Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 88 USERS: B+ YOU GRADE IT The Privilege of Irony
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 11 | Aired on 01.05.2014
It's like, the eternal discussion of Girls goes around and around the central concept that it's in some way autobiographical, because Lena Dunham is incapable of telling a story about an asshole that is a girl, played by her, and therefore she does not also think that the girls of Girls are assholes. It's less a joke about a woman poking fun, and more of a scathing documentary of why women suck. But any Judd Apatow movie, those people are assholes and Apatow's in on the joke: He is a man, writing about men, and therefore capable of being ironic about men. Women don't exist deeply enough to be a part of that conversation, so hating Girls is a fun thing for men to do, and that's the conversation we get to have, because men are the ones talking.
"Baby Got Back" is -- actually, can I ask all the black people reading this to leave the room for a second? This is a white people conversation. Thanks.
"Baby Got Back" is not funny on its own merits, because as we all know, black people -- actually, can I ask all the women reading this to leave the room for a second? Homos too. This is strictly a man conversation. No offense. Thanks.
As we all know, black men really like big butts. So when a black man sings about butts, he's just doing something we already know they are constantly doing. So what's funny about it is, when a white guy sings about the big butts he is being ironic, because he's not black (and may or may not be into big butts, that's not the point of the joke). If you had a rap cover of a Weezer song, let's say, it would not be that hilarious, because white men are always ironic and nobody else ever is. We are just what we are, all the time. A rap cover of a Weezer song would just be mean.
Anyway, in this case the very funny joke by a white man for the delight of other white men got picked up by Glee, a show that is literally about sucking the originality out of life until it is a pre-Oz Kansas world, and the show did Coulton's re-arrangement, and he sued them for doing that without talking to him about it, making it a head-to-head of whose lack of originality was more original. As much as this show is about ripping things from the headlines, this episode is like, literally a play-by-play of that occasion. It's more deeply considered, being this show and all, but mostly the backbone of the episode is isometric to the real-life situation.
In this episode, the part of Coulton will be played by a shockingly charismatic Matthew "Rowby" Lillard, his silent partner is played by Broadway dreamboat Christopher "Marshall" Fitzgerald, and the song itself is called "Thicky Trick," which manages to be about both butts and also "ratchet," which is not something we're going to be talking about but does make this episode even more on-point than usual, ratchet being just the latest way for us to pull this bullshit on each other with some fashion of plausible deniability.
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