big bang theory is about what dumb people think smart people are like.
Yes, it’s a horrible caricature, Henry Cavill is basically the template for most geeks these days.
Big bang theory is about nerds.
Also, BBT stayed entertaining for the most part throughout the 8 or so seasons it was on. IT started great and then dropped to “meh”.
Oh look, a dumb person.
Calling a person dumb because they like watching sitcoms is like saying Gordon Ramsey isn’t a chef because he likes fast food burgers.
How can you stay entertaining when you were never entertaining in the first place?
I wouldn’t say dumb people. It’s a caricature, much like Dennis the Menace is a caricature of small children in a quiet, suburban neighborhood. Only Big Bang Theory wasn’t based on an existing comic. So more like Friends being an unrealistic caricature of a late-20’s/early-30’s group of people living n NYC.
Entertainment doesn’t always have to be authentic.
So more like Friends being an unrealistic caricature of a late-20’s/early-30’s group of people living n NYC.
Actually a pretty good comparison given how awful Friends is.
apologies for the pixels, I stole it from reddit
bbt is blackface
Reddit ass comment
Not true. Blackface can be funny.
This is a charged topic that needs grace and nuance to do right. When blackface is done with the input, support and consent of the black community, it can re-open discussions about how black identities continue to be co-opted by white media.
Tropic Thunder is a great example of blackface as social commentary.
Sarah Silverman did it, too, as…I think a statement on stereotypes? There were levels there but I don’t think they were intentional.
Tropic Thunder had input, support, and consent of the black community?
I don’t believe it was, no. I said what I think should be done, not necessarily how things have been done.
I still think Tropic Thunder did it well, since it’s not making fun of black people, it’s making fun of how out of touch white people can be. I’m basing that off what Brandon T Jackson and other black performers have said about it in the years following its release.
Anyone down voting you never saw tropic thunder or did and have no sense of humor, probably think big bang theory is banging.
It’s just a dude dressed up like a dude, pretending to be another due.
IT Crows was amazing, I laughed to death. Where the bigbang theory was not so funny, too much detail IMO.
Next season might turn out to be IT Pigeons
IT Crowd was three British goofballs doing elaborate running gags over 24 episodes.
BBT was four creepy bigots and a nice blonde woman doing pop culture references and calling one another stupid for 279 episodes before spinning out an 80s nostalgia prequel series.
It was the difference between a few cherished cleverly crafted comedy routines and endless derivative slop.
By far. I think that Big Bang Theory has rotten the minds of lots of highschoolers (that now are at university, or have already graduated)
If you think otherwise, you’re head disabled.
The problem with the r-slur wasn’t the word itself but dehumanizing mentally disabled people; I guess being more overt about it is preferable, if we have to choose one or the other, but you’re not circumventing anything.
Yes
Exclamation mark
Yes
Exclamation mark
Looking forward to hearing from you.
To whom it may concern… No too formal
I watched both, and yes.
I watched none, and yes.
I watched only TBBT, and no.
You should explore your horizon a bit more, it is a great show.
Expand*
What is it called?
The IT Crowd
Start here
Except for that one transphobic episode that Graham Linehan has ruined his whole life over instead of going “Yeah, I’m sorry, that was a bit insensitive.”
It was long after the reunion which I realized this and I feel ashamed for all times I’ve rewatched the series since.
Linehan has become much worse since that controversy, he’s been on a proper trans hate crusade since like 2019. It wasn’t about being insensitive, he’s completely deranged and the episode was just an early slip.
Absolutely. I can’t know what has gone wrong inside him, but even if this particular brainworm was eating him up 20 years ago, he could have just said something vaguely apologetic and let it blow over. Instead, he decided a trans hate crusade was more important than his family or his career.
The IT Crowd creator has stated he does not believe trans women are women and that transgender rights oppress women.
I wanted to make some quip about it being typical but actually not all men think this way or assume they know what women think. And I’m sure some women think this way. But it also tells me all I need to know about this tool. Good riddance.
What it means is that the writer is closer in personality to Douglas than the rest of the cast. And that’s telling.
EDIT: since I don’t want the top reply not to mention this, fuck IT Crowd creator Graham Linehan for the incalculable damage he’s done to innocent trans people. He’s a worthless, disgusting bigot.
