Stuff people should be watching, part 2

Community, which is my favorite new show this year. If you've never seen it, what's wrong with you? it's about seven very different (slightly crazy) people who form a Spanish study group at a community college in Greendale, Colorado. The study group was initially a ploy so that Jeff, a lawyer who was disbarred after his bachelor's degree was deemed invalid, could score with the hot chick in his class, but everybody's kind of bonded and now they're really good friends.

So, why do I like it? It's straight-up hilarious, for one thing. The cast is stellar. One of the things I love about it is that the characters are funny in just about every combination you can think of - the show does a good job of mixing it up so that different characters get to play off each other every week.

But I think the best thing about Community is the way they use meta jokes and references. It's sort of a defining characteristic of the show, particularly since Abed is a pop culture junkie who relates to the world through movies and TV. Thus, the show is ridiculously self-aware and the references come at a rapid-fire pace. But what I've noticed about the last couple episodes (where they did an episode-long extended homage to Goodfellas and then action movies) is that the jokes are funny even if you don't get the reference.

One of the pitfalls of pop culture is that it's not the same for everybody, whether because of generational differences or cultural differences between countries. (BtVS, for example, sometimes loses its international fans with very American references.) Community has addressed this head-on in some cases - like when Troy says, "It's a cookie wand. Me and Jeff made it because it made you look more like the Cookie Crisp wizard, which is not even a reference I get because the Cookie Crisp mascot when I was growing up wasn't a wizard. It was a burglar."

But the brilliance here is that I've never seen Goodfellas, and I still thought the chicken finger crime syndicate was fantastic. I don't need to identify every action movie being spoofed to find the paintball war hilarious. Because - as Alan Sepinwall recently pointed out - everything they do is "tied to honest efforts at characterization to work long-term. The Goodfellas episode was ultimately about how Abed and Jeff each relate to other people. A recent episode where uptight study group members Annie and Shirley turned into a pair of bickering buddy cops was largely about how both of them resented how they were perceived by the group."

The jokes come from the characters, not the other way around. Plenty of shows are guilty of bending a character just to get a good punchline, and ultimately I think viewers resent that. I know I certainly do (I'm looking at you, Bones). When the references are funny not because it's a reference, but because it's a character moment, then it works whether you get the reference or not. And if you DO get it? Bonus. You get to laugh doubly hard.