10 Things You Learn Rewatching Community
The iconic comedy's best hidden details and lessons...
The best kind of comedy is the kind that demands a second viewing. Some jokes fly by so fast that even if you laugh at them, you don't appreciate the true depth of the joke until you hear it twice. Community is the god king of this kind of comedy on television.
Which should come as no surprise given that this show was created by the all star team of Dan Harmon and the Russo brothers, two names that pretty much everyone knows these days thanks to their work on Rick and Morty and the MCU respectively. But Community was their first big hit, and it has all the trademarks of both creators.
Most of which you notice upon rewatching the show now that it's all on Netflix. This irreverent, cartoonish sitcom hid a LOT of details in the background of the show's plots, a lot of which require careful combing through individual episodes before finding them.
These are the most interesting things you learn from that effort, whether they're bizarre, interesting, or just plain hilarious.
10. This Show COMMITS To Its Running Gags
A good running gag knows exactly how much gas it has in the tank and runs it through until it is completely dry. We all love the cabbage guy from Avatar but if he showed up every episode, you'd want to shove every one of those f%*king cabbages down his throat.
Community understands this better than almost every show of its type out there. Rather than just come up with a few running gags and run them into the ground, they come up with multiple, and just sparse them out across different episodes and attached to different characters.
By now we already know of the most famous example, throughout the first three seasons, different characters mention Beetlejuice, culminating in Annie saying it a third time, and a man dressed as Beetlejuice walks by in the background. It's a blink and you'll miss it joke but one that brilliantly rewards viewers for their dedication.
There are plenty of others out there, such as Pierce's addiction to painkillers in season 2, all of which show the magic you get when a writing team is comprised of exactly the right people on the exact same page.