Community 4-08: Herstory of Dance

It's kind of hard to talk about any fourth-season episode of Community without placing it in comparison to the first three seasons, which have been reduced to a homogenous mass of quality, ignoring the ways in which Community has always varied greatly from season to season and even episode to episode. If we want to praise a fourth-season episode, we say that it could comfortably fit into the first or second season. Most of this discourse is the very boring discussion of quality and "jumping the shark" which takes up so much of TV criticism. A lot of it is also grounded in the figure of Dan Harmon as auteur, an idea which ignores not just the death of the author and all that jazz but the hundreds of other people that make Community what it is [1]. Another issue with the way people talk about this season of Community is that it papers over both the discontinuities within the Harmon-led seasons and the continuities between new and old.

Despite the undeniable changes, the fourth season of Community is engaging with the same question as the second and third (maybe not so much the first) were: in a cultural landscape cluttered with a century of pop-cultural referents and a thick layer of irony and media-savviness, how is it possible to create something as seemingly straightforward and sentimental as a sitcom? How can we get past our postmodern detachment and recognition of having seen this all before in order to reach some kind of genuine moment of catharsis, whether it be a big emotional Winger speech or simply a belly laugh?

"Herstory of Dance" attempts to grapple with this problem in several ways. Plot-wise, it's a very conventional sitcom episode. The A-plot is about a character telling a small lie, and piling increasingly ridiculous lies on top of it to avoid embarrassment, which is the basic formula for many if not most sitcom episodes. The B-plot is about a character going on two dates at once, which is openly lampshaded as a cliche. Every joke carries with it the weight of history; we cannot watch it without being aware that this, like any other sitcom episode, is a rehashing and recombination of long-established tropes.

Maybe that last bit isn't entirely true. There are sitcoms that occasionally have the power to surprise, and certainly plenty of sitcoms that do their best to make the viewer see their content in a straightforward way, not comparing it to comedies past.. But Community sees this all as misdirection. In its view, every TV show (and maybe every cultural product) is a rearticulation of what's come before, and that's wonderful. It celebrates the cultural literacy of itself and its viewers, and maintains a half-ironic, half-sentimental relationship to the hackiest of plotlines. This is true in not just the broader sweep of the plot but also small gags that work as tributes, like the line of tape between the two dances in this episode, reminiscent of every sitcom "feuding siblings split the house in two" plot. Abed has become the core of the show because he's simultaneously the most culturally literate and the least cynical. Unlike Jeff (the ostensible lead) who simply disdains the predictability of the world around him, Abed celebrates it and makes it work for him.

These ideas, and the ways in which "Herstory of Dance" communicates them to various degrees of success, are all circulating in the opening scene. This is one of Community's much-vaunted table scenes, where the characters interact with each other and make jokes at each others' expense without the pressure of an ongoing narrative. These moments are kind of utopian, just long enough for one to get a glimpse of the kind of camaraderie and free exchange that exists when the group is in stasis before the events of any given episode disrupt this status quo. They're usually the funniest part of the episode, and one often feels the desire for a whole episode of nothing but the study group sitting around the table chatting. Part of me thinks that such an episode would be the best thing Community has ever done, and its best episodes are usually ones that hew close to the study space but never entirely dissolve into plotlessness ("Competitive Calligraphy" and "Remedial Chaos Theory" com to mind). On the other hand, fully giving into the temptations of simply hanging out with the characters would probably result in disappointment. Maybe it's best if the study space hang-out is some glimmering place we can only ever see glimpses of.

We get especially few glimpses here, as the plot intrudes early. What back-and-forth there is centres around the Pierce-designed American version of Inspector Spacetime, a callback to a plotline in the generally (and somewhat unfairly) pilloried "Conventions of Space and Time". This is ultimately then not much of a table scene (although it was more of one in my memory of the episode), so the big paragraph above about the utopian space of the study-room table is conjured entirely by the presence of the study-room set. Which may just speak to my ability to be easily sidetracked, but I think it also demonstrates how sets can build up complex emotional associations over the course of a show, sitting right in the centre of series space. As a single-camera comedy, Community doesn't have a lot of sets that have this quality, but the study room definitely does.

The Inspector Spacetime jokes aren't funny, but they do serve an important purpose here. In its opening seconds "Herstory of Dance" draws the same dichotomy that fans and critics draw all the time -- between somewhat obscure but clever and complex cultural objects and popular but simple and stupid ones. The dichotomy between the British and American versions of, well, anything usually illustrate this [2]. Community aligns itself with the obscure and the outsider, befitting its status as a cult television show.

If we imagine TV shows as existing in a Bordieu-esque cultural field, Community has made a conscious move towards the sphere of autonomous art, although not necessarily the kind of avant-garde work that Bordieu meant by that term. Instead it gestures towards the status of the cult, which falls somewhere in the middle in terms of cultural prestige, esteemed by nerds and pop-culture aficionados (like Abed) but not necessarily by a higher cultural authority (although one wonders whether such authorities even exist in a significant form today). Community has made similar moves in the past by referencing cult texts ranging from Dungeons & Dragons to spaghetti westerns, but the connotations of these references are distinctly different. With the dismissal of Dan Harmon fans are more inclined to see new Community episodes as not autonomous works of genius but as a commercial production affected as much by studio whims as by artistic inspiration. So the kind of references and in-jokes that would once be seen as simply a natural expression of the show's cult aesthetic can now be read as an attempt to preserve that aesthetic and reassure fans that Community is still Community. The exact same joke or reference could take on radically different meanings depending on which season it occurred in. This is not to suggest that either of the previously-mentioned readings are incorrect or distorted, but rather that a text's meaning is always rooted in the historical conditions of its production and reception.

