big bang theory is about what dumb people think smart people are like.
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
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Not true. Blackface can be funny.
It’s just a dude dressed up like a dude, pretending to be another due.
Anyone down voting you never saw tropic thunder or did and have no sense of humor, probably think big bang theory is banging.
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.
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”.
How can you stay entertaining when you were never entertaining in the first place?
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.
Yes, it’s a horrible caricature, Henry Cavill is basically the template for most geeks these days.
No explanation necessary:
This changes my perspective on the entire show… I’m going to have to watch it again for the 152nd time with this in mind now.
I might require some explanation.
Autism.
Masking is a strategy used by some autistic people, consciously or unconsciously, to appear non-autistic. While this strategy can help them get by at school, work and in social situations, it can have a devastating impact on mental health, sense of self and access to an autism diagnosis
Oh shit, I’m a high masker.
Getting through the day be like:
Subject: Fire. “Dear Sir stroke Madam, I am writing to inform you of a fire which has broken out at the premises of…” No, that’s too formal. “Dear Sir stroke Madam. Fire, exclamation mark. Fire, exclamation mark. Help me, exclamation mark. 123 Carrendon Road. Looking forward to hearing from you. All the best, Maurice Moss.”
0118, 999, 881, 999, 119, 725…3.
Oh good. I first thought this was some racist image editing joke based on skin colour. And everyone was happily going along with it.
If he’s low masking, how did he just have a chat about that ludicrous display last night?
I love this so much.
This image?
The show?
“Yes!” 💯
Because, similar to blackface in its time, people love to point and laugh at exaggerated caricatures of something different from themselves.
And CBS airs lowest common denominator garbage that the masses devour.
The term you’re looking for is minstrel shows https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minstrel_show
BBT is a minstrel show to humiliate smart people, anti intelligence sentiment is high in America
The Big Bang Theory was frustratingly bad.
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).
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 hate 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 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.
is this not comedy gold?!
watched it, it was okey lol. don’t put too much thinking in it
Saw a critic call it, “Nerd blackface”
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.
can you imagine someone saying that in a room of Linux nerds?
Ironically, that would be hilarious.
brag about Ubuntu being his favorite Linux distribution we? Like, can you imagine someone saying that in a room of Linux nerds?
H-hey!
Why???
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.
Amazing
Omfg, that describes it adequately.
perfection.gif
IT crowd is about nerds for nerds. Big Bang theory is about nerds for non nerds. “Nerd blackface” is more succinct though.
The big bang theory was not for geeks or nerds. It was pure shit.
I’m a geek and a nerd and i loved it, sorry.
Hush you! Can’t have people not joining in the dogpile on a TV show that ended 6 years ago…
Misogynistic pure shit.
I always felt like it was a show for moms of geeks and nerds that missed their kids once they moved out.
It had a good few first episodes with fun geeky jokes, but it quickly turned to bad jokes and lazy stereotypes and relied loosely on stereotypes to contain the geekyness.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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He doubled down exponentially because he can’t be wrong.
Which episode?
Edit: oof
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.
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No no IT Crowd is a show about sysadmins, not geeks lol. There’s a very clear difference.
Yes, in the proportion of furries vs weebs.
And Moss was a nerd not a geek. He wasn’t obsessing about comics, videogames etc. like the characters in BBT.
Flashbacks to the rett & link “nerd VS geek” music video
That came out 12 years ago
The IT crowd came out almost 20 years ago
I also think this is a cultural difference. The comic book obsession seems more like an american thing. In the Netherlands and Belgium there is also a big comic book appreciation, but it’s much less about heroism and more humorous.
Okay but he didn’t obsess about the British equivalent of comic books either. Geeks obsess about consumerist pop culture whether it’s comics, LEGO or Harry Potter. And Moss did non of that.
I loved both shows. IT crowd made me laugh harder making it the better show.
Young Sheldon on the other hand was very very good.
I watched both, and yes.
I watched none, and yes.
Start here
I watched only TBBT, and no.
You should explore your horizon a bit more, it is a great show.
Yes
Exclamation mark
Yes
Exclamation mark
To whom it may concern… No too formal
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.
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 only seen the one episode of BBT, I think the first one, where a goddamn theoretical physicist spends a whole day forgetting the basic properties of light.
My family stared at me the whole time, expecting me to find it funny. Then THEY got mad at me when I said that was the dumbest shit I’ve seen in a while. Later I found out that Sheldon uses Ubuntu and brags about it.
But, okay, dumb jokes aside - the show doesn’t explore any concepts or situations in new and interesting ways And THAT’S why it’s bad.
Shelden uses linux. Hahahaha. That’s it. A good writer could make a whole episode about that, alone, and it would be hilarious. Imagine him on internet forums. Imagine him fumbling during a talk because his laptop wouldn’t work with whatever vidchat/system/software his hosts used, and getting haughty about it. Imagine Sheldon traveling across the country to “fix” an entire auditoriums tech to run on Arch after his failed remote speech. Walking away all “You’re Welcome” as the staff can’t figure out how the fuck to use it.
Funny, but now you’re talking about the layman being cut out. Ratings won’t survive and it dies after one season. But that would be better lol
I mean, the IT Crowd ran for 5 seasons while actually being funny to people working in the field it portrays, unlike Big Bang Theory which many nerds (not just physicists) find un-funny
As a science nerd I think BBT is very funny, even when the writers make such glaring errors as having Sheldon stop his self-destruct device just before its countdown reached zero - even though he modeled it after Star Trek, specifically referenced a TOS episode the self-destruct was featured in, and even used the same password. Any true Trek fan knows the Enterprise self-destruct was unstoppable after the countdown reached 5 seconds - a fact that comes up in the very episode Sheldon mentioned. A deplorable writing error, to be sure, but I think such things are amusing in their own way.
The only remotely objective measurement I know is that enough people enjoyed the show to make it last 12 seasons. Y’all are welcome to your own opinions, but all the absolutist pontificating is pretty silly. There’s no Kelvin scale of funny.
IT Crowd is hysterically funny as well, but it’s written differently (not correctly or wrongly, just different) and was written and performed for a different audience, in a different country. There’s really no point arguing which was funnier.
“I’ve only seen the one episode…”
Sheldon: “You certainly put a lot of effort into expressing an opinion you’re woefully unqualified to form.”
People be forgetting that the first season or two of the big bang theory was legitimately very good.
The first season or two of the IT crowd was… oh yeah, the whole show.
IT crowd’s best episodes were best-in-class. tnetennba. But it had a lot of meh too.
The thing about the IT crowd is they always try and walk it in
