Episode Report Card Lady Lola: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Smack Talk for Dummies
By Lady Lola | Season 4 | Episode 3 | Aired on 10.29.2009
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Lemon is still searching for a new cast member that appeals to the "real America" (you know, the one she doesn't believe in?), and she continues to displease Jack by searching in elitist, intellectual enclaves like San Francisco and Toronto. By gum, real people aren't smart or well-connected. They're the salt of the earth! Kenneth piques Jack's interest with some fundamentally creepy tales of a comedy club back in his hometown of Stone Mountain, Georgia. So off Jack and Lemon go. During the car trip, they continue to debate the existence of a "real America," and Lemon enlightens us with her sandwich-based theory of humanity. Ironically, it's a sandwich containing deep-fried carp and pig offal that lands in the hotel bathroom for most of the trip. During her stint in the vomitorium, Jack heads over to the club Kenneth suggested and finds a hayseed ventriloquist Rick Wayne and his silver-tongued dummy Pumkin. Lemon insists she see them before Jack can extend the job offer, so she loads up her heckling guns and heads down to The Laugh Factory. Let's just say Lemon is outmatched and that Jack goes absolutely, spectacularly apeshit, then leave it at that. I'm still a little scarred from the smut that came out of that buck-toothed dummy's latex lips. Shudder.
Meanwhile, Frank is trying to ensure he, Toofer and Lutz have a hot and happening Halloween planned. Simultaneously, Jenna is looking for something only they can provide -- priority status when the new cast member arrives. Their nefarious, self-propelling plans become one when Jenna introduces her gay friends to the writers. Cerie tells Frank that The Gays have the best Halloween parties, with all the hot drunk girls, so Jenna blackmails the writers into giving her top special treatment in exchange for entrée into the Hallowiener party.
In the background, Tracy is scrambling to save his own life. After learning that two celebrities have died that day, he infers from the Rule of Threes (famous people tend to croak in groups of three) that he's a marked man. After some antics with Betty White and Jimmy Fallon, Tracy is spared when a certain peach-lovin' doll kicks the bucket.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!Lemon walks into her office ripe from a long plane trip. Lacking any deodorant or body splash, she starts rubbing a candle on her armpits. Of course Jack walks in on this. He asks how the talent search is going for the new cast member. She tells him she's seen people in San Francisco and has an auditions set up in Toronto. Jack is not pleased with these hippie, Lefty enclaves. He tells her to forget smart comedy and think about what makes people laugh. On cue, Lutz walks in with a tray of parfaits, trips over a chair, and makes a spectacular pratfall. Lemon and Jack crack their shit up... then attend to Lutz, who may or may not be bleeding profusely. Awesome.
In the studio, Frank is telling Tracy that the rotund man who inspired Pac-Man has passed away. Kenneth adds to that a famous clog dancer. Frank wonders who'll be next, since celebrities always die in threes. He tells Tracy to be careful. Tracy scoffs at the urban legend. He stands up and walks away from his chair, at which point a light falls on it from the beams overhead. Credits.
Outside, Jenna calls out to a writer, then lights the script that contains her edits on fire. She tells Kenneth she wants to make it known that she is in charge so that there won't be any power redistribution when the new cast member arrives. Kenneth tells her she'll attract more flies with honey than vinegar, but she thinks the only way to survive in the business is to be cutthroat and power-hungry. Kenneth tells a little anecdote about Florence Henderson baking cookies for the writers of The Brady Bunch -- "and in exchange they wrote her the role of a lifetime, as her own Grandma Hutchens!" Jenna ponders this intriguing idea of being nice.
Jack's office. Kenneth checks to see if Jack is going to participate in the annual company pumpkin-carving contest. That'd be a no. Jack asks Kenneth what he, as a Middle American (well, Southern, but for all intents and purposes...) finds funny. Kenneth tells him about a pig farm-slash-butcher back in Stone Mountain that would turn into a comedy club at night. Cut to Lemon's office. Jack walks in to tell her they're heading down to Georgia. Lemon's response: "After these messages?" Commercials. Wow, this show is getting really into the meta.
Writers' room. Toofer looks bemusedly at Frank's Halloween party Evite. Lutz doesn't want to have another one after last year, when a hot girl from an office across the street came over and asked them to close their blinds and (implicitly) stop being so pathetic. In that scene, btw, Toofer was Kid from Kid 'n Play. Nice. Frank tells them not to give up on the magical night when women have free reign to "dress slutty and drink too much," and where they can "hide [their] bodies in bulky costumes." Toofer and Lutz are disconsolate, but Frank reassures them that anything can happen on Halloween. It's a holiday when "up is down, down is up. Good is evil... and evil is good." On cue, newly nice-to-writers Jenna enters the room with a tray of cookies. And by "cookies" I mean four still wrapped packets of ready-made dough that she didn't bother to remove from the package before sticking in the oven. She wafts the sweet aroma of burnt plastic at them.