There's a much more natural and effective example of meta-humour that immediately follows this, which is the black-and-white Dean that comes in to invite the group to a "classic Greendale dance" (another reference to the show's past). This is a great visual gag that the costume commits utterly to, which makes it all the more jarring. The Dean's black-and-white image stands in contrast to the typically bright colours that Community uses, and he literally looks like a segment of film cut from an old film or TV show and transplanted inside the world of Community. The Dean is not dressed as anything natural, but as a mediated image. His jarring presence within the colour world of the study room also makes us see the seemingly natural world of the TV mise-en-scene as an artificial, mediated image as well. This defamiliarization, the act of making the audience aware that it is watching a TV show, is the result of much of the Community's meta-humour, but the Dean's costume defamiliarizes in a way that is new and hence much more productively jarring. And all of this without much in the way of explicit reference to or discussion of his costume.

So anyway, the Dean's announcement of the Sadie Hawkins dance leads to Britta calling out the fake feminism of that kind of event and proposing a counter-dance. Of course, she confuses Susan B. Anthony with 90s alt-folk singer Sophie B. Hopkins, and spends the rest of the episode scrambling to cover up this mistake. As in most of the plotlines that draw on her quasi-activist side, Britta is more or less right about the dance, which sort of makes me uncomfortable with how ridiculous the show makes her. Britta's a much stronger character when the writers get away from the trope of the flighty, superficial female activist, which is both reactionary and misogynist (see also: Bluth, Lindsay). Of course, this is a comedy and it has no obligation to play anything straight, but it's disappointing to see a generally intelligent program fall back on hoary stereotypes that ultimately make any kind of political engagement look ridiculous [3]. Abed's pop culture obsession, on the other hand, is the source of a lot of jokes while nevertheless being presented as valuable and worthwhile in a sincere way.

But politics aren't really the point of "Herstory of Dance", despite a title that references the long-mocked rhetoric of 1970s feminism. The A-plot quickly becomes about Britta's stubbornness and refusal to admit she's made a mistake. Again, this is a standard sitcom theme, and interestingly enough it's one that isn't openly identified within the episode. The usual story of this type would result in increasingly strained and ridiculous attempts to maintain the charade, with lies piling upon lies until the whole thing collapses, the lying character fesses up, and there's a moment of cathartic reconciliation. This is not what happens here.

Britta is mentored in duplicity by Pierce, who identifies with her desire to not give Jeff the satisfaction of his usual cooler-than-thou mockery. As others, this is a bit of a rehabilitative turn for Pierce, whose character has basically degenerated to a stock racist old coot since his central role in the second season. Even if he is motivated purely by spite, he is unusually supportive of Britta and ultimately responsible for the plot's happy ending. Chevy Chase's affect in this episode is even notably different from usual, less angry and more happy and open.

Moreover, through the scenes of Pierce sympathizing with and supporting Britta, "Herstory of Dance" introduces the idea that being the butt of a joke matters, and it's something that characters like Britta and Pierce are aware of and have to live with. Which is really one of the central ideas that "Herstory of Dance" and Community at large insist on: jokes, the ways we tell them, and the ways we remember them, matter. Using "Britta" as a synonym for "mess up" is funny, and Community lets us laugh at it, but it also reminds us that it's much less funny if you're Britta. A seemingly extraneous scene of Jeff berating Britta, right after the premise is established, helps to reinforce the stakes and produce Jeff's status as the cool jokester as a kind of hierarchical position. Jeff physically looms over Britta in the scene, which is in part simply due to the heights of Joel McHale and Gillian Jacobs, but the framing of the camera specifically seems to emphasize the smallness of Britta. By contrast, in both the opening and scene Jeff and Britta are seated, in a position of equality and equilibrium, and in the conclusion Jeff sits down when he admits he has been bested.

This scene is repeated a couple times as Britta's pretense that she originally meant Sophie B. Hawkins balloons into a pretense that Hawkins herself will play the dance. We anticipate the usual payoff of confession, forgiveness, and reunion, but then Sophie B. actually shows up, summoned by some obscure Pierce magic. When Jeff asked if she did it, Britta says "If it's possible to make something happen by willing it, then yes". While there's a plot explanation for it, "Herstory of Dance" subtly suggests that yes, perhaps it is possible to make something happen by willing it -- or by proclaiming it forcefully enough. The lie becomes truth, and discourse becomes reality. Instead of Britta being punished for her deceit, her stubborn pride and insistence on a coherent narrative -- her "commitment to the bit", as Jeff puts it -- ultimately win the day.

An ending like this could only be found in a comedy as thoroughly postmodern as Community. Not only does the main plot of "Herstory of Dance" invert the usual sitcom moralism, it draws on the idea that our discourse and the stories we tell ultimately shape the reality we see around us. The struggle over the definition of "Britta" in this episode suggests the mutability of language and discourse. "Britta" was first simply a name signifying an individual, but it eventually came on to take on a second meaning of "screw up", which of course stemmed from and influenced the meaning of Britta the person. This suggests that rather than there being a simple one-way relationship between a word and its meaning (or its sign and its signifier, if you will) the two are part of a complicated web of ideas. Community celebrates this mutability of meaning and the free play of signifiers, most frequently in its rapidfire wordplay but also in larger plots such as this one.

