Wowie zowie, 3.5 readers. All I can say is:
What a twist! So many twists in this episode and they were all very unexpected.
I won’t spoil it with the details, but it was the best episode of the entire series. My only worry is I don’t know if they will ever be able to top it. I hope it’s not all downhill from here.
What say you, 3.5 readers?
Are you Geekensteins watching it? Tweet along with me – @bookshelfbattle
Hey 3.5 readers. The season we’ve waited so long for is finally here. John Snow vs. Cersei vs. the Khaleesi vs. the Whitewalkers.
You know we’ve been hoping that John Snow and the Khaleesi will take shit over and bring Westeros into a new age of peace and prosperity, but given what we know of George R.R. Martin’s penchant for surprises, aliens will probably land and blow everything up right at the end or something.
What say you, 3.5 readers?
Sex, feminism and trapping a man.
BQB here with a review of Ali Wong’s stand-up comedy Netflix special, Ali Wong: Baby Cobra.
I consider myself a comedic historian and to the best of my knowledge, this special marks the first time that a comedian took to the stage while seven months pregnant.
With her baby bump on full display and not slowing her down a bit, Fresh off the Boat writer Ali Wong makes all manner of freaky sexual jokes that might offend your virgin ears, puts political correctness through a meat grinder, dishes on all the hilarious methods she used to “trap” her Harvard Business School graduate husband, and even sends up feminism (all women had to do was stay home and some bitch had to go and ruin it).
Her words (paraphrasing), not mine. Different comedians are definitely able to say different types of things and get away with it in today’s politically correct age.
I’d never heard of Ali before and just watched her special on a lark but I was glad I did. The one thing I notice is she speaks with almost a devilish charm, like she’s trying to come across as evil to make the jokes work yet you are also left with the impression that she isn’t half that evil off the stage.
Then again, how would I know? I never asked her trapped husband.
OJ Simpson meetings. The Age of Spin. Care bears. Bill Cosby.
BQB here with a review of Dave Chapelle’s Netflix special.
After a ten year hiatus, Dave Chapelle is back in the game and at 42, he hasn’t lost the spring in his step. Though he does look and come off as a bit older and wiser, he’s still got that ability to drop laugh out loud truth bombs. That’s no easy feat, and even more difficult in today’s politically correct, “naughty jokes are so offensive” landscape we seem to be living in.
You don’t want to hear me tell Dave’s jokes, so just watch his special instead. To summarize without spoiling, he’s shaken about Bill Cosby (imagine learning someone you have loved and admired for years was hiding a disturbing secret). He feels bad for millennials because he was raised by the Care Bears to care, whereas today, so many terrible things are happening on the news that it is impossible to care about it all. Youngsters are living in “The Age of Spin” i.e. no one’s looking for the truth anymore, but just the best version they agree with.
I loved Chapelle’s Show from the early 2000s. I have great memories of popping in his DVDs and watching them over and over again. I wish Dave had kept up with his act over the years but then again, maybe there are some stars that shine so bright they need a rest before they can shine again.
Dave is still shining. Shine on, Dave Chapelle. Shine on.
SPOILERS!
You know 3.5 readers, The Walking Dead Makes me sad, not due to the post-apocalyptic landscape, but rather, because there are all these women who have men that have died and they are obsessed with avenging them.
Do you think Video Game Rack Fighter would avenge me if I were to be vanquished by a super villain? Doubtful. She’d shrug her shoulders, go, “Meh,” then return to playing another game of Car Thief Mayhem.
In this episode, the two women that the late Abraham was boinking (behind each others’ backs) team up to avenge their man’s death. This makes me jealous of Abraham, not because he’s dead (that’s nothing to be jealous of) but because the two women loved him so much that they are willing to put the anger they have at each other over banging the man they thought was theirs in order to avenge him.
I don’t have a woman willing to avenge me. Hell, I don’t even have a woman willing to make me a sandwich.
Sasha and Rosita are a formidable team. Call them “Abe’s Babes.” What say you, 3.5 readers?
They’re broke. They’re girls. They’re 2 broke girls.
BQB here with a…wait for it…review of two broke girls.
