GORDON: As the name would suggest, “Defending Your Sh*tty Taste” simply entails each of us bring up one or more cultural elements- shows, music, trends, etc.- which are generally despised, devaluated, or looked down upon by the general public, and proceeding to talk about what value we see in ’em and why we personally enjoy ’em.
EVAN: Before we get started in earnest, I think it would be good to lay down some ground rules, and sort of explain the general format.
Like you said we’ll each be bringing up our own topics [which we’re well aware have their problems] and extolling their virtues. It will be up to the other person to point out the flaws. What I’m going to insist on is that we solely target the cultural element itself, not bringing up or comparing anything else [ex: “But as a communist doesn’t this conflict with your belief that _____?”]
GORDON: I’d also point out that this isn’t really a debate. We’re not here to bash each other’s pleasures, no matter how sick and indecent they might be… Evan.
Gordon and I have talked about offensiveness as far as stand-up comedy, and came to the general consensus that if you’re mocking the perpetrators of rape and racism you are doing a good thing. You can joke about hot-button issues if you’re not demeaning them, if you’re using satire and not just being an uncouth [and unfunny] person. You are permitted to broach these topics because you are doing so in a respectful manner.
Now, from time to time I like to peruse the funny pictures on the popular image hosting site imgur, which I continue to pronounce “im-gur” in spite of being directly told I was wrong on the site’s FAQ. Part of what makes the site so popular is its community, responsible for the comments on various images being rewarded by “upvotes,” mostly due to their level of wit.
There is another scale of judgement when it comes to doling out internet points, however, and it directly ties into what I was writing about offence and comedy. See the image below:
I feel like I have more to write about than usual this week [unfortunate, since I’m a little late to this review due to my having a job now], so let’s get right into it. To summarize this episode in a sentence, Max and Caroline have not been paying their rent and are being forced to sell their property to a real estate corporation; not wanting to do so the two go to Caroline’s makeup mogul Aunt Charity to ask for some . . . financial help.
The first topic I wanted to delve into a little bit was the show’s humour, not in how it chooses the easy route on almost every joke but how it seeks to push the bar in its content. For example: a semen joke eight seconds into the episode. Co-creator and executive producer Michael Patrick King said that he “[considers] our jokes really classy dirty [ . . . ] they’re high lowbrow.” While the show has largely steered away from the rampant rape jokes which cropped up multiple times per episode int he first season, they certainly haven’t stopped walking, and often crossing, the line between “classy dirty” and dirty.
Take Max’s joke about how bubblegum flavoured lip gloss [which was wearing when she had her first kiss] helped to get her an A in class. It’s no secret that her character has slept around a lot, for little to no reason, but hinting at a minor [I’m sure her first kiss was before the age of 18] locking lips with a teacher is uncomfortable at best. A few minutes later she likes a tube of lipstick to a dog penis.
“How much is too much?” is a question that Gordon and I discussed once in regards to stand-up comedy, and we came to the conclusion that edgy humour is only as good as what its meant to accomplish. In the case of 2 Broke Girls that’s apparently to elicit cheap laughter. As far as I can tell, I mean. This has never been a laugh-out-loud show, but it’s Max’s snarkiness [as overbearing as it is at times] and not her disregard in screening her sexual partners that drew me to her to begin with. 2 Broke Girls may be trying to brand itself as an edgy comedy à la Family Guy, but needs to ask itself if they can continue to counterbalance that with the heartfelt moments they’ve been trying to inject into the show.
As a final note on the show’s humour, Aunt Charity had the upper two layers of her skin removed to look two years younger, which actually made me queasy just looking at her. Physical gross-out humour may be something 2 Broke Girls is thinking about adding more regularly in stretching the limits, which is a decision I’m currently unsure about. After all, one of my favourite episodes was the eighth one of this season, where Caroline yanks a needle out of her arm and proceeds to spurt blood all over the walls of an egg donation clinic.
Finally on to what was the biggest moment for me. So I’ve been writing about what the point of the “Current Total” and it’s accompanying ka-ching at the end of each episode for a while, so imagine my surprise when I saw it change so drastically in this episode.
Caroline coerces her aunt into signing over $25,000 to cover what the real estate corporation says they’ll need to keep the property, but finds out later that the cheque doesn’t clear because taking advantage of drug-addled relatives [Charity was on morphine lollipops to dull the pain of not having a face] isn’t exactly an ethical business practice. Then her and Max sign over the store.
All of the first season was leading up to “Max’s Homemade Cupcakes,” and suddenly we realize that the girls are starting over from scratch, especially since Max declares that they have just enough money to pay back everyone they’ve borrowed from. Soon after a little bit of curious greenscreen work in the windows behind Caroline’s head is explained when a car crashes through one of their walls. It looked pretty realistic, too.
The “New Total” leaves the girls with a single dollar to their names and us as an audienec wondering what exactly is next for them. This is a hard reboot of the status quo, though there are hints by both Charity and the real estate woman [who was deaf, by the way] that maybe starting out smaller is the way to go.
Whatever happens with the rest of this season, I have to give 2 Broke Girls my grudging respect for reigniting my interest and curiosity in the show.
Stray Observations:
The audience was going bonkers over Sophie today, and she wasn’t even really doing anything. Maybe an exec decided to re-send the memo that she’s supposed to be this generation’s Kramer.
Han has been very into memes lately. “Ermahgerd!”