The B-plot in "Herstory of Dance" also rests on distinctly postmodern grounds (which is to say grounds that are shaky, uncertain, and possibly entirely ficticious). Abed re-enacts a plot from countless sitcoms by trying to go on two dates at the same time. As is typical of Abed (and of Community) he does it not out of any interest in either of the women involved but out of a desire to fulfill a trope. "I'll get to wear two outfits, mix up their names, maybe hide under a table" he enthuses.

This is more than a simple lampshade hanging. Community emphasizes the performative aspect of comedy. The humour in Community does not arise from an unplanned and organic collision of characters but from people actively deciding to be comedic characters. In the background of this episode is Troy desperately trying to create a set of wacky hijinx, openly attempting to put together a comedic plot as a rival to Abed's. "Herstory of Dance" also suggests that, while Abed's enactment of these tropes may be artificial, so would any other choice. Prior to embarking on the two-dates scheme he was making a conscious effort to "display growth" -- that is, to perform an idea of character development that is just as artificial and referential as zany sitcom tropes[4].

But not all of Community's characters have equal access to irony and performativity. In this plotline Abed is the postmodern author, self-consciously regurgitating tropes and stories -- and four women are the passive characters in his scheme. Annie, Shirley and the girls they suggest Abed to are not allowed much if any meta-knowledge, and are left out of the play of tropes and texts. Unlike Abed, the women are motivated by straightforward, unironic emotion, and "Herstory of Dance" largely does not take these emotions seriously -- Abed's two dates vanish once their narrative purposes have been served, and Shirley and Annie are swept up in Abed's new romance. None of them seem to mind being passive objects in Abed's shenanigans, and Community has suggested in the past that this is the right attitude to take for those not blessed with metafictional magic (most notably in "Virtual Systems Analysis").

This gives the Abed plotline a distinct lack of stakes. In a straightforward rendition of this trope, the tension would consist of the protagonist trying to avoid having his plans exposed and being rejected and humiliated by both women. But for Abed said humiliation, rather than being legitimate emotional damage, would just be another part of the story -- he would be rather pleased that his shenanigans resolved as they always did on TV. Because of this there's little to no dramatic tension. While dramatic tension is certainly not necessary for a comedy plot, it's hard to centre ten minutes' worth of jokes on self-consciously repeating something everyone has seen before (as Community has discovered the hard way several times).

Enter Brie Larson's Rachel, the lowly coat check girl. Rachel proves herself a better love interest for Abed than either Shirley's churchgoer or Annie's "quirky girl"[5]. She immediately recognizes the appeal of Abed's play and is conversant in the same tropes and references that he is. Unlike the other women in this plotline, Rachel is fully fluent in Abed's meta-language of cultural references, and can partake in his narrative play as a full and willing participant. Notably, though, she still only takes on the role of helper, providing costume changes and distractions for Abed as he exercises his master plan.

Rather than becoming an equal participant in Abed's metafictional play, Rachel takes the role of a viewer substitute. She responds to Abed's antics just as an idealized Community viewer would, with a mixture of unquestioned enjoyment and savvy understanding. She figures out the tropes he's playing off without having to be told, loves them ("it's one of my favourite bits") and moreover loves Abed's re-enactment of them ("I think it's awesome"). Her reactions signal that the viewer should see Abed's ruse as entertaining and not sociopathic. I'm quite interested in this subject of viewer substitutes in TV, which occurs in everything from Homeland to Mystery Science Theatre 3000, and hope to do some Serious Academic Writing on it in the future.

But back to "Herstory of Dance". Abed is so caught up in his performance of the two-dates plot that he fails to realize the romance plot he is now involved in, and as a result alienates Rachel. As he says, "I was so caught up in one trope that I missed the trope that was right under my nose -- that the right girl was right under my nose". Of course, he deals with it by making a big public declaration of love, a trope that Rachel had previously identified as being one of her favourites [6]. She accepts it, and even the direction of the scene is straight out of any teen movie. (These movies aren't usually set at college, but Greendale is basically high school for adults, so there you go).

And so we have a romance plotline told entirely through metafictional play, moving from trope to trope like a high-wire act, without ever touching some kind of authenticity. Except Community isn't content to leave it at that. Before the proverbial cane pulls Abed and Rachel off stage, Rachel proposes that on their upcoming date they act out another sitcom plot. Abed is tempted, but ultimately wants to "do real". The suggestion is that Abed has "shown growth" by moving past his complex meta-jokes and embracing authentic and emotional human interaction. But "Herstory of Dance" has already established that this romance plotline is just another trope, and "doing real" would just be another kind of performance. If Abed and Rachel went out for a dinner and a movie, they wouldn't be doing so out of some kind of authentic prehistoric desire, but because a dinner and a movie are part of the cultural romance narrative. Community knows this, but it seems to want to forget it in favour of a traditional form of closure.

This is the central tension at work in much of Community. For all of its postmodern awareness, it also has a penchant for moments of straightforward sentimentality. When Jeff uses "Britta'd" positively, it may be a message delivered through postmodern wordplay, but it's also one that conveys an honest friendship, an emotion that the show takes seriously. When it comes to the relationships between its characters, Community is about as far away from cynicism and critical distance as you can be, often resulting in big emotional speeches and group hugs.

