If there was an award for self-awareness, this episode would win the top prize. Community's "Cooperative Calligraphy" starts out with an extremely simple goal: The main characters must find a pen. In classic sitcom form, everything spirals out of control, all the while with Abed proclaiming: "We're stuck in a bottle episode!" While Community is known for its pop-culture references and meta humor, episodes like this prove that it can almost transcend even that format, with a Bottle Episode that works both as a commentary on Bottle Episodes and a terrific Bottle Episode in its own right. Set in on room in the library, this episode wrings all the comedy it can out of a single drawn out witch hunt. A trend you may notice in some of the best bottle episodes: characters obsessed with a seemingly insignificant goal that causes them to fracture in either hilarious or devastating ways. Community is quite clever in making the search for Annie's pen matter ("it's not just a pen, its a principle!") in a comedic, yet curiously relatable fashion. Does it matter where Annie's pen went? Not really. What matters is that it instigated such a brilliant piece of television meta-comedy. Leave it to Community to have the perfect quote to describe Bottle Episodes in general, courtesy of Abed: "They're wall-to-wall facial expressions and emotional nuance. I might as well sit in the corner with a bucket on my head."
Self-evidently a man who writes for the Internet, Robert also writes films, plays, teleplays, and short stories when he's not working on a movie set somewhere. He lives somewhere behind the Hollywood sign.
