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what's up wisecrack michael here a lot
of you have been very puzzled for a very
long time on why wisecrack
composed of many dan harmon fans have
not covered the
other show he made you know the one
without the intergalactically drunk
scientist
like our favorite grandfather grandson
duo community gets extremely meta on
everything from han solo types i know
but i'm calling dibs on the han solo
world before jeff slouches into it by
default to filmmakers god complexes to
the very plot of the show itself
what if shirley came back would that
change your disposition surely could get
us back on formula but i don't see it
turning us around
but while one might dismiss the
overabundance of references as some
weird flex by the writer's room i want
to suggest that something else is going
on the show is trying to tell you
yes you that you're much smarter than
network television thinks you are
so how does community manage to do that
while also managing to be incredibly
irreverent and silly
let's find out in this wisecrack edition
on the philosophy of community
and spoilers ahead for community
and before we get into it i want to give
a huge shout out to raycon for
sponsoring this video i only come to the
studio once a week for an hour or two to
shoot
which means i spend most of my time home
in my apartment with my fiance
during the work day i need to watch
certain shows for research of course
or listen to music and i just don't want
to disturb anyone else
raycon earbuds had been the perfect
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now back to the show community follows
jeff winger a disgraced lawyer who has
to attend a lowly community college in
hopes of getting back to the courtroom
the
the state bar has suspended my license
uh they found out my college degree was
less than legitimate in the process he
becomes friends with a study group full
of truly bizarre characters
the phrase cult classic gets thrown
around a lot these days
almost as much as the phrase classic
cult which is often used to describe
heaven's gates jonestown and people who
still watch american idol
but i digress community is one of the
few sitcoms that absolutely deserves
this distinction
it's a show so beloved that its fans
basically saved it from extinction twice
the creator has his own mythos and
documentary and it remains a part of the
cultural conversation
half a decade later with that
long-awaited movie maybe still on the
way
one of the reasons for this status is
the show's use of references which are
intricately layered upon each other i
think we've all reinvented ourselves
over the summer
a little late to the hipster party much
a little much on the much much
it also mixes in a healthy dose of
self-awareness like the bottle episode
in which abid constantly reminds
everyone that
because it's starting to feel like a
bottle episode and this is obviously all
really fun
but what if in its over-the-top use of
tropes and references
the show gives us a unique way to
explore the meaning of pop culture and
our relationship with it
if we want to get a deeper understanding
of why clip shows featuring things that
never happened
or a loving fear of levar burton so do
you go to school nearby
are actually commentaries on us and how
we relate to the media
we have to look at a thing called epic
theater or interventionist theater
epic theater was a style developed by
playwright bertolt brecht
if regular plays wanted people to leave
feeling relieved that the hero saved the
day
brecht wanted them to leave the theater
feeling very confused
he was living in an era in which people
were consuming lots of theater
but the purpose of this theater was to
provide entertainment
not to make people think about
themselves and their place in society
with epic theatre he aimed to shift the
art's purpose in hopes of broadening its
boundaries and giving it a social
function
brecht criticized art's traditionalist
tendencies which he thought led to a
constant repetition of the same stories
and creative forms
so rather than appealing to the
audience's hearts like most art of his
time
he sought to speak to their minds that
meant using both
songs placards and projections of ideas
onto the stage to hammer home the
meaning he wanted the audience to get
these plays weren't subtle works using
subtext to convey ideas
they were intellectual works that put
the ideas front and center
so if he were a live circle 2009 he
probably would have been sick of all the
multi-cam network sitcoms that recycled
the same themes
over and over without ever shaking
things up or exploring challenging ideas
of course dan harmon has always seemed
similarly bored with traditional sitcom
tropes from his early days of heat
vision in jack
into community and up through the modern
reign of rick and morty harmon has
pushed against tv's tendency to simply
repeat what's worked in the past
and this means that rather than
recycling the same tropes that we're
used to
so that watching television is a
pacifying experience where our body
melds with the couch
and our mind melds with the screen and
our mouth melds with a bowl of pizza
rolls covered in queso
harmon wants to disrupt our assumptions