2011 was an up and down year for comedian Whitney Cummings. The show she starred in, Whitney, premiered and it was ultra awful. Even so, NBC kept it going long after they should have pulled the blog.
I don’t even know how to explain it. The best I can do is that it was a show that was supposed to be funny and yet, everyone on the show was beautiful, they all made a lot of money doing jobs like “blogger” and they all complained about their problems. Ultimately, characters with Manhattan problems just don’t play in Poughkeepsie. Jerry Seinfeld was the last comic to make that schtick work.
Yet, that year, the show Whitney created, 2 Broke Girls, premiered and it’s been going on strong on CBS ever since. As the show’s title suggests, Max (Kat Dennings) and Caroline (Beth Behrs) are two broke girls, struggling as poorly paid waitresses and living as roommates in a run down apartment.
They toil away at a diner, where they endlessly harass their diminutive boss Han (Matthew Moy) with one stereotypically Asian joke after another, mostly revolving around Han’s height, or lack thereof.
Max and Caroline are the female version of The Odd Couple. Max has been poor and boorish her whole life, whereas Caroline was raised in wealth and luxury, only to fall to the bottom of the heap when her father is arrested and sent to prison for running a Bernie Madoff type scam. Thus, Max teaches Caroline how to slum it, and Caroline makes an effort to give Max some class, though those efforts are rarely successful.
Overall, no one ever speaks normally but rather, the dialogue has jokes crowbarred in from every last angle. Most of those jokes never land but rather, are of the so bad they’re good variety.
Surprisingly, the show revolves around a lot of stereotype humor. In addition to endless jokes about Han’s Asian heritage, the girls are also friends with a duo of Polish immigrants, Oleg and Sofie (Jonathan Kite and Jennifer Coolidge aka Stiffler’s Mom from American Pie). Oleg and Sofie are portrayed as as being exceptionally dumb (i.e. the worst of all Polish stereotypes) and yet in many ways they often ending up providing the girls with sage like advice, often on accident.
Garret Morris, an alum from SNL’s golden age, rounds out the cast as Earl, the plucky diner cashier who shouts out a joke or a dig at random from time to time.
You know, I’m no prude when it comes to humor. In fact, I’ve often opined on this fine site that people need to lighten up and chill out if we’re all going to ever get along in this great big melting pot that is America. Even so, I avoid ethnic/stereotypical humor like the plague because I don’t want to offend people and/or have a picket line outside BQB HQ, so I’m surprised Whitney doesn’t have a similar picket line outside Whitney HQ.
I mean, it’s a funny show and I don’t see any intent on the part of the writers to emotionally wound anyone, but literally every episode there’s someone being made fun of their ethnicity, or there are gay dudes talking with a flamboyant lisp or something. Whitney has somehow unbolted the magic formula to allow her to make these jokes and not get run out of Hollywood on a rail. (FYI I’m not saying that I’m some sort of evil person that wants that formula).
Ultimately, I enjoy the show, but I tend to take it or leave it. Its the one show that I watch if I need something mindless to preoccupy my time, but I never watched it from the beginning and I often can go like ten episodes before checking back in and jump right back in without feeling like I need to go back and watch those ten episodes. You can jump right in too, it’s not like you’re going to miss any great plot points. Just Max making jokes about her boobs.
STATUS: Moderately shelf-worthy, though to the show’s credit, it may never “Jump the Shark” because the show has had a “We’re funny because we jump the shark every episode” kind of a feel.
Nerds. So many nerds.
BQB here with a review of CBS’ The Big Bang Theory. SPOILERS ABOUND.
Now in it’s tenth (my God, time moves so fast) season, this show follows the shenanigans of Cal Tech scientists Leonard, Sheldon, Howard and Raj (Johnny Galecki, Jim Parsons, Simon Helberg and Kunal Nayyar, respectively).
Oh, and all but Raj have significant others. As of the tenth season, Leonard is married to hot next door neighbor babe/non-nerd struggling actress turned pharmaceutical rep Penny (Kaley Cuoco), Howard is married to short, sweet sounding yet gets angry often Bernadette (Melissa Rauch), and Sheldon is currently dating Amy (Mayim Bialik in her best role since Blossom.) Alas, Raj remains single and strikes out with the ladies on a regular basis.