Honestly, I always found that episode… Weirdly progressive? Even maybe by accident? Consider the following:
- The trans woman April is legitimately physically attractive and with a distinctly feminine voice to match.
- She’s a legitimately very sweet, intelligent, and earnest person.
- She tells Douglas upfront in no uncertain terms that she’s trans (she phrases this as “I used to be a man”, but honestly, considering both 2008 and the fact it was used to setup a joke, I think this isn’t too transphobic? A trans person in 2008 might’ve even said this because there was less of a support network to understand that you always were a woman.)
- Douglas gets upset because he thinks he’s been tricked, but 1) he absolutely was not, and the episode makes this crystal clear that it’s because April made every effort and he’s just an absolute dumbass, and 2) Douglas has been portrayed in the show to this point as nothing but a juvenile, overdramatic, chauvanistic sack of shit, and we’re clearly not supposed to be rooting for him.
- She’s a fantastic girlfriend and becomes the love of his life. A big part of this is because she has a duality between traditional femininity and an interest in traditionally masculine activities, but I also don’t think this is terrible representation? I have a trans woman friend who carries herself in a traditionally feminine way but hasn’t dropped more traditionally masculine activities that she grew up enjoying.
- She throws the first hit at the end, but this is after Douglas dumps her on the spot after they’ve hit it off, had sex, and confessed their love for each other because he was too stupid to listen, he tells her to get lost, he basically calls her gross to her face by talking in a disgusted tone about “that operation you had”, and flat-out denies her existence as a woman.
- It’s made very evident that if Douglas weren’t transphobic, he could’ve lived the rest of his life with a woman who’s established to be literally perfect for him.
Yeah, it’s kind of a Death of the Author moment. Ignore Glinner being a transphobic ogre and it’s actually quite good.
Glinner is the biggest argument I’ve seen against Death of the Author, because once you know you’re supposed to be laughing at the marginalised character and with the characters mistreating them, it’s impossible to find it funny.
There’s lots of examples of it too. The first time watching the theatre trip episode where a judge in drag opens the play, I’d read Roy’s discomfort with the show being “too gay” as a joke on Roy being out of his element; we were supposed to laugh at his discomfort. But on rewatching it’s hard to shake the idea that actually Roy’s defence of “I don’t want his sexuality rubbed in my face” is meant as something the audience is supposed to identify and agree with, and that far from being a knowing playful nudge at gay theatre the whole thing was a mean-spirited caricature of it. The meaning does get changed whether Roland Barthes likes it or not.
100% agree. It paints trans women favorably and makes Douglas the asshole like he deserves.
Wait THAT’S the trans episode that everyone says is super-transphobic? In the context of being released in 2008 it’s perfectly fine. There’s probably be a few things that should be different if it were made today (and honestly, its been a few years since I’ve seen it so I might be not remembering some important yikes moment or something) but my takeaway was always that Douglas is still an asshole and April is an amazing woman who can do so much better than him
Edit to add: Honestly far worse is the Aunt Irma plotline. Most of the jokes are that “haha these guys are acting like girls” and that plot honestly kinda fell flat because of it
Honestly I think the only way it could have been less transphobic was to actually have a trans woman play the role? The woman that played April was quite fetching. And seemed like a pretty fleshed out person and not just a punchline. It would have been just as easy to find some beefy guy to put in a dress with bad makeup. Make a complete bigoted caricature. But they didn’t. Matt Berry’s character was always the butt of the joke. And in totality in the end still missed her. Honestly short of having a trans actress portray the character it really was one of the most positive and Progressive portrayals ironically at the time. Though I’m sure that has more to do with the staff involved then it does lineham himself.
I’m a ciswoman and I actually love April’s ass-kicking. I’m sure it was meant to be a dig at her femininity but it’s the first time in media where I felt like, yes. This is exactly how I want my gender displayed.
And her actress was gorgeous.
Douglas ruined a great relationship because he just couldn’t stop himself being a transphobic bigot. Pity Glinner didn’t learn any lessons from his creation.
Which episode?
It is interesting to compare screenrants analysis to this reply here.
