Community - "Regional Holiday Music"

Season 3, Episode 10

“For a while there, I thought we were going to end the semester on a really dark note.”

First, a deep breath……

All right. Writing about the last episode of Community that we will get for the next few months (okay, the last episode before a few months away that’s not a season finale) may be the hardest thing I will ever do for this blog. Of course, a large part of it is that it’s going away for a while, and I have to make sure that I hold back the tears long enough to write this piece. Part of this is the fact that I have to avoid reading too much into the episode, as well as making sure that I don’t place too high of expectations on it. But really the hardest part is going to be finding the words to explain how even though I didn’t like the central conceit at the heart of it, this is one of the best episodes the show has ever done.

Glee spoofs are fairly easy to make at this point in that show’s run. When Community made its first cracks at the show early in its first season – biting, harsh cracks straight from the mouth of Jeff Winger – it was fresh and frankly unmotivated, given the Glee had yet to transform into the schizophrenic, incoherent mess that it is today. Jeff’s jabs worked precisely because the backlash hadn’t happened yet, and thus the almost random hatred against the show became riotously funny.

The show’s later jokes at the show’s expense – such as the jabs in “Modern Warfare” and the quick cutaway in “Paradigms of Human Memory” – maintained that success because A) thanks the show’s leading edge in Glee-related humor, it still felt fresh, B) the show made sure to make to keep the gags short and sweet, and C) Glee had started sucking, giving the gags extra oomph. However, somewhere between all of this, Glee-bashing became the norm, and as shows from SNL to Sesame Street began to mock it, Community lost (or seem to lose) the edge they had due to oversaturation. This all culminated with the opening scene of the season premiere, a toothless spoof of many of Glee’s ridiculous numbers. There was some nice character work and metatextual humor at play, but as a spoof it failed terribly.

Which is all a long way of saying that tonight’s Glee-spoof of an episode should have probably sucked, based on the diminishing returns previously established. I mean, a whole episode composed of sequences like that opening scene? Ugh. And yet I cannot deny that the humor here worked, for reasons that don’t sound convincing on paper, but work in reality. (Hey, just like this episode.)

The key, I think, was that this episode was able to reach specificity with the humor without making it so specific that it seemed out of place within the show’s world. Same a capella incidental music? Great. Mocking the show’s use of regionals as some sort of ambiguous benchmark? Fantastic. Nailing the random nature of the show’s musical numbers? Awesome.

And let’s talk about those musical numbers. Each one could have just been an excuse to mock the theatricality of Glee, but instead the writers used them effectively as joke machine for the characters, to the point that every other lyric was its own punch line, building on the lines that came before it, which meant that the songs became the episode’s biggest source of laughs. Using Abed’s first number to mock the pretentious of Glee’s own numbers (which frankly makes sense, given how much of a blank slate Abed is most of the time) freed up the later ones for more character-based humor. Troy’s rap highlighted the alienation he feels at Christmas, as well as serving as a platform for his buried narcissism. Annie’s “Santa Baby”-inspired number mocked the sexualization of Christmas songs while pointing how the same about the Jeff/Annie pairing. And the children’s choir number was shorthand for all of Shirley’s soft spots, and continues her fetishization of the “good things” in life to hide from her angrier side.

But, as with all of Community’s theme/homage/spoof episodes, there was an undercurrent of pathos to the proceedings, and thank goodness for it. While the episode had managed to provide a whole lot of laughs for its running time, I would have been seriously disappointed had it only done jokes, because as funny as it was, the show is at it’s both when it can deliver both comedy and emotion, and I would hate for Community to go away for a few months after only giving 90% of the output of which I know it’s capable. And I was really worried that it was going to do so, because it wasn’t until the last few minutes that the show played its hand. The show has over course done last minute emotion in the past, but I find that as the show has grown older, it grown less and less of afraid of showing it’s hear earlier, so I was thrown off that it took so long to get to the pathos.

But here’s the problem: After the undeniable classic that is “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas,” how do you follow that with another Christmas episode without feeling like you’re just chasing past success? Well, it turns out you don’t. “Abed’s” was a relentlessly dark yet ultimately uplifting half-hour of television, something that the show shouldn’t try to replicate, which was something that was addressed in the opening dialogue. So instead the show went in the complete opposite direction, and gave us something much sunny and brighter.