This is something that a lot of contemporary artists seem to be grappling with -- how to tell stories with genuine human emotion when we live in a postmodern culture that distrusts any such straightforward emotional displays. This is why former postmodern authors like Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon have drifted over to writing stoutly naturalist bourgeois family novels. Community has a more complex answer to this challenge. It suggests that real emotions and genuine desires are still in abundance, but the way we express them now is through reference and metahumour. Even Jeff's final text message in "Herstory of Dance" is narrated in a sarcastic voice (as Britta presumably reads sarcasm into the message at first). This is the postmodern condition, according to Community: sappy sentiment conveyed through cynical posturing.

What's striking is that it does this while often being line-for-line the funniest comedy on TV. (Less so in the fourth season, admittedly). Postmodern theorists often talk about the liberatory potential of linguistic play, but it's hard to find anything joyful and liberating in struggling through a volume of Derrida. (Although I'm sure old JD was having fun while writing it). Community actualizes the joy of postmodern play and makes it broadly accessible. The endless referentiality of Community's script may admittedly be a shallow idea of play that depends the objects of commercial mass culture, but if nothing else it provides an example of how metafictional play can happen in the broadest-aiming, most conservative cultural realm -- that of network television. And that's no small feat.

[1]Arguably the exodus of writers and directors from the show over the past couple of years has made much more of an impact than the departure of Harmon alone has.

[2]Of course, many British shows that are held up as obscure works of genius in North America are viewed in their home culture as broad entertainment, Doctor Who being the most prominent example. Anglophilia has more than a bit to do with this, but I would say that the difference mainly demonstrates how the public status of a work shapes our view of it.

[3]In this respect Britta forms a dyad with Shirley, whose devout Christianity is the source of most of the jokes surrounding her character, and is never really anything but a joke. Some would praise "going after both sides", but I think ultimately this suggests a "centrist" politics that views both political extremes with equal horror, which ultimately supports the status quo if not absolute apathy. (The linear political spectrum is also a heavily flawed idea). This ultimately obscures the radicalness of the current state of the world. Of course, Community isn't and doesn't have to be about the neoliberal world order -- it takes place in a comforting fantasy world in more ways than one. But invoking real-world politics as a source of jokes makes it easier to believe that we actually live in that fantasy world where everything will be all right by the end of the episode.

(I may have just Britta'd this review.)

[4]Just think of all the things that dramas (and increasingly comedies) do to flag to the viewer that they're developing characters and are hence Quality Television. Think of long philosophical monologues, revelations about a tragic childhood, or extended romance plotlines. Alternately, just think of every flashback plotline on Lost, and you should have a good idea of what I mean by performing character development.

[5]The "quirky girl" Kat is a pretty expert parody of the archetype that appears in countless movies and films, the one who is supposed to be a loveable free spirit but more closely resembles, as Troy puts it, "a toddler with a growing disease". Nathan Rabin famously dubbed this trope the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" and denounced it for the nice-guy misogyny it embodies. I can't really argue with Rabin, even if the term he coined has been overused, nor can I deny that Community gets a lot of good comedy out of Kat. However, it's interesting to contrast the portrayal of her and that of Abed, who suffers from a similar level of oddness and arrested development. Abed is self-consciously aware of his quirkiness and the tropes it embodies, and expresses his strangeness through approved American popular culture. By contrast Kat seems to be remarkably unaware of her strangeness and expresses her strange personality in a straightforward and honest manner. For this she is entirely a joke, someone that can be shrugged off without incident, whereas Community sympathizes heavily with Abed's eccentricities. Of course, not every character can have a complex internal life, but one wonders if Kat would be presented as more relateable if she made the occasional comment about how she totally resembles that girl from Garden State right now. There's a larger point to be made here about postmodern metahumour and social deviance, but this is already a bit of a tangent.

[6]Interestingly enough, when Kat makes this comment, Abed dismisses the public confession by say ing that it "takes something private and makes it a public performance". This is funny in a kind of subtle and ironic way, as Abed is clearly in the midst of making a public performance out of private romantic affairs. Whereas in a straightforward two-dates plotline the man (and it's always a man who attempts this) wants to keep his plans entirely secret and private and is doing the scheme because of internal motivations, Abed is performing for an audience -- himself, Troy, Rachel, and implicitly the TV viewers. Abed should know better. In Community, everything is always already a public performance. Maybe he just needs to read his Butler.

Community 3-18: Course Listing Unavailable

This episode of Community begins where so few do: directly where the last episode left off.  That episode ended with longtime supporting character Starburns being killed off in an off-screen meth lab accident, a surprisingly dark ending for a joke character.  It seems to presage a deeper shift.  As I mentioned in my last post on Community, much of the third season has been about the central characters facing or not facing adulthood, which comes with the realization that there are consequences to your actions -- even actions meant in jest.  For the past couple episodes, especially in the Troy/Abed story arc, it feels as though the show has been coming down on the side of childish naivete -- but in "Course Listing Unavailable" (a title that directly suggests the failing of usual modes of understanding) things swing around dramatically to the other side.

We begin with one of Community's trademark round-table scenes, where as usual the jokes are flying fast and furious.  The main question at stake seems to be how to react to Starburns' death, and more generally to the death of an acquaintance.  Jeff's everybody-dies refusal to mourn at all seems a little harsh, and a not entirely genuine application of nihilistic philosophy into real life (as Jeff so often does), but the insistence of Annie and the rest of the group on reacting to it as a major tragedy seems also a bit disingenuous, given that they hardly knew Starburns, referring to him entirely by a nickname.  They seem to be more upset by the idea of death intruding on their happy fantasyland than anything else.

