Never not Wrong.

When I first watched COMMUNITY, it was the third or fourth episode of the first season, and while I thought it was funny, I could tell it was searching for an identity. I decided to stick with it. Then came the halloween episode….then “Contemporary American Poultry”………then, undoubtedly the jewel of season one, “Modern Warfare”. 

It didn’t take long for me to become devoted after that.

Season two only upped the ante. Starting with “Epidemiology” and running all the way through “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”, those six episodes reached a comedic high that is hard to top for any series, let alone one as great as COMMUNITY. Then they went and made “Paradigms of Human Memory” and I realized that this show will never catch on with the masses. The majority of humans that live in America need to be told when to laugh. It’s not an insult, it’s just a simple observation. Why is a pedestrian show like THE BIG BANG THEORY so popular? Because it milks simple laughs out of a simple premise with a simple laugh track. You hear the laugh track, it means you’re being told to laugh. It’s quite obvious why almost every comedy on CBS manages to gather high ratings. The majority of people need to know when to laugh. Don’t believe me? Go anywhere with a big crowd, ever. NO ONE knows when to clap, laugh, or talk unless someone else does it first. Everyone looks around nervously, waiting for the first person to do anything, and then if it catches on, they follow suit. Laugh tracks are audience enablers. It might not be that funny, but dammit, everyone else is laughing so I probably should too.

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT was cancelled despite being arguably the most critically lauded television show of the past 10 years, and that’s because it didn’t give a fuck if you were laughing along with it. It moved fast, threw out jokes and references and plot lines with such dexterity that if you didn’t get it, well fuck you. It wasn’t going to slow down and explain why something is funny, it just is. You needed to move as fast as it did. The same thing is happening to COMMUNITY and it’s following show, PARKS AND RECREATION. Neither one have laugh tracks, and both are struggling in the ratings, despite having sterling ensembles and some of the strongest writing on television. 

Obviously, no one gives a fuck about strong writing. 

My theory about COMMUNITY is that it is Abed. Abed sees the world around him and can’t relate to it. He can’t understand or sympathize with feelings or emotion, and so he uses pop culture as a springboard into understanding society. COMMUNITY as a television show operates in the same way. It does not understand the world around it, where shows like GLEE and THE BIG BANG THEORY and TWO AND A HALF MEN are inexplicably the biggest shows on television, so it retreats into a corner to deconstruct television tropes. It does not understand why you would think such dumbassery is funny, so it resigns itself to being too meta for you to understand. 

COMMUNITY will be cancelled at the end of this or its fourth season, which is a shame……but much like ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, it will gain a following, but the irony is that it could have used that following a long time ago. So I say enjoy it now, and marvel at the way something as awesome as “Conspiracy theories and Interior Design” is an actual television episode. We Should all be so lucky.