“It’s obvious! She’s obsessed with her brother and she saw your being born as his love being taken away from her.” Morphine lollipops make Max smarter.
The greenscreening was particularly suspicious in that is showed an actual street outside their window, and was actually filmed against a wall I don’t think they ever showed prior to this episode. Which leads me to wonder if they’d planned a car crashing into it from the beginning, which I hesitate to believe if only because I don’t think they have that much foresight.
2 Broke Girls Cheesecake Menu: I feel like CBS is forcing me to eat my words when I assumed that they were having the two girls show more skin to draw in viewers. Not much to report here, once again.
This is the second part of a three-part series on CBS’ 2 Broke Girls and Fox’s New Girl, both shows that premiered in the fall of 2011. In yesterday’s post I went into some detail about the cast of both shows, and this time I’m going to address the element of both that, hopefully, helps them put the “com” in sitcom.
HUMOUR
2 Broke Girls was created by Michael Patrick King, the openly gay writer whose claim to fame is HBO’s Sex and the City [he wrote all of the season premieres and finales, and was responsible for its adaptation to the big screen], and Whitney Cummings, comedian and star of her own NBC sitcom, Whitney.
Cummings has, for the most part, been preoccupied with her show, and because of that it’s King who takes the onus for much of the show’s writing. Now I do want to save a lot of potential content for tomorrow and the final part of this series, so what I’m going to share are a few of his words about where the show is coming from:
“Ballsy” is a pretty accurate statement for a show on a broadcast network that has, by my count, averaged nearly two rape jokes per episode. It also describes well the decision to include in this week’s episode, “And The Kosher Cupcakes,” a 13-year-old Jewish boy implying he’d soon be receiving oral sex from one of the show’s female leads.
Edginess aside, do I think it’s funny? As evidenced by the video proceeding this paragraph Kat Dennings has her tone down when it comes to delivering dry, deadpan lines. Beth Behrs’ Caroline has a knack for visual humour [see last week’s: “And The Broken Hearts”] and even Oleg, the lascivious fry cook, has his moments where you can’t help but grin at his audacity. Whether it’s funny throughout, however, is a different story.
Continuity and pacing aside, a lot of the times lines fall flat. “And The Broken Hearts” featured a joke between Jennifer Coolidge’s Sophie and Jonathan Kite’s Oleg where the two riffed on the variations on the word “come,” a scene so horrid that I’m cringing as I rewatch it. The show may not shy away from dealing with topics like masturbation and drug abuse, but “shock and awe” doesn’t always equal “amuse” or even “entertain.”
New Girl was and is created, produced, and written by Elizabeth Meriwether; her largest claim to fame is the 2011 Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher-driven comedy No Strings Attached.
Now I don’t have the public uproar that surrounds 2 Broke Girls available to create articles about New Girl, so I’m going to have to address its humour with largely my own words. Though the show began with the passable premise that a quirky female teacher moving in with three men was going to create conflict, the show has since moved beyond that in leaps and bounds.
Zooey Deschanel was, without question, the reason many tuned in, but I don’t believe it’s why they return. Jake Johnson’s Nick and Max Greenfield’s Schmidt both own their roles, and are arguably even funnier when clashing with each other. Case in point:
Where King’s show relies on a lot of wordplay and snarky jabs, courtesy of Kat Dennings, Meriwether’s is one that puts the “domestic” and the “comedic” in “dom com.” In addition, the characters all bring their own brand of humour to the table, with Schmidt’s douchiness, Nick’s freakouts [see above], or Jess’, well, Zooey-ness.
It’s not even that the show shies away from sex and the like. An entire episode revolved around Jess seeing Nick’s penis [much to Schmidt’s curiosity], and her willingness to have a threesome is strangely adorable. The difference is that it’s not overly-raunchy or in-your-face; for the show sex is another part of life, and one that’s plainly funny as opposed to darkly so.
I realize that there are significantly more clips from New Girl, but the fact is that I think the show is funnier overall, and you can always look for more stuff from 2 Broke Girls on YouTube if you’d like. As the head writer, King has a pretty decent cast of characters [again, see last post] available to him, and if he wants to give them lots of sarcasm and whatnot that’s entirely up to him. It’s fine to be “ballsy” or “classy-dirty” but the intention should be to have your audience laughing, not shaking their heads and saying “I can’t believe they just said that.”
Culture War Reporters 
Permission To Laugh?
Gordon and I have talked about offensiveness as far as stand-up comedy, and came to the general consensus that if you’re mocking the perpetrators of rape and racism you are doing a good thing. You can joke about hot-button issues if you’re not demeaning them, if you’re using satire and not just being an uncouth [and unfunny] person. You are permitted to broach these topics because you are doing so in a respectful manner.
Now, from time to time I like to peruse the funny pictures on the popular image hosting site imgur, which I continue to pronounce “im-gur” in spite of being directly told I was wrong on the site’s FAQ. Part of what makes the site so popular is its community, responsible for the comments on various images being rewarded by “upvotes,” mostly due to their level of wit.
There is another scale of judgement when it comes to doling out internet points, however, and it directly ties into what I was writing about offence and comedy. See the image below:
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Tagged burka, comedy, comments, common consensus, downvotes, funny, guilt, hilarious, humour, image, Imgur, internet, internet points, joke, jokes, mob mentality, Muslim, offence, offended, offensive, offensiveness, okay, opinion, permission, picture, Ricky Gervais, unfunny, upvotes