and he does so by subverting criticizing
and sometimes just straight blowing up
classic sitcom tropes
occasionally that means using the
spiritual perfection of chicken fingers
to explore the dynamics of mafia films
and the divine
silliness of mafia cosplay to us lines
were for suckers
hacks sheep we were wolves
and we had the chicken to prove it
sometimes it means using a pulp fiction
episode to actually do on my dinner with
andre episode that explores how we can
use film to make human connections
i chose my dinner with andre because
it's about a guy who has an unexpectedly
enjoyable evening with a weird friend
he's been avoiding lately
but in both cases the show is
simultaneously having fun with classic
film tropes while also getting us to
reflect on what happens when we can only
make sense of our lives through the
framework of these tropes
indeed many of the study groups best
antics are the result of their inability
to think outside of the rigid box of pop
culture
when faced with a basic problem the
dining hall running out of chicken
fingers
they turn to cultural tropes for their
solution in this case that means going
full goodfellas and tearing the group
apart in the process
i don't believe what greedy sellouts you
people turned out to be i'm not gonna
stand here and be ignored
in a less frivolous example abed's
dinner with andre occurs when he can't
conceive of what a standard adult dinner
would look like
outside of a film reference here even
his attempt at normalcy is completely
mediated by a work of cinematic fiction
i'm sorry so you're
ending early because in my dinner with
andre the waiter
the show constantly encourages us to
think critically about what we're
willing to accept as entertainment
and why we're content to watch the same
tropes play out over and over again
we see this in the freaky friday episode
if you're worried about abid you should
talk to
him right i should talk to him
and which troy and abed by a six-pack of
body switching movies
this of course makes you think how in
the hell has this idea been recycled six
different times
change up 13 going on 30. 17 again 18
again vice versa
freaky friday but not content to merely
roast a tired trope
community uses this trope to create an
oddly sweet breakup for troy and brita
while also bucking against the inanities
of standard sitcom breakups
wait are you breaking up with me
i think so one of the show's underlying
arguments seems to be that the reason we
serve the same slop over and over is
that we keep coming back to the trough
without any complaints
case in point abid and troy's obsession
with the fictional kick puncher film
franchise which is clearly a parody of
the way the action genre recycles these
same formulaic tropes over and over
again
but through this ongoing bit we can also
see if we're willing to be introspective
how often we too are just like troy and
abed
letting ourselves fall prey to crappy
recycled movies because of the hype
it's a version of what brecht was doing
with his interventionist style
making the audience reflect on
themselves so
sure community might not have the same
grand ambitions that brecht had to
change theater so that theater and time
could change the world
but it does seem to have a clear mission
to use its extreme metaness to make you
rethink your own expectations about
contemporary media
and we think harmon's breakfast tv goes
deeper than just breaking the fourth
wall and offering meta commentary about
culture
see one thing that was really important
to brecht was making sure his audience
was always aware they were watching a
play
rather than letting them get too caught
up in the action similarly community
never wants you to forget that you're
just watching a tv show
this approach was and remains striking
because most entertainment has the
opposite aim
namely to make us get so caught up in
what we're watching that we momentarily
forget it's just a performance
this is called the suspension of
disbelief which means that the audience
accepts fiction as reality so as to
experience the story as
real brecht wanted his audience to avoid
the suspension
and he did so by having actors purposely
deliver their lines awkwardly or
even speak directly to the audience
community's version of this similarly
breaks or at least
alludes to breaking the fourth wall this
is accomplished largely via abed
commenting on the audience i use the
ballots to rank everyone by popularity
and i put the most popular with the
least popular
i figured it would maximize each
partnership's audience appeal and more
subtly via characters discussing plot
dynamics and seasons and character arcs
we'll definitely be back next year
if not it'll be because an asteroid has
destroyed all human civilization
and that's canon oh and abed also plays
a cartoon character literally named
fourth wall
subtle by refusing to let us suspend our
television disbelief
community deflates the significance of
standard sitcom tropes
for example in friends there was an
audience expectation that rachel and
ross just had to get together for the
show to make sense
similarly in how i met your mother the
show had to jump through some wild hoops
to make sure that ted and robin ended up
together
examples like this dominate modern
