answers,
and then god comes down to me, and it’s a very hot chick.” was actually just a failed
attempt to verbally express what could only truly be expressed through dance.
Frank trying to stop a nosebleed by cramming trash up his nose "I stuff it up, I plug it."
becomes a compelling metaphor for Mac’s inner turmoil, "I've been in agony the whole
day, but I came to this realization that sometimes you gotta let the blood flow in order to start
the healing. Some cuts you just can't plug up. It's the same for you. You got this thing
inside you and you're trying to plug it up, but you gotta let that shit out. You gotta
let it flow. Otherwise, you're gonna be in agony for the rest of your life."
And Frank doesn’t walk away without showing a sense of empathy we haven’t seen before.
“oh my god, I get it, I get it.” The emotional climax of the finale is not something anyone
would expect from Always Sunny, or from any comedy for that matter. And if you can make
it through the final dance sequence without choking up, then you just might need to seek
emergency medical attention to make sure your heart is still beating.
So there you have it, by using repetition to create new moments rather than merely reproducing
what’s come before, Always Sunny has avoided the staleness that we’d expect from a show
that’s lasted through three different presidencies.
And just like the best philosophers, it’s remained focused on finding the true nature
of humanity, “In there we’re not so different. In there were all the same. In there we're
all just disgusting, vulnerable, ashamed. Like a bunch of filthy animals dumping in
a shit house. It's the one common thing amongst a king and a pauper, we all gotta take a s***.”]
Well, it’s time for us to crush some fight milk and hit the gym.
Thanks for watching guys.