- Sepinwall stranger things season 2 episode 1 series#
- Sepinwall stranger things season 2 episode 1 tv#
And of course the rake is also Bart Simpson: the Road Runner to Bob’s Wile E. The rakes stand in for every twist of fate that sabotages Bob’s plan, every indignity heaped upon him, every eventuality his supposed genius could not foresee, every moment of potential glory snatched from his grasp. Everywhere Bob steps, a rake, a rake, another rake.
Sepinwall stranger things season 2 episode 1 series#
What simpler way to confirm Bob’s fears than by topping the lead-up to the gag-Bob being mangled and torn while hanging beneath the Simpsons’ station wagon en route to witness protection at Cape Feare Lake-with a series of rakes to the face? That the onslaught of the rakes is so tedious, so basic, so not personal, only makes it worse. Finally, the rake gag is a bit of character-based humor with actual philosophical overtones: Sideshow Bob, who keeps trying and failing to murder his young nemesis, Bart Simpson, throughout the show’s run, fears that the universe is indifferent to his desires, and may even derive joy from watching him suffer.
As David Letterman demonstrated on his late-night shows when he repeated the same knowingly lame catchphrase for weeks on end, sometimes a gag is funny the first time, less funny the second, still less funny the third, then ceases to be funny at all, until the audacity of continuing to repeat it wears down your resistance and makes you laugh again. At the same time, though, it is also conceptual humor, because it is also about the idea of excess. The sight of Bob stepping on rake after rake after rake is a monument to comic excess, pushing one joke past all reasonable limits-a gag on the same wavelength of Jonathan Winters in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World systematically destroying an entire gas station with his bare hands, or Laurel and Hardy in Big Business repeatedly trying and failing to get a piano up a flight of stairs. Layer one is the lowest form of humor, violent slapstick. The scene, from the classic season 5 episode “Cape Feare,” represents the whole spectrum of humor folded and refolded into a single gag. You could start by showing them Sideshow Bob stepping on eight rakes in a row in under thirty seconds.
If, by some chance, you stumbled across a person who had never seen a frame of The Simpsons, and they wanted to know why it was so popular, so respected, so beloved, how would you explain it? After you’ve digested that, head over to Alan’s site to read their essay honoring another beloved show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Since we know you’ll want to start debating the rank even before the book is in your hands, Matt and Alan shared with us the section discussing their pick for the best show ever, one that will come as no surprise to Vulture readers: The Simpsons.
Sepinwall stranger things season 2 episode 1 tv#
Today sees the release of TV (THE BOOK), a collection of essays and arguments from our critic Matt Zoller Seitz and HitFix’s Alan Sepinwall that determine the best 100 American TV shows of all time.
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