The Big Bang Theory was frustratingly bad.
Saw a critic call it, “Nerd blackface”
Blackface is a bit more complicated and disturbing than “pretending to be like a black person for comic effect.” I don’t think it’s appropriate to compare it to to depictions of nerd culture.
It’s what stupid people think smart people sound like. I’ve never been able to watch it, but I remember hearing Sheldon brag about Ubuntu being his favorite Linux distribution? Like, can you imagine someone saying that in a room of Linux nerds?
It’s stupid and disrespectful to geeky people, but it’s not perpetuating harmful and violent narratives.
brag about Ubuntu being his favorite Linux distribution we? Like, can you imagine someone saying that in a room of Linux nerds?
H-hey!
Why???
I think the comment was also made by Sheldon? Sheldon’s character should be the kind of person who chews people out on forums for not reading the Arch Linux wiki, or to launch into the “GNU/Linux” copy pasta reflexively when Linux is brought up.
But that would require them to have more then a surface level understanding of the culture they’re making fun of lol.
can you imagine someone saying that in a room of Linux nerds?
Ironically, that would be hilarious.
Amazing
perfection.gif
Omfg, that describes it adequately.
I saw some clips on YT where they removed the laugh track.
It’s really hard to find the show funny when they take out the bit where it tells you when to laugh.
I hate laugh tracks.
I watched and enjoyed TBBT, but I don’t rewatch it. I saw one of these videos with the laugh track removed and was honestly surprised at how awkward the show was without it. It didn’t change the fact that I liked it when I watched it though.
It’s mostly awkward because suddenly you have long times of silence normally occupied by the laugh track. If it was intended to be without a laugh track there wouldn’t be awkward silence.
Yeah, I’ve wondered what it’d be like if someone did one of those laugh track removal experiments, but re-edited to remove the quiet parts
This is kinda off topic, but there’s a show called Kevin Can Fuck Himself that plays around with sitcom tropes, wife and I enjoyed it a lot.
Fun fact. That show was filmed in front of a studio audience.
Although I don’t know if they augmented the audience with canned laughter in post.
Same with Friends and most shows with laugh tracks
It got so popular, had occasional Star Trek references, even a cameo by Leonard Nimoy, and I still couldn’t get myself to enjoy it. It’s such a a shame.
My grandparents used to watch it. I think it had one (1) funny moment I saw in all the show’s run that I caught when living with them - when Neil DeGrasse Tyson calls up Bill Nye and says “I hear you’ve been talking shit about me”, and Nye immediately hangs up the phone in abject terror.
I watched a lot of it back in the day and by like season 10 (I have no clue how long it ran) I realized it was super boring and bad. There would be jokes as lame as “dude owns a Nintendo 64”. That was the entirety of the joke.
Also there is a long running arc about a main character who is physically incapable of talking to women unless he is intoxicated (aka alcohol).
At some point the “humour” was just pop culture references.
is this not comedy gold?!
In the beginning it was kinda funny. But it went downhill pretty fast, got super cringe regarding the guys trying to get girlfriends, then the creepiest one of the lot gets one. Just ugh.
I like to say that Big Bang Theory was a stupid show about smart people, and Arrested Development was a smart show about stupid people.
Yes, it’s the “Friends” of it’s era - the comedy is in the laugh-track, I mean studio audience.
watched it, it was okey lol. don’t put too much thinking in it
No explanation necessary:
This changes my perspective on the entire show… I’m going to have to watch it again for the 152nd time with this in mind now.
I might require some explanation.
I love this so much.
This image?
The show?
“Yes!” 💯
If he’s low masking, how did he just have a chat about that ludicrous display last night?
If I had to rate the IT crowd out of ten, I’d give it 01189998819991197253
… 3
I’ll just put all the fire together
A very good metaphor for IT support
No… the IT crowd is a sitcom FOR geeks. That other shit just makes fun of us
I believe this is what happened to Dr Who. When it started it was for science and history nerds, science sounding gobble-de-gook, cos play outfits, very low production values (the infamous duct tape boots). All just good fun.
When it was rebooted the focus had shifted. The Doctor as the cool guy, a Jesus figure, became more and more pronounced. They started to make fun of nerds on a regular bases. Amazing writing and production values, but at some point during the Tennant era I stopped watching in disgust.I only started with NuWho, watching it as it came out in 2005.