And then comes the Dean in a silly outfit to give them more bad news.  This is a familiar comic beat, but interestingly enough we see the moment before it: the Dean receiving the news himself and trying to decide what to wear.  We see his closet full of costumes which, while fabulous, is nowhere near the comic dimensions it could have taken in one of the show's more surreal episodes.  One of the series's most outlandish, over-the-top characters is connected, at least notionally, to real life.

The plot then unfolds pretty directly from there.  What's most notable about it is that it's driven by the only instance in the episode of someone behaving like an adult and taking responsibility for their actions, the Biology professor resigning for letting Starburns steal his equipment.  (Once again, Community riffs off Michael K. Williams' iconic Omar character, who is often said to be the only one in The Wire who took responsibility for their actions.)  This quiet, off-screen act is a strong contrast with the hysteria we see on screen, and the overreaction and the denial of responsibility from both the study group and Chang and his minions.

Because, after all, what the study group does at Starburns' memorial is basically a textbook example of inciting a riot ("Let's burn this mother down!").  Of course, inciting a riot is kind of a bogus crime, but that's neither here nor there.  It's a funny segment, involving lots of one-liners, a pinch of meta-commentary and a call-and-response rap, but it doesn't hide the fact that the study group is basically turning a memorial service into a binge of whining about having to go to summer school.  And the riot, crucially, starts before Chang and company swarm in, making the issue of causality more complicated than the group later admits to.


There are obvious political resonances, of course, from the crackdown on the Occupy movement to the Patriot Act (the piece of crayon writing that Chang makes the Dean sign to authorize force).  Perhaps this is a kind of apology for the cavalier dismissal of protesters in "Geography of Global Conflict", which coincidentally aired during the peak of the Occupy movement.  But if it is, it still rests a great deal of the blame with the study group -- and, by analogy, protesters.

What comes as a surprise is the characters having to face realistic consequences for their actions.  Greendale has disintegrated into much worse conditions before, such as during the pillow and blanket fort wars few episodes ago, or any of the paintball mayhem.  But the smaller scale of this episode's riot almost makes punishment seems more acceptable -- we're no longer entirely in the land of whimsy, as we are in the concept episodes.  Of course, there's still a good deal of silliness here, such as Chang producing an impostor Dean to get him off the hook, but it's firmly in the less surreal register of Community's "normal" episodes.

Community has become fairly notorious for ending its episodes on a big speech, usually by Jeff, a trend that the show itself poked fun at in its fake clip show last season.  (To be fair, it goes to this well less often than a lot of other shows that shall not be named here).  Here, we have Troy giving a much shorter speech, which basically amounts to "we're together, so everything is going to be alright".  This is, in the end, what the series has the most faith in: connection, as well as good humour.  The sentimentality of this moment, accompanied by treacly music and a mise en scene that might have come out of a Boston Pizza ad, could be easily mocked, but for viewers that have been watching from the beginning it uses their familiarity with the characters -- their TV friends, as sitcom characters are designed to be -- this is a tender, genuinely affecting moment.  The "we" in this scene seems to implicitly include the viewer as well as the characters, and could be read as a sign of appreciation for Community's loyal cult audience.

And as far as the good humour goes, we can see that in Annie's reaction to the heavy drink she poured herself in a moment of desperation just a few minutes ago.  She scrunches up her face and shakes her head, as though laughing at the foolishness of her previous angst.  More than anything, this final shot suggests that the ability to laugh at yourself is just as important as togetherness.


This ending calls back repeatedly to one of the series's most high-concept episodes, and one of its best, "Remedial Chaos Theory".  This is the same type of whimsical episode that "Course Listing Unavailable" so decidedly sets itself against.  But the comparison only makes the current situation look more dire -- there is no more gimmick, no reset button that can make this go away by the end of the episode.  As much as the sentimental moment of togetherness may bolster the group's spirits, the fact remains that they're expelled, and as the episode closes there's no solution to that problem in sight.  Once again, we return to the title, and the breakdown of Community's standard approaches.

"Course Listing Unavailable" is directed by Tristam Shapeero, who has become one of the series's go-to directors (having done about a third of this season) and has a script attributed to regular, non-standout-ish writer Adam Countee[1], although once again this doesn't mean much given the collaborative nature of American comedy writing.  Shapeero has previously done a lot of the gimmickier episodes, but here he does similarly well with the gimmick of the complete loss of gimmicks.  Even the "normal" episodes have a distinct look, involving bright colours (although not to the extent of something like Suburgatory), clean lighting, and a lot of quick cuts.  There have been a lot of "normal" Community episodes, even if they aren't the ones that grab the most attention, so there's a definitive stylistic template that Shapeero employs well here.

And that, in the end, makes "Course Listing Unavailable" a bit paradoxical.  It's a "normal" episode, but it threatens to destroy the prospect of future normality entirely.  It fully explores the fear Community has been playing with all season -- that sometimes normality is the most terrifying thing of all.

Next week: "You're about to see something that you've never seen before."

[1]He doesn't have a Wikipedia page, so I'm assuming he's a schlub.

Community 3-11: Urban Matrimony and Sandwich Arts

In the three-month interval between the previous episode of Community and this one, the show had gathered up such a massive, Katamari-esque ball of cultural associations that the actual text of Community had been more or less occluded from view.  Rather than being a low-key, dorky show that was only ostensibly about community college students it became the latest in a long line of TV martyrs.  Community became a stand-in for every show that was too smart or too good for TV: it was Arrested Development, it was Firefly, it was Freaks and Geeks and Deadwood and My So-Called Life.  The Internet, never much motivated by anything other than having its entertainment taken away, raged against the soulless and inept NBC machine.  People who never watched the show were suddenly passionate about its possible cancellation (we can call this "the Conan effect".)