Series 3, episode 4, “The Speech”. Sadly, it’s also the episode where they convince Jen a box with a flashing red light is the Internet, but it has a subplot where Reynholm un-knowingly dates a trans woman. He finds her stereotypically masculine behavior attractive until he finds out she is transgender and a physical fight erupts between them.
It’s not even on the upper end of offensive comedy about trans people, but when the episode was criticized, Linehan doubled down and has kept doubling down harder for 20 straight years, to the point where he now spends all of his time harassing, dead naming and doxing trans women on Twitter. His wife left him, writing jobs dried up, he’s just a miserable has-been Twitter checkmark asshole now.
Honestly, I found the episode pretty hilarious. And it was’nt even really offensive towards trans women. I always thought the joke was more on Douglas’ fragile ego than anything else.
But yeah, sucks what’s become of the author.
I also thought the joke was about fragile masculinity… but I can see it being off putting anyways and I’m open to being wrong.
That episode aired in 2008 and I think a little self-reflection would have went a long way to getting people to forgive his mistake.
Only problem is, we now know it wasn’t a mistake, it was deliberate, because he’s extremely transphobic. To the point where he is now better known as an anti-transgender activist than a (former) writer.
The IT Crowd and Father Ted are genuinely brilliant, too bad Graham is a total dickhead.
He doubled down exponentially because he can’t be wrong.
These shows are both for morons who think this is how nerds act.
What? The whole charm of the IT crowd is that it’s pretty spot on for how IT people act with each other. It’s hyperbolic for sure but I felt like it was the most authentic representation of tech people in the media.
i have absolutely been called over to laugh at a circuit board. hell, i’ve done it myself
I agree; silicon valley also did a great job with this imo.
Someone writing on that show had to have worked IT at some stage.
A lot of things that happened in that show resonated with my IT support experience.
I often reference the IT crowd when a colleague is having issues… “Have you tried switching it off and on again”
90% of the time it works, eyes roll, and we all have a laugh
The fucking unplugged pc.
(And the graveyard shift goth)
My old boss called me, said please come to my office… my laptop will not turn on and I cannot figure it out.
I get there, he tells me to please help him, he is probably being stupid.
I look at his laptop, I see his charger plugged in, I follow it down the desk, across the floor all the way to the wall socket where the plug lies…
He had walked the charger’s plug to the wall socket and just left it on the ground.
I plug it in, he sees me do this, laptop turns on, I leave.
Given there was only one writer, and he knew nothing about computing other than how to turn one on, nope.
While I like IT Crowd it’s unfortunately written by a TERF activist so I will never watch it again. Also explains why there is an episode about a trans woman getting beat up
Edit: before you downvote me maybe lookup what kind of activism Graham Linehan has been doing after he made IT Crowd.
A man so abhorrent his wife and family wants nothing to do with him.
Goddamnit. Father Ted and Black Books too. I won’t stop watching because shows are made by more than one guy, I just won’t do it in any way that gives him money.
All three of those sitcoms had excellent comedians and writers in the cast, and they don’t deserve to have their work overshadowed by one man’s terrible views.
I’ve always saw BBT as just a way to re-normalize making fun of neurodivergant people.
I think that’s right but at the same time I think you’re not doing it justice by implying that’s all it is.
And a way of renormalizing misogyny.
The Big Bang Theory was frustratingly bad.
is this not comedy gold?!
Saw a critic call it, “Nerd blackface”
perfection.gif
Blackface is a bit more complicated and disturbing than “pretending to be like a black person for comic effect.” I don’t think it’s appropriate to compare it to to depictions of nerd culture.
It’s what stupid people think smart people sound like. I’ve never been able to watch it, but I remember hearing Sheldon brag about Ubuntu being his favorite Linux distribution? Like, can you imagine someone saying that in a room of Linux nerds?
It’s stupid and disrespectful to geeky people, but it’s not perpetuating harmful and violent narratives.
brag about Ubuntu being his favorite Linux distribution we? Like, can you imagine someone saying that in a room of Linux nerds?
H-hey!
I think the comment was also made by Sheldon? Sheldon’s character should be the kind of person who chews people out on forums for not reading the Arch Linux wiki, or to launch into the “GNU/Linux” copy pasta reflexively when Linux is brought up.
