In the world of NBC’s “Community,” Chevy Chase walks the university corridors as a who-knows-how-old returning student, Joel McHale (wait, isn’t that the guy from The Soup?) is a washed up lawyer always ready to talk himself out of a mess and Ken Jeong (think crazy Asian mobster in The Hangover) is a self-deprecating Spanish teacher.
And the list goes on to make up the show’s collection of eclectic characters who attend Greendale Community College in Colorado. The group assembles under the ruse of studying Spanish but inevitably end up in some hair-brained adventure each week.
While it’s no The Office or 30 Rock, the show has its moments and is quickly becoming a decent way to spend a half our before the major primetime comedies hit on Thursday night at 9 p.m.
M. Garrett Bauman, an emeritus professor of English at Monroe Community College in New York, however, doesn’t think so.
In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Bauman argues that the show’s cast of quirky characters (a divorcee, a former football star and a once straight A high school student to name a few) are not representative of students at a real community college. Bauman says the show overlooks people too poor to go to an expensive four-year university, people on welfare, high school slackers etc.
“I suppose students truly shattered under life’s wheel and those seeking technical jobs don’t make for perky television material.”
Bauman concedes that it is, of course, made that way for comedic effect. And in an effort to entertain extorts the assumptions many people make about the institution.
“Community does not capture the real community college—as if there were one. But neither do M*A*S*H, Scrubs, or The Office capture actual institutions. Comedy exaggerates, romanticizes, and deconstructs. Community plays off stereotypes and clichés, reinforcing and puncturing them at the same time.”
All we have to say is, of course its not real. That’s what comedy is. That’s what two hours on Thursday night on NBC is. In the real world, a boss like Michael Scott would have been fired years ago. A doctor like J.D. Dorian would never be able to get away with daydreaming constantly on the job while people are dying around him. And Tracy Jordan would be a washed up self-absorbed former TV star who was once on a sketch comedy series. And no one wants to watch those shows.