The one thing I notice when I talk to people about this show is that they either love it or hate it, but there’s little room for opinions that are in-between. People who hate it feel this is a show that gives you a stereotypical view of a nerd, i.e. that all nerds are scientists and love comic books and so on. My usual reply is, “Yeah. Nerds are nerds and nerds do nerd things.”
In the show’s defense, it would be one thing if all the actors/actresses weren’t nerds in real life. One thing I hate is the Hollywood version of a nerd, i.e. where they take a hunk or a babe and just whip a pair of glasses on him/her. That’s essentially engaging in “nerd face” if you will.
I get the impression that all of the actors/actresses are nerds in real life, save Kaley Cuoco who is not a nerd and that is fine because she plays the hot neighbor girl that Leonard drools over. Jim Parsons, in particular, strikes me as a super deluxe mega nerd, so much so that I’m not sure if his career as an actor would have ever taken off had he not landed the role of Dr. Sheldon Cooper.
By the way, don’t we all know a Sheldon Cooper of sorts? Perhaps not to such a Sheldony degree, but surely we all know someone who we wish would show more empathy, someone who is super smart when it comes to book learning but incredibly dumb when it comes to human interaction. FYI if you don’t know anyone like that then you might be that person.
Further criticism might come from the fact that Leonard lusts after Penny rather than, say, a nerd girl in his league. My reply is that a) in earlier seasons Leonard, finding it impossible to gain any ground with Penny, does give nerd girls a try and they treat him just as shabbily. In my personal experience, sometimes when it comes to the dating world, nerds can be worse to fellow nerds than non-nerds and b) at times, the show has flipped the script and made it out as though Penny is the one at a disadvantage, i.e. having never gone to college yet dating a scientist with a doctorate.
Ultimately, there’s a give and take, back and forth between Leonard and Penny that’s fun to watch. We male nerds tend to chase after hot non-nerd babes like dogs chase after cars. In this show, Leonard basically shows us the hilarity that ensues when a nerd actually catches a hot babe, i.e. he’s that dog who catches the car and now needs to figure out what to do.
Throw in creepy weirdo Howard and perpetually single Raj and you’ve got a sitcom.
Count me in as one of the people who like the show. Admittedly, I did not watch it for years, but only because for years it was up against the NBC Thursday mega block that featured The Office, Parks and Recreation, Thirty Rock and Community.
Once that block ended, I started binge watching Big Bang and now I’m all caught up. And yes, there are nerds who have tried to tell me that Community was the better nerd show. To that, I just wonder why the nerd shows just can’t get along. The more nerd shows, the merrier.
I’m impressed by the show’s ability to make jokes about incredibly complicated scientific concepts. Sheldon and Leonard will be working on an experiment and say something complicated yet funny. I won’t understand the complications but oddly, I’ll still understand why the joke is funny. There are also little things, like the way Sheldon rips on Howard for being an engineer. I never knew scientists dumped on engineers.
Ironically, it is possible to be a geek and not a nerd. Nerds are super smart and love comics and fantasy. Geeks also love comics and fantasy, yet aren’t necessarily super smart. That’s why I’d say Community was more of a geek show than a nerd show, but again, geeks and nerds must learn to love one another, largely because we’re so nerdy and geeky that no one cool will have us.
To the show’s credit, there’s even a geek. Stuart (Kevin Sussman) regularly appears as the gang’s not that bright but super geeky pal/comic book store owner.
Also, the girlfriends make the show. The early seasons, where Leonard, Howard, and Raj are single sad-sacks are a tad depressing. Sheldon is single in those days too but he’s sort of beyond human emotion and doesn’t seem to notice or care. While Penny is Leonard’s love interest from the beginning, things get funnier when Bernadette and Amy are brought into the mix.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. My one complaint is I feel like it has been ages since Penny put Sheldon to sleep with a rousing ballad of “Soft kitty, warm kitty, little ball of fur..”
This is an outrage, 3.5 readers. I’ve become so used to watching the pornographic Lord of the Rings fantasy hour every April-May for years now and now they have the audacity to make me wait until July.
What say you, 3.5? My official reaction:
Bookshelf Battle 