Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Wide Stances and Sneaky Glances
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 9 | Aired on 08.03.2009
to know about, and he kind of blurgs, and then she's like, "Spit!" But he doesn't. He babbles instead about how it has an interesting flavor and was more like a showerhead and less like a water spout, and gag me, and Nancy screams, "You swallowed!"And the joke is that he goes, "I didn't wanna be a hypocrite," but the point is the self-satisfied, territorial, grin on her face that he doesn't even see. The best way I can approach describing this face -- which is instantly recognizable and relatable -- is to relate a very crass statement from a very good friend of mine, which was also instantly relatable: basically that it's a lot less satisfying to wipe your dick on somebody's sheets once you're together with that person and they are suddenly your sheets also. It's not mean and it's not aggressive or neurotic, exactly, but that's the face she's making. She had the beginnings of an orgasm, and he swallowed, and it's not sex, and it's not poison.
That night, she goes off on him for masturbating in bed with her, horrified and smiling in horror, and for the first time you can see that he's sort of delighted by the transgressive ickiness of what they did too. Which, it's very interesting, because breastfeeding is the most normal thing in the world, and the way guys are about breasts is about the least natural thing about breasts, and there's this very clear line between sexual use and everyday use, like with lots of your parts, that we don't like crossing, but out of all those, breastfeeding is probably the number one thing. The top of the hell no pyramid, as it were, and I mean, for about thirty obvious reasons. But it's also one of those taboos where nothing bad actually happens or could happen, so you get a lot of playing around with it, especially in stories like this. Poison River was basically 500 pages of this, and that's one of the best novels ever written. So I don't know.
So Nancy tells Andy to take a fucking Ambien, and he tries to explain how, for men, that's just one of the many great things about masturbation, and she's like, "I AM RIGHT HERE." Awesomely, Andy doesn't skip a beat: "Well? I'm engorged. It hurts. I need you to suck it out. Be the baby..." She grins to herself, but turns on the light and sits looking away from him while he lists all the weird shit they've gotten up to -- the bathtub scene, recently watching him fuck her sister, the suck & spit tonight -- and asks how, then, his masturbation in her vicinity is really all that weird.
Um, it's still weird. Don't jack off around other people. There is no amount of weirdness that can accumulate where that's normal. I don't care if it's wartime, or if your leg is chained to Cary Elwes in a dirty underground bathroom. I don't care if they started it.* Don't jack off around other people. It is a private activity.
(*Obviously, in that case, go for it. I am exaggerating to prove a point.) Nancy takes a less commonsensical approach, living as she does in the complete absence of an objective morality, and says the main reason they shouldn't go jacking off in front of each other is because they need to try and stay as normal as possible. That's what she says, but obviously what she means is that babies don't masturbate, and certainly not in bed with her. Andy's like, awesome, so we're just your normal brother and sister (in law) who share a house and a bed and a Mexican (-American) baby. That kind of normal.
Nancy's like, exactly! The kind that masturbate on their own time, instead of together. (Because once you start doing that, what you are doing is having sex with each other. Grow up.) Which private time, Andy points out, is a nonexistent quantity, and then the baby starts up. Nancy tells Andy to masturbate while she's feeding the baby, and he tries to reciprocate by saying she can "rub one out" anytime she wants, but she informs him that masturbation -- between giving birth two weeks ago and her babydaddy's disappearance -- is not high on her list. She takes off to deal with Stevie, handing Andy a burpcloth as she goes, which is somehow the grossest part of all of this.
At today's You're Pretty! seminar, Raylene instructs a scary lady to share her story, because it's a safe place. The story involves how her man says she's can't do anything on her own. I can't say if that's true for everything, but she definitely shouldn't be allowed to put on makeup by herself. She looks like Edward Cullen as a fat drag queen. Her man continues on to say that nobody will hire her, because she's so stupid, and he calls her Dummy and No-Jobby. About whom I find myself giving less than a single shit, because don't stay in abusive relationships. It's not fucking rocket science.
Anyway. Blah blah whine whine and finally Doug -- because who can take an obnoxious moment and make it truly egregious? -- shows up and leans against the doorframe: "Come on, No-Jobby! Finish the story." Raylene tries to intercept him and he immediately explains to her that he wants to make him a bunch of money selling her "face chemicals." She tells him to fuck off, and he starts throwing around the unsayables like how they're all "bored housewives," and she gives him the shadow economy speech I've given like a million times about drug-dealing -- that You're Pretty is for (specifically women) who have been marginalized and disenfranchised and have never been given the opportunity to succeed.
I guess the funniest thing about a Depression is that even educated white men have to hop on over to the shadow economy on occasion. Makes me feel warm in my tummy, anyhow. So Raylene gets hardcore with him after he starts screeching about how he's going to sue for sexual harassment ("You mean discrimination?") if she doesn't let him sell makeup, and she bitches that he's "blowing her gig" so they negotiate how much it's going to take to shut him down, and she chases him out the door after agreeing to let him sell three full orders, and he asks her out, but she's "into snatch" so maybe finally Celia's inner barsexual will finally be unleashed. Either way it's a Doug storyline through and through, and it's too bad. I can remember when Kevin Nealon made me feel positive about life.