But that would require them to have more then a surface level understanding of the culture they’re making fun of lol.
can you imagine someone saying that in a room of Linux nerds?
Ironically, that would be hilarious.
Omfg, that describes it adequately.
IT crowd is about nerds for nerds. Big Bang theory is about nerds for non nerds. “Nerd blackface” is more succinct though.
Amazing
I like to say that Big Bang Theory was a stupid show about smart people, and Arrested Development was a smart show about stupid people.
Yes, it’s the “Friends” of it’s era - the comedy is in the laugh-track, I mean studio audience.
watched it, it was okey lol. don’t put too much thinking in it
I saw some clips on YT where they removed the laugh track.
It’s really hard to find the show funny when they take out the bit where it tells you when to laugh.
I’ve seen that. Cringeworthy.
Same with Friends and most shows with laugh tracks
Fun fact. That show was filmed in front of a studio audience.
Although I don’t know if they augmented the audience with canned laughter in post.
I hate laugh tracks.
I watched and enjoyed TBBT, but I don’t rewatch it. I saw one of these videos with the laugh track removed and was honestly surprised at how awkward the show was without it. It didn’t change the fact that I liked it when I watched it though.
It’s mostly awkward because suddenly you have long times of silence normally occupied by the laugh track. If it was intended to be without a laugh track there wouldn’t be awkward silence.
Yeah, I’ve wondered what it’d be like if someone did one of those laugh track removal experiments, but re-edited to remove the quiet parts
This is kinda off topic, but there’s a show called Kevin Can Fuck Himself that plays around with sitcom tropes, wife and I enjoyed it a lot.
In the beginning it was kinda funny. But it went downhill pretty fast, got super cringe regarding the guys trying to get girlfriends, then the creepiest one of the lot gets one. Just ugh.
It got so popular, had occasional Star Trek references, even a cameo by Leonard Nimoy, and I still couldn’t get myself to enjoy it. It’s such a a shame.
My grandparents used to watch it. I think it had one (1) funny moment I saw in all the show’s run that I caught when living with them - when Neil DeGrasse Tyson calls up Bill Nye and says “I hear you’ve been talking shit about me”, and Nye immediately hangs up the phone in abject terror.
I watched a lot of it back in the day and by like season 10 (I have no clue how long it ran) I realized it was super boring and bad. There would be jokes as lame as “dude owns a Nintendo 64”. That was the entirety of the joke.
Also there is a long running arc about a main character who is physically incapable of talking to women unless he is intoxicated (aka alcohol).
At some point the “humour” was just pop culture references.
TBBT can be an okay show if you don’t mind the overused surface level nerd culture references, casual misogyny, and Elon Musk’s appearance. Other than that it can be a guilty pleasure of mine.
I’ve watched IT Crowd half a dozen times.
I haven’t managed to finish an episode of BBT before I switch it off in disgust.
In other words, you have insufficient data to make a meaningful comparison.
It is amazing to me how people believe their subjective experiences automatically qualify for criticism.
I mean this is Lemmy. 98% of the people here believe that anyone who downvotes them is a Nazi and a fascist, plus whatever negative adjective you could think about
This place was way better before the exodus from reddit.
I mean people are allowed to like different things. There is no gatekeeping to be done on something as subjective humor
expressing dislike is not gatekeeping though…?
or am i gatekeeping gatekeeping now?
no, but i can gatekeep it for its misogynistic and abelist rhetoric, or its racist depictions, or having musk in an episode.
Right? Like there can be no objective criticism of literature or something.
See also: Community.
Community, IT Crowd, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, Scrubs… The 00’s had a lot of great sitcoms. We didn’t know how good we had it.
Community had less than half a season in the '00s, so calling it an '00s show sitcom seems a bit of a stretch.
Oh wow, in my head I pictured it starting around 2006 or so.
Probably because of that gas leak
My name is Earl
(Since you’re including things that began barely in the 00’s, I’m going to include things that ended in the 00’s)
Friends
Frasier
Both riddled with laughing tracks. Neither is funny either.
Laugh tracks usually have nothing to do with how funny a show’s writing actually is, but studies regularly show that people have a more positive experience with TV comedies when they have a laugh track. I assume it’s probably something parasocial.