That is, at least ostensibly. Like me, I’ll bet you found it weird that Abed was suddenly the person in the group who cares about, well, anything that’s not pop-culture related, but luckily the show provided a reason for that. You see, Abed has a vested interest in keeping the group together because it’s his grounded connection with reality, and, fueled by his belief that the last time that the study group filled in for the glee club was a positive one for all involved, he seeks to get everyone involved once again. He believes that he’s doing them a favor, that he’s finally found a way to pay them all back for the friendship they’ve shown him. Abed may not the best at feeling things, but he knows that friendship is a vital part of life, and he recognizes and respects what the group should mean to him. Giving them a happy Christmas this year makes up for the dark Christmas he caused last year with his mental breakdown.

But here’s the catch: for everyone else, glee club is akin to a horrible zombie virus. Once they hear a song, they become enthralled by its power, and they lose their ability to think of anything other than the glee club. (At this point, I’m sure you get the allegory at play here.) Through his attempt to do something kind for his friends, Abed has robbed them of their humanity, and as he’s still more or less unaffected by song, he seeks out sabotage through Britta. Its move that manipulative (he uses both Britta’s naïveté and her horrible signing voice to essentially break the spell) yet done in their best interest.

Realizing that he fucked up, Abed hides away, afraid to look at the friends that he inadvertently betrayed. But lucky for him, they realize something. None of them have been all that good this year. They say what the audience had already known for quite some time – this has been a dark school year for the group so far, and all of them have let their worst impulses get in the way of their group dynamic. Abed was the only person who caused the group trouble by looking out for somebody besides himself. And maybe that’s something they should all be thankful for, and should all try to do in the future.

And that’s how you tell that’s both dark and uplifting without seeming like a copy. This episode was so well done, that as it was closing out, I was happy, and since the show was sending us out on such a high note, I was convinced I could carry that memory around with me until the show was able to return. And then we got to the closing song, and specifically this line:

“Noel, Noel, we’ll see you all after regionals.”

I just about lost it. No Community, you won’t. It’s going to be much longer than that. The full weight of the show’s hiatus came crashing down on me once again, and even though I still has that happy moment lodged in my brain, that moment became coupled with a sense of loss, and was overwhelmed with sadness at the thought that I had a barren few months ahead of me in which I probably wouldn’t experience another moment like that one. Throw in a fantastic surreal and hilarious tag to really drive the point home, and I may or may not have teared up at the thought of the fact that a show this fantastic is going away for a few months, that  I won’t have regular episodes to guide me through my next semester of grad school work.

I love you Community, and I will miss you dearly while you’re gone.

And fuck you NBC. Fuck you straight to hell.

Merry Christmas everybody, and happy holidays.

Quotes and Other Thoughts:

I wasn’t able to work this in the review proper, but that was Taran Killam, better known to most of you as a bit player on SNL, Blauman on How I Met Your Mother, or Jimmy the Overly-Touchy Orderly on Scrubs. But he also starred in the fantastic (but never picked up) pilot Nobody’s Watching, which was written by Community producers Neil Goldman and Garrett Donovan, along with Bill Lawrence, and if you haven’t seen it, you should totally check it out.

I would totally watch the horrible Inspector Spacetime Christmas special.

I think I would have preferred to see Britta play a tree, but that callback to her weird pizza dance in “Remedial Chaos Theory” more than made up for it.

All right, favorite song. Go! (And don’t say it was Annie’s, you pervs.)

“I wouldn’t call a surprise visit from your pastor a ‘gift’.”

“I’ll be at the movie with my bubby.” “You’re only taking one?”

“What the hell are regionals? They never stop talking about them.”

“This guy’s like human fro-yo”

“And ten times your best will be so bad, I will yell at you.”

“He let himself down when he left the house this morning wearing a sweater vest.”

“Everything’s cooler when cameras are spinning.”

“Wait. You guys never let me rap with you…”

“Who’s that guy? You all see him too, right?”

“They’re just trying to pander to your demographic’s well-documented historical vanity. Resist!”

“Fake butter, AIDS, and Twin Peaks.”

“Britta’s adorable! So, Shirley or Annie for the Christmas Queen….”

“I realize the stakes aren’t that high, but somehow it makes it extra scary.”

“Boop-ba-doop-a-do-do, sex!”

“This will help us get to regionals.” “I knew it!”

“Wait, where are the lyrics?” “They’re in your heart, Britta.” “Oh yeah. Dah-doy!”

“Oh, Britta’s in this?”

“Look, Kings of Leon!”

“And to think I trusted him enough to captain a magic carpet in the dream I had last night.”