Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: C- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Take Seattle To The Zoo
By Jacob Clifton | Season 6 | Episode 2 | Aired on 01.16.2007
Ryan voices over the comparison to "Taylor Hicks... hit in the face with a shovel," which is neither creative nor true in any way. I think he looks like an asshole with a serious lack of clue. Which is not entirely creative but is factually true. They indulge his weird, stupid self for way too long, even going to the salon where he works so that the ladies there can scream and pretend that he's not embroiled in a brain-dead mentally ill bisexual hell of his own devising, and letting him talk crazily about the Taylor thing for awhile, and his stupid fruit-punch mouth going on and on about work: "I get into a trance where I start seeing the whole form of the hair coming," he says. He gives the lady a good haircut, that's true. I would not let him near me because he's a weirdo, but if he took his meds I might let him give me a haircut. He does a Hicks impression, which is just the paprika on the awful egg salad of this picnic, and explains the final word on Hicks: "If I portray him it's just me," he says. Speech impediments and mile-a-minute Zippy the Pinhead talking turn Simon off the second he comes wandering in, screaming nonsense, and Simon looks at the camera like, "Jacob, I know. And I am sorry." Finally, it's over and Simon asks him to swear on the life of his mother that this is not a joke or some kind of performance art, and Eric responds wiltingly that nobody could pretend to be this crazy, and that Paula is beautiful and then tries to style Simon's hair, and gets tossed out by security on his ass, which Ryan finds beautiful and hilarious because Ryan's in an even worse mood today than he was yesterday, and Eric fixes his own hair and continues to babble crazily, and inside, Paula notes soberly that there are some troubled people here in Seattle.
There's a montage of jokes about how short Ryan is, which I do not appreciate in the slightest, although it's kind of funny to see all the ways he deals with it. One guys notes that he's kinda short, and without even thinking Ryan spits, "You're charming." That kind of thing. There's another moment where he's talking to a tall kid and calls for his apple box, and the kid is hilarious, like "You really have a box that you stand on?" And Ryan grins: "No. Come on." ["Oh, you come on, Seacrest. That box has your name engraved on it." -- Joe R] This is all to introduce Anna Kearns, the tallest girl in the world. 6'4" flat-footed, she says, and 6'7" in the heels she's wearing today. She says it used to freak her out too, but now she has figured out how to use that attention for her own purposes, and I admire that so much and I wish she would explain this very simple thing to some people, because she's clearly over it and probably can't even remember a time when it bothered her. She tells Ryan she's here to prove that very exceedingly freakishly tall people -- "Like us!" -- can win in life. She looms down to hug little Ryan, and they're both so damn cute.