5 Viral Clips That Mislead Everyone About What Comedies Are About
When a network debuts a comedy, they put out a promo that quickly cuts between characters being wacky. These promos are always terrible, and based on them, it’s a wonder that anyone gives any comedy a chance.
In time, however, people watch these shows on their own and pick out the scenes that really do work great as jokes in isolation. When you see one of these clips go by on your feed, it might convince you to check the show out. Just be aware that if the scene was so special that it went viral ahead of anything else in the show, maybe nothing else in the show is quite like it.
How to Be Single
Dakota Johnson gets into a cab in New York, and the driver asks for the destination. “Home,” she says. “I’m going home.” We’re just seeing this clip on its own, so we can only imagine what tribulations she endured up to this point only to realize where true happiness lies.
Don't Miss
Then the music cuts out, and the driver says, “Woman, I don’t know where the fuck you live.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “Can I go to South 2nd and Berry?” And now the car goes off.
Based on this scene, the movie has to be some feature-length parody skewering movie clichés, right? The movie is How to Be Single, and it actually contains nothing of the sort other than that one bit right there. It’s just a normal rom-com. Sure, it has jokes, and when it’s Rebel Wilson making the jokes, they often consist of making fun of stuff, but that’s all a normal part of rom-coms, and there’s nothing subversive about that.
The most distressing part of the movie happens early on, when someone is in a car coming to New York, and “Welcome to New York” plays. Having arrived at this movie after seeing only that clip of the cab, this is when you expect a character to angrily switch the song off, or the car to crash, or something else silly to happen and cut that short. But it just plays out, and you realize now just what sort of movie this is.
“Why did I put this on?” you’ll say. “What have I committed us to watching? Oh no. What have I done?”
Veep
Any episode of Veep has dozens of jokes worthy of being shared. But one particular clip has spread widely to represent how nuts the show can get. “How am I doing?” says Jonah into a phone. “I’m eating so much pussy, I’m shitting clits, son.” Then we zoom out and a character played by Peter MacNicol starts screaming at him.
“Hey,” he says. “This is an elementary school! Watch your spewing mouth, you animal!” And sure enough, they are in a classroom, surrounded by small children.
Maybe that is the funniest scene in the whole show. But it’s an unusual scene in an unusual episode. This was the one episode of the show done in a mockumentary format. Veep uses plenty of handheld cameras, so it might not look so different from mockumentary shows, but it isn’t one, other than in this one episode.
As a result, there is no other episode of the show that jumps into a conversation already in progress and then lets us slowly understand the context. There is no other episode where the camera starts shaking to respond to the chaos. The show has plenty of good scenes but none other quite like this.
Several other sitcoms used the mockumentary format successfully around this time. There was Modern Family, The Office and then there was that show that looked at first like a clone of The Office…
Parks and Recreation
I first heard of Parks and Recreation on a fateful plane ride at the start of 2010. An employee from NBC appeared on the TV, saying, “Hi! We’d like to give you passengers a taste of some of the brand-new shows on our network.”
The first show was Community. They chose the episode where the school creates the Greendale Human Being mascot, and they chose well. The episode contains this exchange, which you might have seen shared in meme form.
The show would later go a different route with Troy. Focusing on him being a jock didn't bear much fruit — other than that one memorable conversation, of course.
The second show was Parks and Recreation, which was actually in its second season by this point but remained so unknown that NBC felt the need to call it a brand-new series. Here, too, they picked their sample episode very well. They picked the one where the Venezuelans come to Pawnee, the one featuring Fred Armisen listing the various offenses that would, in Venezuela, send you to jail.
There was probably no point in the series where they gave a guest character a monologue so good as that one. And since this was just 11 episodes into the series, there was no scene up to this point anywhere as good as this one. If you tuned into the show then based solely on having seen this scene, you would be disappointed, and the same holds true if this clip leads you to watch the first episodes right now. The show would get good eventually, but they hadn’t figured it out yet.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Armisen has appeared on quite a few sitcoms to bestow his blessing. He appeared in the pilot of Broad City, and he appeared in the pilot of Brooklyn Nine-Nine as well. Both consequently saw success. Brooklyn Nine-Nine went on to produce this scene:
The joke in the scene is how shocking it is that Amy would talk about a cock in her ass (it turns out she is not talking about that). But really, it’s shocking for the show to talk about that, because they hadn’t said anything quite like that in the five prior seasons.
This scene happened in the first episode of Season Six, which marked the show switching from Fox to NBC. Fox had had a rule against jokes where the actors swear (or pretend to swear) and the show covers it with a beep, but NBC did not, and this episode made good use of their new freedom.
So, this joke might not give you the best idea of what the Fox part of the series is like. It gives you an even worse idea of what the NBC part of the series is like because despite what this scene would suggest, the show’s quality suddenly dipped when it jumped networks. It’s not clear why this happened. A writer from back in the Fox days was still around and did this episode. Maybe it was because they devoted 30 hours to perfecting this one joke, leaving no time for the rest of the script.
The O.C.
“Remember when the boys made us watch that movie about the gay guys on the mountain?” asks Summer.
“Lord of the Rings,” says Marissa, nodding.
If this were just a case of one character (the dumb one, we assume) misunderstanding a question, it would be the sort of joke any show could do. But it turns out that no character here misunderstands anything. The show lets us assume Summer meant Brokeback Mountain but reveals she didn’t mean that at all.
There are two punchlines — first Marissa saying that the movie is Lord of the Rings and then Summer revealing that this is correct — but the scene treats neither as a punchline because within their world, this is just a normal conversation between two people in sync. This part of the exchange is over in seven seconds, and they continue the rest of their serious conversation about relationships.
Based on seeing that one joke in meme form, I watched all four seasons of this damn teen drama. It did not contain a single other joke on the same level as that one.
Oh, it did get funny sometimes, just not as funny as this. It especially got funny after it brutally killed off one of the main characters, just a few episodes after the Lord of the Rings conversation, and replaced them with someone funnier.
Clearly, there were people on the writing staff who secretly just wanted to write a comedy. Let’s hope they went on to get their wish.
Follow Ryan Menezes on Twitter for more stuff no one should see.