(I'm a huge fan of the show and think it's one of the best comedies on TV, but I got sick very quickly of all this sturm und drang.  In general I find ratings discussion about the least interesting way of considering TV aside from pure recap, and I wish we could just talk about the show without it always turning into a discussion of demographics and timeslots and how the network is screwing Community again but, well, here we are.  And in retrospect, by not having it on the winter schedule NBC only pushed its return back like a month, which doesn't seem worth all the drama in the end.)

Given that, it's hard to read "Urban Matrimony and Sandwich Arts" in any context except that of the return of Community, even though this was probably not considered at all in its production.  Texts acquire cultural baggage which can overwhelm their literal meaning and existence -- just try to read Uncle Tom's Cabin and give it a fair shake.  Curiously, this episode contains a pretty significant plot point -- Shirley's wedding -- that was all but ignored in the discussion over it.  The meta-drama around Community has, I think, become much more interesting to many people than the drama and gags within the show.  But I think the show still has some power and merit of its own that raises it above merely an object of obsession.

"Urban Matrimony and Sandwich Arts" starts out with a big table scene, one of the staples of Community.  These scenes are usually some of the most purely enjoyable because they allow the characters to bounce off each other and trade some of the show's rapid-fire jokes and free association without the burden of having to push forward a plot.  I would kill for an entire episode of this, as unpalatable as it probably is to the networks ("Cooperative Calligraphy" comes close, but is still based on a central plot).  In this case there's a bit of a shift-up, as the scene takes place around a cafeteria table instead of the usual big study room table, but the basic beats remain the same.

Of course, the scene isn't completely plotless, as it lays the groundwork for the overarching storylines of the episode, but these elements are introduced in a way that feels spontaneous and distinctly non-storyboarded.  A lot of times the more sitcommy scenarios in Community can feel too schematic, but these scenes always have the air of improv, with a new character coming in with a hook and everyone reacting to them, but not being afraid to go off on a tangent.  Pierce coming in with his "entrepreneur" look -- a great piece of costuming -- and a handful of dumb gadgets is the perfect kind of addition to this scene.


(The over-the-shoulder shot is interesting here, and highlights one of the advantages of a single-camera comedy.  Instead of observing the characters performing as though we were a stage audience, the camera places us amongst the characters themselves, as though we were actually a part of this circle of friends.)

This freeform scene is interrupted by the arrival of Andre, Shirley's ex-husband, who is back to propose marriage to her.  Andre is an interesting kind of disruption to the group.  He doesn't have a real comedic character hook, and with him comes the reminder of Shirley's past and her family.  Their children rarely appear, but there's a tension that their existence creates: unlike the rest of the group[1], Shirley isn't an unburdened twenty-something who can go off on whimsical adventures without having to worry about responsibilities.  Community chooses to elide this sometime in favour of involving her to the whimsy, but "Urban Matrimony and Sandwich Arts" very consciously deploys this.  Even before they start fighting about whether Shirley should be more or less involved in Greendale, Andre's presence suggests an uncomfortable reintroduction of the real world to the surreal setting of Greendale.

That dynamic -- the surreal being threatened by the real -- is what fuels most of the subplots in this episode.  As much for its characters as for its audience, Community is a safe and welcoming bubble where imagination can be unleashed without a real fear of consequences.  As much as these characters fight, they still make up a fairly warm group of oddballs that mutually support each others' fantasies -- a community, if you will.  From a more negative perspective, this is a state of arrested development and a bit of a cult, something the show isn't afraid to recognize.  "Urban Matrimony and Sandwich Arts" is a part in a coming of age story, in which our sheltered characters realize that they have to face the real world through a ritual experience, the wedding (which is really an "okay-now-you're-really-an-adult-party-time-is-over" ritual), but also isn't afraid to recognize that coming of age kind of sucks.  (This can also be seen in "Mixology Certification".)

The most obvious expression of this is in the plotline where Abed and Troy attempt to act normal for Shirley's wedding, excising their weirdness through an all-day Dreamatorium session.  When the two arrive they're so dry and normal that they're abnormal, ending up seeming halfway between sarcastic and door-to-door missionary.


It's a testimony to the comic skill of Donald Glover and Danny Pudi that they manage to make the most intentionally dull lines hilarious.  But in the end the two manage to re-whimsify themselves with only a hint of struggle against the temptations of the normal world.  Although Abed and Troy will eventually have to face the real world, for now they can put it off.  (The temporary-ness of this resolution is acknowledged in the very next episode, "Contemporary Impressionists".)

Jeff and Britta are also forced to confront adulthood in this episode, mainly through the fear that they'll become their parents.  This is another one of the nightmarish aspects of growing up -- the increasing suspicion that you're slowly sliding into a life that you spent your entire teenaged years disparaging.  If Abed and Troy live in a continued childhood, Jeff and Britta are in a continued adolescence, constantly rebelling against what's expected of them -- but the wedding presents the onset of terrifying adulthood, so terrifying for these two because they have no model for adulthood other than one they see (with some justification) as a kind of doom.