I found it magnificent, exactly because it shied away from glorifying violence, made emotions be the focus of things and there was clearly some large over-arching thing with “Bad Wolf”, but it wasn’t like in the American shows, where if there’s a clue to be seen, the camera zooms in on it, making sure you can’t miss it.
I gather you are right, and NuWho is way more American and hero-centric than Classic Who — but because it was and I was a teenager enjoying shows like Prison Break at the time — I got into Who, and then into better British shows, better shows in general, chasing that sort or good pacifist writing. Star Trek is ofc prolly the best franchise when it comes to actual philosophy. Doctor Who elicits emotions more than thought when compared to the Star Trek Ethos, albeit in a more profoundly British way.
Uuh there’s actually a new episode of Dr Who tonight that reminded me.
Oooh, it’s out already. And I have a few glasses of rum left. And a steak. And a pint of red. Ooooooh. This is turning out to be a nice day.
Anyway tldr completely agree with you, but I think going a bit American with NuWho was a crucial step in luring in more watchers to start appreciating the good things. Kinda how for a kid, it’s easier to learn to eat a new dish when you introduce it bit by bit or with copious amounts of ketchup or something — slowly teaching them that the bitterness is what makes it tasty.
The original Doctor Who was an educational show mostly aimed at school aged children that used a sci-fi gimmick to teach history lessons (much of which are a bit outdated now). They would alternate storylines between future and past settings through most of William Hartnell’s run.
Towards the end of classic Who it was already much more like modern Who than those first seasons.
The big bang theory was not for geeks or nerds. It was pure shit.
Misogynistic pure shit.
It had a good few first episodes with fun geeky jokes, but it quickly turned to bad jokes and lazy stereotypes and relied loosely on stereotypes to contain the geekyness.
I always felt like it was a show for moms of geeks and nerds that missed their kids once they moved out.
I’m a geek and a nerd and i loved it, sorry.
Hush you! Can’t have people not joining in the dogpile on a TV show that ended 6 years ago…
If you think otherwise, you’re head disabled.
Yes
Exclamation mark
Yes
Exclamation mark
To whom it may concern… No too formal
Except for that one transphobic episode that Graham Linehan has ruined his whole life over instead of going “Yeah, I’m sorry, that was a bit insensitive.”
EDIT: since I don’t want the top reply not to mention this, fuck IT Crowd creator Graham Linehan for the incalculable damage he’s done to innocent trans people. He’s a worthless, disgusting bigot.
Honestly, I always found that episode… Weirdly progressive? Even maybe by accident? Consider the following:
- The trans woman April is legitimately physically attractive and with a distinctly feminine voice to match.
- She’s a legitimately very sweet, intelligent, and earnest person.
- She tells Douglas upfront in no uncertain terms that she’s trans (she phrases this as “I used to be a man”, but honestly, considering both 2008 and the fact it was used to setup a joke, I think this isn’t too transphobic? A trans person in 2008 might’ve even said this because there was less of a support network to understand that you always were a woman.)
- Douglas gets upset because he thinks he’s been tricked, but 1) he absolutely was not, and the episode makes this crystal clear that it’s because April made every effort and he’s just an absolute dumbass, and 2) Douglas has been portrayed in the show to this point as nothing but a juvenile, overdramatic, chauvanistic sack of shit, and we’re clearly not supposed to be rooting for him.
- She’s a fantastic girlfriend and becomes the love of his life. A big part of this is because she has a duality between traditional femininity and an interest in traditionally masculine activities, but I also don’t think this is terrible representation? I have a trans woman friend who carries herself in a traditionally feminine way but hasn’t dropped more traditionally masculine activities that she grew up enjoying.
- She throws the first hit at the end, but this is after Douglas dumps her on the spot after they’ve hit it off, had sex, and confessed their love for each other because he was too stupid to listen, he tells her to get lost, he basically calls her gross to her face by talking in a disgusted tone about “that operation you had”, and flat-out denies her existence as a woman.
- It’s made very evident that if Douglas weren’t transphobic, he could’ve lived the rest of his life with a woman who’s established to be literally perfect for him.
100% agree. It paints trans women favorably and makes Douglas the asshole like he deserves.
Yeah, it’s kind of a Death of the Author moment. Ignore Glinner being a transphobic ogre and it’s actually quite good.
