Community - "Course Listing Unavailable"

Season 3, Episode 18

Have I mentioned how much I love callbacks in comedy? Or, to rephrase the question, you know that I love Arrested Development, right? For the longest time, I though that callbacks were the Old Faithful of comedy, one of the true ever-reliant sources of humor. They combined my two favorite things in television shows, well-told jokes and a sense of continuity, and I loved them for that. “Course Listing Unavailable” had these things in spades, and on that account this should have been one of my favorite Community episodes of the season. Yet somehow it all ended up falling a bit flat.

Last week I expressed some trepidation at the idea of an episode that would focus on the death of Starburns. While I always like Starburns in his function of one of the many tertiary characters of the show, and for his role in filling out the weirdness of the Greendale campus, I felt no emotional connection with the character, and I knew that I couldn’t really count on the episode to use the character to connect with me emotionally. That of course left the option of the show entertaining me on a comedic level, but death is a dark stuff, and dark comedy is hard to do. I have faith that there’s enough skill in the writers’ room for dark comedy to be something the show could do successfully, but given the way that last week’s episode ended with the pronouncement of Starburns’ death, I didn’t really expect that that would be the case with this episode.

Surprisingly, the humor here actually did work. The first act, which just allowed for the study group to bounce off of one another in the wake of Starburns’ death, worked like gangbusters. The obvious key here was just allowing the humor to bounce off of the group members, no surprise given that the show has always mined some of it’s greatest scenes from just the core group sitting around the table. It specifically worked here because the jokes weren’t about Starburns’ death so much as they were about the reactions that were expressed by the group in the wake of it. We’ve always known that the group is largely selfish and misanthropic when it comes to anybody outside of the group, so this was a largely funny reminder of that, and it also played into the season’s darker focus quite well.

It was in the second and third acts of the episode that everything really started to fall apart, and it was unfortunately thanks to seed that had been planted in the first. Before the first commercial break, we saw Jeff become devastated only when he learned that he would have to attended summer school. It was a funny, believable moment for the character, and I even liked it when he gave a Winger Speech at Starburns’ memorial meant to ferment hatred against the school. Jeff has always been a character who makes grand pronouncements and fling bullshit for his own benefit, and takes personal inconveniences way too seriously, so I was willing to go along with what was a really bombastic move on his part. Again, it seemed to be playing up this idea of the selfishness of the members of the group in any situation, so I though it worked.

The problem then came when Jeff’s hatred of the school suddenly seemed to affect everybody else in the study group as well, and eventually the whole school. Suddenly Jeff’s moral outrage was no longer strategic bullshit, but rather a legitimate emotion that he seems to have awoken in the rest of the student body. I can see how this was maybe meant to be a joke on the part of the writers, something that would had to the comedic insanity of the whole thing, but it’s an insanity that goes too far and strains credibility. In order for the scene to work, we have to buy that generally forgiving persons like Shirley and Annie, and someone who loves the school as much as Pierce does, would somehow be suddenly fed up with the school. None of it really makes sense, and nothing ruins comedy quite like an episode that rings false to what we know of the characters. (But hey, at least the show didn’t suddenly have Abed mad about something. That really wouldn’t have made any sense.)

It’s here that the callback problem starts, with Annie listing the technicality that’s keeping her at Greendale for the summer, and Shirley the loss of her sandwich restaurant, as reasons for their anger with the school. (Pierce doesn’t really give a reason for why he’s upset, so I have to assume that like the rest of the Greendale crowd, he’s mostly just caught up in the group mentality of anger that pervades the moment.) I get that the show would point to its own past as justification, and it’s a relatively smart move, except for the fact that I don’t think they are substantial enough claims given what we know about the character. Shirley for instance has every right to still be upset about losing her restaurant, but I’m not sure if I buy the requirement of summer school to be a large enough issue to break the camel’s back. And while Annie should be even more upset over her incomplete in Biology considering that it was just last week that she had to deal with the grades issue, and she it prone to outbursts, taking part in such a larger, sustained demonstration of anger betrays her character. Sure, this could be the show attempting to show the darker side of somebody besides Jeff, but to do that, the darkness has to come from a believable place.

That the second act ends with Chang asserting his power over the school was a welcome relief to this action, because even though it’s over-the-top, it’s befitting of the most cartoonish character of the show, and it’s the sort of grand epic idea that the show does well with. (Note: I believe that the show will deal with this more next week, so I’m sort of projecting forward here.) However, the aftermath of Chang’s actions, at least at they relate to the third action, weren’t all that great and sort of ruined any forward momentum that seemed to be building when seemed to be slowly building his domination over the school.  The gang gets kicked out of the school thanks to Chang replacing the Dean with his Imposter, Not Moby, and his schmoozing with the school board.

All of this I’m okay with. Chang can rise all he wants. It’s the group’s reaction to everything that bothers me. While it makes sense within the space of the episode for them to get over their expulsion, especially considering their recently found aggression against the school, I’m not sure I believe their optimistic attitude. Part of this comes from the fact that the group’s sudden optimism at their situation the reversal of the darker aspects of the season, made even more frustrating that their was a long, callback-filled conversation used to justify it. It also doesn’t help that this episode is obviously being setup for next week’s episode, and that regardless of what happens, the group will somehow end up re-enrolled at Greendale, so that scene ends up being a bit of a non-starter.

It’s here that I’ll note how neatly these three acts divided up the episode, each tackling a different idea. The first was the group’s reaction to Starburns death, the second was the their disillusionment with the school, and the third was their expulsion and them dealing with that. This would be something commendable in another, better episode, where the ideas expressed didn’t run counter to the continuity of the episode of the whole. As it stands, it’s the one thing that works for the entirety of the episode, but it’s certainly not enough to save this misfire.

Quotes, Etc.:

“How one armed was he? Tell me when to stop.”

“You mean ‘Starburns died how he lived: in a meth lab explosion’?”

“Is it always about the Holocaust with you people?”

“Okay, I gotta go. This call costs seven dollars!”

“You seemed smarter than me when I met you.” “Thank you.”

“Starburns, I didn’t know you all that well, but why did you always smell like salami?”

“…No soft serve?”

“Now think about that last little puppy in that basket full of puppies. And now, that puppy is catching on fire.”

“Name any other step.” “What are you, my final?”

“Oh, because his sideburns were shaped like stars. I just got it.”

“Our school flag is an anus.” “Well, you guys drew it.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that we are all Ted Danson at Whoop Goldberg’s roast.”

“I regret giving you that adult backrub you didn’t ask for when you were asleep.”