television and are basically a
prerequisite for having a multi-season
run watching community for the first
time it's reasonable to expect a
romantic payoff between our cocky
attractive protagonist
jeff and the edgy attractive loner brita
but because the spirit of brecht lives
on inside the troubled bowels of dan
harmon
they get together for a bit and then
they split up you want to stop doing
this
yeah and then she dates another member
of the gang and then they split up and
at the end of the day
none of it matters somebody's sure
working our way around the table
by doing this community isn't saying see
we're not like those other shows we're
different
rather it's challenging the audience to
rethink our assumptions about modern
media
and how we consume it like why do we
immediately expect that the relationship
between the two good looking people and
the pilot will romantically drive the
show
and what does it say about us and is it
a bad thing
see it's not just that film and
television has created a deep
expectation that any two
on-screen stone stone-cold hotties are
eventually inevitably
gonna bang it's that this assumption
bleeds into our real lives
leading us to assume that meat world
friendships and romantic relationships
will also work like the ones we see
on screen because while we might think
that we are like abed
slowly falling in love with a mystery
woman who is hearing impaired
we're more likely just reading way too
much into a friend messing with us to
prove a point
also like alvin and in more ways than
just this
the character of abed is really just an
exploration of what happens when we
interpret our whole lives
through the matrix of film and
television and while it's funny when
abed does it
the show often forces us to face up to
how dark and lonely this can actually
make our lives
take the claymation christmas episode
which uses comforting holiday movie
imagery to explore abid's inability to
cope with real life family drama
you're a man now take care of dad
wash your dupa mommy's moved on
new family new life his insistence on
real life following a wholesome
family-filled narrative
makes him unable to deal with the
reality that his mother has moved on and
now spends the holidays with her new
family
or that time he gets set up with two
blind dates to the sadie hawkins dance
why don't we each pick a girl and then
let abby decide
instead of making it a competition
that's exactly a competition and his
commitment to the guy on two dates at
once trope
don't you already have a date to the
dance yep now i have two which means i
can do the classic two dates in one
night sitcom trope
i'll get to where two outfits mix up
their names maybe hide under a table
leads him to miss out on the fact that
brie larson or you know a character
played by bree larson
actually likes him aved's friendship
with troy follows a similar pattern
he struggles to deal with his buddy
leaving to explore the world by boat
with the host of reading rainbow
so instead of enjoying the last movie
night and wishing him well
he constructs a wildly intense game of
hot lava to process his emotions
he can only deal with a dramatic change
once the two friends both
die and come back as clones i'm not an
exact replication
i have all of abid's abilities and
memories but i'm missing his wild
emotionality
although i think i may be able to let
troy go now for much of the series
abed's behavior isn't really
challenged at least not explicitly but
with the introduction of the gruff
criminology professor buzz hickey in
season 5
this show gives him a bit of tough love
initiate ballistic foam
oops what the hell sorry you just
destroyed five hours of work
this forces abed to acknowledge that
he's using these structures and tricks
of cinematic storytelling to make sense
of life
i know all the tricks and tropes of
filmmaking but what i'm missing is what
i think the critics call
substance but there's a problem abed's
structure over substance problem can be
taken as a broader critique
it asks what happens when our whole
lives are mediated via the narratives we
learn from the media
sure we know all the tropes the plot
twist the emotional monologues and the
heartwarming conclusions
but does any of this help navigate our
real lives away from the screen
this seems to be the ultimate brechtian
challenge offered to us by community
to realize that maybe some of the
problems in our lives are caused at
least partially by our internalization
of the media we consume
and to realize that the media will keep
feeding us this type of thing because it
thinks that's all we're capable of
but like the study group we're actually
smarter than the tv thinks we are
as a result community is able to call
both the audience's assumptions and the
media's recycled tropes into question
and by doing so just like brex theater
it just might be making us a little more
critically
engaged and aware so next time someone
asks you who your favorite early 20th
century german experimental playwright
is
just scream dan harmon and then run away
before they can call it into question
but what do you guys think is dan harmon
the new bertolt brecht
are we all a little bit like abed let us
know in the comments
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