Laugh Track Mondays…

April 14, 2008

“The Jerusalem Duality” The Big Bang Theory

Any show with a laugh track generally turns me off, but these two pretty much amuse me enough to attempt to ignore it. However, tonight both shows almost made me wish I hadn’t watched live. The commercials made it almost not worth it. So if you’ve never seen these shows, don’t judge based on tonight’s episodes. Let’s start with a Bang…

I love nerds and geeks (no, not the kind who eat weird sh*t for the hell of it). Smart guys turn me on, so this show was a must-see for me when it first started airing. I have to say, I’m a little disappointed. The jokes are predictable, the acting is, for the most part, terrible, and they somehow managed to find the most annoying chick on Earth to play the love interest. Still, there is Sheldon. Ahh, Sheldon. He has the best lines, and the writers are catching on to the fact that he is the only funny actor on the show. Tonight’s episode was Sheldon-centered, in that he has an identity crisis when a 15-year-old Asian kid appears at the university and criticizes Sheldon’s research. When Sheldon realizes the kid is right, his world crumbles around him. The rest of the episode involved Sheldon’s attempts to find a new calling while annoying all of his friends in the process. Sheldon wins in the end, though, when the kid scores with a chick, successfully distracting him from future Nobel prizes. As Sheldon says, “Screw him, he’s weak.”

Though Sheldon can normally do no wrong in my eyes, tonight was not one of his strongest episodes. I did enjoy Sheldon’s dig at Penny when she, puzzled as always, mentions she doesn’t understand why this kid being smarter than him is such a big deal. In true Sheldon form, he replies, “Of course you don’t. You’ve never excelled at anything.” Only Sheldon has the guts to tell this girl how dumb she really is, as the rest of the cast is too busy drooling over her to make even a semi-intelligent remark in her presence, which doesn’t make sense to me. She’s just…not that hot. I was also entertained by Sheldon’s idea to win the Nobel Peace Prize by building a new Jerusalem (Nuevo Jerusalem!) in the Mexican desert in order to solve the Middle Eastern crisis (Good Lord.) He even gets the line of the night, “Engineering…where the noble, semi-skilled laborers execute the vision of those who think and dream. Hello oompa-loompas of science!”
Unfortunately, every other joke fell flat. This show is at its best when it underplays the stereotype it’s based on. Johnny Galecki (Leonard) seems to be mocking the entire idea he could possibly be a nerd in real life, and it always pulls me right out of the episode. Don’t deny it, Johnny…You’re typecast as a whiny loser in your roles for a reason.
Ack.