Once again, the show doesn't resolve this fatalism entirely.  Jeff and Britta believe that they are doomed to unhappy marriages, despite their antipathy towards marriage in general, and almost marry each other in a hilarious drunken shout-fest.  Shirley and Andre talk them down, by arguing that marriage can be happy with hard work and open communication [2], but it still leaves marriage as an inevitable future -- one that Jeff and Britta are free to make the best of, but one that they can't avoid.  (The Jeff/Britta pairing has a similar air of inevitability, something that Community frequently plays around with.)

This dynamic is reinterpreted most interestingly when it comes to Shirley's plotline.  In "Urban Matrimony and Sandwich Arts" she's torn between her impending marriage and her career ambitions, which involve opening up a sandwich shop with Pierce.  The choice between romance and career is a very typical one, the foundation of a thousand romantic comedies, but it exists in an interesting dynamic with the plotlines discussed above.  If we use the model of these other stories, that would position Shirley's wedding as the inevitable sign of adulthood that she has to confront.  But that doesn't quite work.  Rather, it seems like advancing her career is a form of growth for Shirley, converting her from a housewife constrained to the domestic to a full human being [3].

In other words, while for the other characters Greendale is a retreat into a childish world, for Shirley it creates the possibility of her own coming of age.  And unlike the other characters being dragged helplessly towards an inevitable adulthood, Shirley is actively pursuing it.  Through her Community is possibly suggesting a resolution towards the dilemma it presents in this episode.

Despite this, however, the issues she faces still aren't settled.  She doesn't get the restaurant with Pierce, and Andre still isn't fully accepting of her ambitions -- he just loves her enough to put up with them for now.  As with the other plotlines, the conflict is deferred, but not resolved.  This is a really smart approach to serialization, which uses both the episode and the series as distinct narrative units.  Problems can be addressed within the framework of an individual episode, but this is always temporarily pushing back the inevitable reality that these characters don't want to face.  It's like a comedy version of The Shield, but perhaps more formally deft.

Oh yeah, and this episode was really funny.  Sometimes that gets lost.

Next week: "Is it true that when they told you of your wife's death you said 'Oh no, now I'll need a fourth for bridge"?"

[1]Pierce isn't a twenty-something, but he doesn't have any dependents or real responsibilities, so in many ways he's closer to the younger characters than Shirley.

[2]Honestly, I'm with Jeff and Britta (and Laura Kipnis) on this one.  "Urban Matrimony and Sandwich Arts" more or less repeats the societal refrain on romantic relationships, which is that they "take work" but are life-defining and necessary, making marriage an institution that never fails, but only is failed.  To be fair, Community also offers alternate models of living contently (Troy and Abed never seem desperate for love), but the big moment of sincerity at this episode's climax does seem very orthodox.

[3]The idea of business as being liberating from the patriarchal domestic sphere was a tenet of Freidan-esque liberal second-wave feminism, and has been beat up by smarter people than me.  It still gets reproduced unabashedly by capitalist media, and this episode of Community falls into line with that.  I know it's unreasonable to expect my favourite shows to be models of radical leftism, but suffice to say that in the fight between patriarchy and entrepreneurship I'm stepping out of the way.

Community 3-05: Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps

I'm not sure if there's ever been a show as aware of its own textuality as Community.  (Okay, maybe some reality shows, but certainly nothing fictional.)  Beyond all the pop-culture references and fourth-wall-breaking humour (usually courtesy of Abed), there's a willingness to fold, distort and mangle the traditional narrative methods of television.  It also relies on the audience's knowledge of TV conventions for humour.  Last season's clip show episode, for example, would just seem like a really weird narrative if you had never seen clip shows and didn't know that there wasn't supposed to be new content in them.  Like I mentioned in my 2 Broke Girls review, this is a kind of audience-hailing -- "you watch way too much TV, but that's cool, because you can get the jokes here!  We're your friends!"

"Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps" is far from the furthest down the rabbit hole Community has gone -- in some respects it's a fairly conventional sitcom episodes, riffing off the "Everyone Tells A Story" format that's been used many times on The Simpsons and a modified version of The Rashomon.  The basic joke is that each character tells a horror story that reflects his or her skewed worldview -- in Pierce's story he's a debonair playboy, Abed's is autistically dry, Shirley's is an excuse for moral condemnation, and so on and so forth.  The similarly-structured previous episode is a much more adventurous one.

And yet, even here, Community takes up the task with an execution that still manages to go beyond the norm.  The jokes here reference back to storytelling, mainly referring to the incongruity between the form of verbal storytelling and that of its televisual representation.  This is similar to "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas" in that we can see only the fantasy and are left to infer the verbal telling of the story, although there are a few cutbacks to the telling at some points.  This is first established in Britta's formulaic slasher story, where her lack of effort or storytelling skill is reflected in the dialogue: "An escaped convict from the asylum has escaped and he's mental and on the loose and stuff.  He was last seen in the woods and has a thingy for a hand -- a hook thing where a hand should be, you know what I mean."

The episode is then about the transition from a raw story to the processed medium of television, and how something that seems normal if not ideal in the former becomes absurd in the latter.  This is somethign that has no doubt frustrated many aspiring screenwriters.  For example, Abed telling a story in his natural affect is normal, but Britta speaking in an unnatural monotone along with him?  Is funny.  And that's partly just because we get to see all of the established characters act so completely out of character.

And I think that leads into what makes this episode really tick: Community is writing fanfiction of itself.

