The verdict is in: Community isn’t funny. I completed the first season this week, and I hate to disappoint all you hardcore fans out there, but this show isn’t the comedic gem you claim it is. I’m all for giving a series time to develop, but Community has taken up 525 hours of my life already.
Its formula isn’t that far off from South Park or The Simpsons really. All three are packed with pop culture references, movie parodies, and in-jokes. All three are fairly self-aware and ironic, but Community is nowhere near as funny as those series. This might have something to do with it being live-action. On The Simpsons, when they spoof something like Stanley Kubrick movies, the animated format allows the writers more leeway with the plot, putting the characters into situations that can sometimes border on the surreal. They also don’t have to rely as much on logic or common sense. But in a live-action series, the suspension of disbelief threshold isn’t as high, and in Community’s case, can only go so far.
The episode “Contemporary American Poultry” for example, is meant to be a riff on Goodfellas, and the plot is tied around the group’s efforts to gain control over the school’s chicken fingers operation, with Abed playing the Ray Liota part. The problem with this episode is that we’re all familiar with Goodfellas by now because it’s on almost every friggin’ day, so the joke sort of wears thin after a while; there’s nothing funny or new in Community’s handling of the material.
(There’s also a small reference to the door-closing scene at the end of The Godfather, which has been recycled to death already. Thanks guys).
I had a similar problem with the follow-up episode “Modern Warfare,” when the campus descends into chaos over a paintball tournament. This was meant to be a spoof of the action genre, and yes, Jeff waking up to find the school covered in paint provided some nice absurdity to the episode, but the rest of it feels like a retread of better spoofs (this is the umpteenth time I’ve heard some variation of “come with me if you want to live” from Terminator). Seriously, haven’t we all watched Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz by now?
I also find the show’s dialog too heavy with pop culture references, and Abed is the worst offender. I get that that’s how his character relates to people, but I also think he's used as a device for the writers to explain their dated references. I don’t need someone to explain to me that Britta and Jeff’s sexual tension is like Ross and Rachel’s on Friends.
And that’s my biggest problem with Community; it’s trying to hard to be ironic by recycling clichés from old sitcoms and trying to make them seem new by having the characters refer back to those same sitcoms. This is a post-post-modern comedy that hasn’t figured out how to turn itself into an actual comedy.
Agreed!