Glinner is the biggest argument I’ve seen against Death of the Author, because once you know you’re supposed to be laughing at the marginalised character and with the characters mistreating them, it’s impossible to find it funny.
There’s lots of examples of it too. The first time watching the theatre trip episode where a judge in drag opens the play, I’d read Roy’s discomfort with the show being “too gay” as a joke on Roy being out of his element; we were supposed to laugh at his discomfort. But on rewatching it’s hard to shake the idea that actually Roy’s defence of “I don’t want his sexuality rubbed in my face” is meant as something the audience is supposed to identify and agree with, and that far from being a knowing playful nudge at gay theatre the whole thing was a mean-spirited caricature of it. The meaning does get changed whether Roland Barthes likes it or not.
Douglas ruined a great relationship because he just couldn’t stop himself being a transphobic bigot. Pity Glinner didn’t learn any lessons from his creation.
I’m a ciswoman and I actually love April’s ass-kicking. I’m sure it was meant to be a dig at her femininity but it’s the first time in media where I felt like, yes. This is exactly how I want my gender displayed.
And her actress was gorgeous.
Wait THAT’S the trans episode that everyone says is super-transphobic? In the context of being released in 2008 it’s perfectly fine. There’s probably be a few things that should be different if it were made today (and honestly, its been a few years since I’ve seen it so I might be not remembering some important yikes moment or something) but my takeaway was always that Douglas is still an asshole and April is an amazing woman who can do so much better than him
Edit to add: Honestly far worse is the Aunt Irma plotline. Most of the jokes are that “haha these guys are acting like girls” and that plot honestly kinda fell flat because of it
Honestly I think the only way it could have been less transphobic was to actually have a trans woman play the role? The woman that played April was quite fetching. And seemed like a pretty fleshed out person and not just a punchline. It would have been just as easy to find some beefy guy to put in a dress with bad makeup. Make a complete bigoted caricature. But they didn’t. Matt Berry’s character was always the butt of the joke. And in totality in the end still missed her. Honestly short of having a trans actress portray the character it really was one of the most positive and Progressive portrayals ironically at the time. Though I’m sure that has more to do with the staff involved then it does lineham himself.
Linehan has become much worse since that controversy, he’s been on a proper trans hate crusade since like 2019. It wasn’t about being insensitive, he’s completely deranged and the episode was just an early slip.
Absolutely. I can’t know what has gone wrong inside him, but even if this particular brainworm was eating him up 20 years ago, he could have just said something vaguely apologetic and let it blow over. Instead, he decided a trans hate crusade was more important than his family or his career.
deleted by creator
He doubled down exponentially because he can’t be wrong.
Which episode?
Edit: oof
Series 3, episode 4, “The Speech”. Sadly, it’s also the episode where they convince Jen a box with a flashing red light is the Internet, but it has a subplot where Reynholm un-knowingly dates a trans woman. He finds her stereotypically masculine behavior attractive until he finds out she is transgender and a physical fight erupts between them.
It’s not even on the upper end of offensive comedy about trans people, but when the episode was criticized, Linehan doubled down and has kept doubling down harder for 20 straight years, to the point where he now spends all of his time harassing, dead naming and doxing trans women on Twitter. His wife left him, writing jobs dried up, he’s just a miserable has-been Twitter checkmark asshole now.
Honestly, I found the episode pretty hilarious. And it was’nt even really offensive towards trans women. I always thought the joke was more on Douglas’ fragile ego than anything else.
But yeah, sucks what’s become of the author.
I also thought the joke was about fragile masculinity… but I can see it being off putting anyways and I’m open to being wrong.
It is interesting to compare screenrants analysis to this reply here.
The IT Crowd creator has stated he does not believe trans women are women and that transgender rights oppress women.
I wanted to make some quip about it being typical but actually not all men think this way or assume they know what women think. And I’m sure some women think this way. But it also tells me all I need to know about this tool. Good riddance.
What it means is that the writer is closer in personality to Douglas than the rest of the cast. And that’s telling.
It was long after the reunion which I realized this and I feel ashamed for all times I’ve rewatched the series since.
No no IT Crowd is a show about sysadmins, not geeks lol. There’s a very clear difference.
And Moss was a nerd not a geek. He wasn’t obsessing about comics, videogames etc. like the characters in BBT.
