Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT "I'm Sorry That You Suck So Much."
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 12 | Aired on 09.01.2008
Like, I don't like pot movies because I don't think pot is inherently funny. If you go "Man, I'm like soooo wasted," half the theatre will laugh their asses off, but I don't understand the joke, because there's not a joke: just a person fucked up on drugs. And one thing I love about this show is that, even with Doug, there's usually a second level to whatever he's doing where he can say the whole "I'm soooo wasted and high on goofy juice" or whatever, and there's still something funny going on at the same time. The time they went to the marijuana trade show was about the only time I've really gotten annoyed with the show doing that.
But my deal with Sanjay is that I, unsurprisingly, don't find homosexuality inherently funny. Like, if you go, "Man, I'm like sooooo gay," half the theatre will laugh their asses off, but I don't understand the joke. And a lot of times there's no second level with Sanjay: he's a faggot, it's funny, the end. Which bugs me but I don't really go there, because you're allowed to find emasculated shallow versions of homosexuals funny, because everyone on this show is a weak, shallow version of something. And it works, because that's what's awesome about the show: making them awesome anyway. I've never felt that Sanjay worked as a character, after he came out, because there's nothing else to him. There's no interior to the character, despite the actor's sometimes laudable attempts at playing him with depth. And I'm not getting PC on you here, I want to be very clear: my problem with this episode is strictly as a writer.
Because if you ever thought that the show maybe hadn't earned the number of gay jokes it relies on (Isabelle, every word out of Doug's mouth, the entirety of every Sanjay scene) -- and it doesn't, and it never has -- I don't see how taking a disc sander to the face of some straw-man queer that, as far as I remember, hasn't even had more than a single line of dialogue since he was introduced, and not playing it for anything other than a cheap thrill is going to solve the issue. I've kind of trusted this season to explain it to me at some point, because a lot of the gay humor has seemed forced in addition to being weak, like Doug's obsession with his long-gone son and whether Silas sucks cock. I don't, given what happens in this episode, actually think it's going anywhere at all, which means it's been playing to the cheap seats all along, comedy-wise, and playing to a greater hypocrisy, writer-wise. This is a show about a drug dealer who blew up an entire town, but who drives a Prius and thinks she's a good person; it's a show in which any character at any time can become a mouthpiece for the self-satisfied superior liberal inside us all, railing awkwardly about Bush or the war or Starbucksization or whatever. But if you're really relying on weak humor at the expense of people whose only personality trait is being historically degraded, isn't that just like smuggling drugs and people in your Prius?