I dabbled in the fanfic world as a teenager (it was a dark time in my life), and while there are many, many issues with the medium there's also a kind of anarchic energy, the pure joy of wish fulfillment and absurdity in equal measures.  In its more out-there episodes, Community has interpreted itself through a number of distinctly fannish lenses -- The gang is turning into zombies!  There's a dark alternate timeline!  Jeff and Britta are hot for each other... no, it's Jeff and Annie... no, Jeff and Britta is the OTP!  What prompted this particular revelation of mine was that the episode used the fantasy sequences as an excuse to feature simultaneously pairings of Jeff/Britta, Jeff/Annie, and the off-the-wall pair of Abed/Britta.  (There were a lot stranger, and mostly gayer, couples in the fanfic world.)



I talked about the perils of writing fannishly in an earlier review I did of Steins;Gate, but here I think this type of writing works.  In part this is just the change in genre.  A comedy offers a lot more room for play and free articulation of ideas without dramatic consequences -- which is a pretty important element of fandom.  The sitcom in particular wants to develop a fannish rapport with its audiences -- after all, there's a hair's breadth between water-cooler chatter about your favourite will-they-or-won't they couple[1] and obsessive shipping wars on the Internet.  But most of all what makes it work in Community is both the excellent execution and the show's well-established own voice of fellow hipness (or geekery, depending on how you look at it.)

"Horror Fiction" was written by series creator Dan Harmon, who is best described as an insane genius -- appropriate enough for an episode that ends up celebrating insanity.  Interestingly enough, Harmon has actually written fairly few scripts for Community -- a quick glance at Wikipedia reveals that he's only written the first two and last year's claymation Christmas special [2], only the latter of which can really be counted amongst the series best.  Harmon tends to indulge in play even more than the other writers of Community, and that kind of low-stakes fun definitely best appears in holiday episodes, which are almost invaribly fluff anyway.

Tristam Shapeero directs this episode.  He seems to have become the go-to guy for film parodies, which Community indulges in a lot.  What Shapeero understands about parody, and so many fail to grasp, is that it works better in general than the specific -- making fun of scary movies is great, making fun of Saw is done to death.  Genres have a cultural lifeblood that make them a much richer vein (blood and vein?  See what I did there?) for comedy than individual works do.  So Shapeero's episodes -- "Contemporary American Poultry", "Messianic Myths and Ancient People", and "Paradigms of Human Memory", two of the show's best episodes and one solid one, don't focus on one particular gangster movie or postmodern headtrip or clip show, but in the totality of the genre.  And when they work at their best, parodies always end up as being great examples of the genre -- for example, you can probably learn more about Gothic fiction from Northanger Abbey than from any particular Gothic project.  Parody also takes a great amount of school, requiring mastery and not just mockery of the genre on display -- just look at the note-perfect costumes in Annie's fantasy-horror.

This episode, while funny, doesn't really join the ranks of great parodies.  In part, its stabs at the horror genre only graze -- the main focus is the characters telling the story, and drifts away from it starting some point during Annie's story.  (No, I don't count the "sexy vampire" genre as horror.)  Of course, this is the point, in a move that hearkens towards the basis of criticisms: stories exist not by themselves but as a tool utilized by the storyteller, whether to act out fantasies (Annie, Troy & Pierce), provoke a reaction (Britta), offer moral condemnation (Shirley) or counter another storyteller (Abed).  The obvious next step is to point towards how the episode itself, as a story, is no less complicit in this.  But there's never any gesture towards the episode as text, and I'm not sure what to make of that.  Whereas "Remedial Chaos Theory" pointed directly towards its own constructedness, "Horror Fiction" never makes the self-reflexive move.  Don't get me wrong, there are some great lines in here -- "We now interrupt your death metal for heavy news", "I hope you're as fertile as I am tonight" -- and on the whole it's a really enjoyable episode, but it doesn't go to the level that truly great Community episodes do.

Before I finish I realize I should probably mention the actual framing device for all these stories -- Britta receives a psych evaluation that reveals that one of the group members is dangerously psychotic, and wants to evaluate their sanity by making them tell scary stories.  Of course, in the end it turns out she input the papers backwards, so in reality only one of them is sane -- which is, in a slightly intrusive final shot, revealed to be Abed.  This is a kind of obvious joke on one level, the "aren't we crazy hahaha" lampshading tha Community is occasionally guilty of.  But it also speaks to the show's embracing of its own outsider status -- it realizes that it's abnormal and so are we, and thinks that rather than pathologize that it should be celebrated.  After all, to be normal would to be like Abed -- obsessed with surface and data, a virtual robot.  (This raises the possibility that this is a skewed perspective that only makes the rest of the group's histrionics look normal, with Abed actually being objectively sane and only seeming dry in comparison.)

This celebration of difference or insanity obviously works best in a show with a small but dedicated fanbase, like this one -- being a fan of the show is an emotional experience beyond the mere experience of a text.  But ultimately this feeling of insider-ness doesn't stem solely or even primarily from circumstance.  In the end, Community could go from a show on the verge of cancellation to a universally beloved hit, and it would still give the impression that you and it are part of a secret, dorky but ultimately awesome club.  And that's probably why I love it.

Next week: I alienate my audience even more with semi-obscure anime.

[1]Community plays with this trope mercilessly.  This can be seen most prominently in the clip show episode where it's revealed that Jeff and Britta have been casually hooking up for the past season, with the implication that these characters' romantic entanglements don't really matter anyway.  It's also evident in the show's willingness to spend an episode teasing a certain pairing and then ignore it afterwards.  To be honest, I'm perfectly fine with fucking with these types of people.

[2]Of course, American sitcoms are more collectively written than anything else, so this attribution probably doesn't mean too much.