I also think this is a cultural difference. The comic book obsession seems more like an american thing. In the Netherlands and Belgium there is also a big comic book appreciation, but it’s much less about heroism and more humorous.
Okay but he didn’t obsess about the British equivalent of comic books either. Geeks obsess about consumerist pop culture whether it’s comics, LEGO or Harry Potter. And Moss did non of that.
Flashbacks to the rett & link “nerd VS geek” music video
Yeah, it’s an interesting difference.
There was a lot of pop culture references in IT Crowd, all the music posters, the retro computers, etc. but the cast didn’t even acknowledge it.
Yes, in the proportion of furries vs weebs.
I watched one random episode of BBT after it was recommended to me by a few people. That one episode was enough for me to decide that I never want to see that show again, and also that I should disregard all recommendations from the people who said I should watch it.
The laugh track alone is enough evidence
There is a laughtrack in IT Crowd too…
I’ve always saw BBT as just a way to re-normalize making fun of neurodivergant people.
I think that’s right but at the same time I think you’re not doing it justice by implying that’s all it is.
And a way of renormalizing misogyny.
If BBT was made today it would be accused of being written by AI. Fully flanderised characters, and endless filler episodes.
I watched both, and yes.
I watched none, and yes.
Start here
British humour is infinitely funnier than the laugh track pandering American sitcoms.
Most humor is funnier than a laugh track sitcom. But humor being regional is … an interesting phenomenon if nothing else. Like yea I enjoyed the hell out of Monty Python as a kid and even now. But ill take the office from Scranton ober the og any day of the week. But I also wouldnt expect peeps from across the pond to feel that way.
Is their anything from that late 90s era early 00s British tv had to compare the chapelle show? Honestly curious, I only have so much knowledge of British humor.
I don’t think laugh track is inherently bad.
But I watched the Big Bang Theory for like the first 3 years, and it just kept devolving into shittier and simpler humour, and like really begging for the laughs with the puns, whereas in Britain it’s genuinely considered somewhat important to keep it organic.
Like unfiltered BBC panel shows are just so much more hilarious than an episode of “hey come share laughs over archaic and super over-blown stereotypes”.
Whatever cheap shit they’ve made over at the BBC is usually funnier than overproduced hyper-supervised multi-writer numbers-pleasing BS. I know that’s subjective, and I won’t die on a hill of “who’s the funniest”, because that’s subjective, but that’s my opinion on it.
It’s interesting when America tries to make British panel shows (like the recent HIGNFY one). The competition aspect and the points, which are only a conceit in the British version, start having importance. They care who wins and it destroys the comedy. The right answer becomes more important than the funny answer.
The Office would like to have a word with you.
The American version of the office has a visual laugh track, every time a character sideeyes the camera and smirks.
But it isn’t though.
Some particular shows are better as Americans versions, I’ll not deny that.
I haven’t watched either of the Offices, but I have watched the entire American “Shameless” and that was glorious and fitting. The British version I glanced at was really meh. And whilst British comedy in general might be better, good comedy in a bad show is less valuable than mediocre comedy in a good show.
It’s like good food. Good side dishes won’t completely cover for a bad main dish, but if the main dish is really moorish, you won’t care about the side dishes being so-and-so.
Edit also do you like to think your username is pronounced “rhee-ri”, or “rhow-eh-ri”. People ask me about the pronunciation of mine sometimes and just made me question how you think yours…?
Fair point.
do you like to think your username is pronounced “rhee-ri”, or “rhow-eh-reh”. People ask me about the pronunciation of mine sometimes and just made me question how you think yours…?
It’s “Rory,” but I’d never thought it could be pronounced any other way until now. Lol.
I’d imagine yours is pronounced: “Dah-suse”?
“Rory"
Yeah okay that’s a simpler way of writing the latter way, then way I thought it probably would be.
Dah-sus is more or less how I imagined it originally yes. Like the “da” from “da man” as in “the” and the “sus” not from the phenomena a few years ago where everything was “sus”, but from the Finnish word for wolf, “susi”.
I know it’s cringe but it was like 2002 when I came up with it.
And I’ve had friends go “deyh-sus” “deissus”, sort of, and I’m comfortable with it, but it’s not like how I meant it.
Rory… Amy relation? (Pun intended.) (so bad-ass btw)
Love Doctor Who, love Rory, but no. No relation. It’s just a name. Boring, but the truth.
