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Comment count is 42
Nominal - 2015-02-20

God this is the laziest, most rote comedy writing. There has never been a single fucking joke on this show where you didn't know the punchline before it happened.

It's also like Everybody Loves Raymond where it's hugely popular but you can't find a single person in real life who likes it.


Caminante Nocturno - 2015-02-20

I remember someone on this site explaining how the only reason their wife liked it was because their marriage was in trouble, and that she stopped watching it once they sorted it out.


exy - 2015-02-20

I have met a shocking number of people (about 2) who have described this show's writing as "sharp" and as "never missing a beat" or something like that. They were both southern grandpa-types. Construe what you will.


TeenerTot - 2015-02-21

My uncle watched this show, but only because it had hot women on it.
He's dead now.


TeenerTot - 2015-02-21

Oh, those were his words, BTW. He thought it would be shameful to watch for the poorly-written comedy, so he claimed to just be leering at women.


Nominal - 2015-02-21

"If I know Charlie, he'll get out of jail clean up his act, start making it up to people..."

The punchline is going to be how he does it again.

"I dunno. I think I'm going to miss him. He and I were almost becoming buddies." "Really?"

The punchline is going to be a big NAAAAAAAAH

"I want to move where the weather is warm and the men are stupid."

The punchline is going to be how she doesn't have to move to find stupid men.

Fuck this goddamnn black hole of a show. I didn't get angry over the concept of SOMA when I read Brave New World in highschool. I get angry at this fucking show being #1.


Crab Mentality - 2015-02-20

Thank god we're finally done with the worst show on television. I'd rather watch golf or an infomercial than this horrible abortion of a show.

Oh, and I hope Charlie Sheen OD's.


yogarfield - 2015-02-20

Jesus fuck Christ.


oddeye - 2015-02-20

why do you want him to die, child?


Rodents of Unusual Size - 2015-02-20

wouldn't that be masturbation?


Old_Zircon - 2015-02-20

For once it's worth leaving the annotations on.


EvilHomer - 2015-02-20

Man, the people on Youtube really care about this crap.

I thought this show got cancelled years ago?


infinite zest - 2015-02-20

I thought it got cancelled when Charlie Sheen killed a hooker or something. That being said, I like to think of the writers room, talented writers working for garbage that won't end. A few lines of coke up your nose and the piano drop is the perfect solution.


Caminante Nocturno - 2015-02-20

Only bad people like sitcoms. Good people stay away from them.


Seven Arts/H8 Red - 2015-02-20

I'm sure the Charlie Harper character will come back next season as a nominal Supergirl villain.


Binro the Heretic - 2015-02-20

My mother likes this show.

Yeah.

And there was apparently a flashback sequence where everything was done with CGI and Charlie's nose turned into a vacuum cleaner and sucked up spilled sugar.


dairyqueenlatifah - 2015-02-20

Old people fucking love this show and The Big Bang Theory for some reason.

Two of the five people who live in my household are in their 70s and think both shows are comedic genius.

Needs a "thank god it's over" tag.


EvilHomer - 2015-02-20

My theory is that the elderly, having grown up in the Dark Ages, when network television was still a significant cultural force, are irrevocably broken. Having been developmentally stunted at a very young age, it is perhaps no surprise that they find shows like these to be clever and entertaining.


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2015-02-20

I don't like it either, but when I was forced to watch it (before Hulu, and when I only had 4 channels, ) I was forced to admit that it's not that terrible, if you accept the premise that sitcoms aren't terrible. But they sort of are.

For purposes of this discussion, I'm going to define "sitcoms" as shows with a laugh track (Big Bang Theory, Beverly Hillbillies), as opposed to "comedies" which don't have a laugh track (Arrested Development, Community). The difference in style between the two forms is significant enough to qualify them as separate subgenres, if not separate genres.

Sitcoms are a dying form, like Vaudeville, which I submit most of us would find painful to sit through. Even if "Two and a Half Men" was extremely successful, it seems to have been a success with older viewers. My 78 year old Dad likes it, too. I'm sort of on the cusp. I used to like sitcoms, and now I can't stand to watch them, even good ones like Mary Tyler Moore.

Two and a Half Men was strong on sitcom fundamentals. The jokes were good sitcom jokes, which means they were loud, stilted, and pointedly jokey.

Incidentally, one aspect of Two and a Half Men I came to appreciate was the dark premise of two brothers, brought up by an emotionally distant mother, both growing up unable to connect with women, although in diametrically opposite ways. This seems very deliberate, and I respect the effort to bring some tragic undertones to the proceedings.


Nominal - 2015-02-20

They're for people too old to have grown up with the internet, thus never being exposed to any deconstruction humor (Clerks came out at exactly the right time just before the internet took off; today its jokes are a dime a dozen on any given message board). To anyone who spends any time online, all the nerd jokes on BBT were played out 15 years ago, and nothing kills the appeal of wacky unsociable fictional nerds like knowing horrible unsociable real life nerds.

The age range of people who love BBT are under 20 (too young for the humor to be played out) or over 55 (too old to have grown up on the internet). Never met a single fan between.


infinite zest - 2015-02-21

This is a pretty good article that sums it up:

http://io9.com/two-and-a-half-men-was-really-a-black-mirror-ep isode-af-1687061480

Besides this clip, I've never seen any of this show, and I guess now I'll never have to.


infinite zest - 2015-02-21

I'd agree with you as well Nominal, but our parents' (or at least mine) generation had films like All You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex, Annie Hall, well basically everything Woody Allen for a while, as well as sitcoms like All in the Family which broke barriers that most modern network sitcoms won't dare to touch, like the use of the N-word (or maybe that was the Jeffersons). Sure, there was some crap, probably more crap than there is today, but that generation certainly had its chance not to give into this sort of thing.


Nominal - 2015-02-21

I think you just explained why. You're covering a decade and you can count the breakthrough stuff on less than one hand.

Or maybe our parents' generation just got old and gave up. God knows what that's going to look like when we hit that age.

But I'm totally looking forward to future nursing homes having the residents playing online games 24/7, trying to shout "faggot noob" over the mic while their teeth are sitting in a glass.


infinite zest - 2015-02-21

Haha yeah. My parents are about at retirement age, and in a lot of ways they're more cultured than I am. I was conceived at a Clash concert to the best of my knowledge. And they like Tapas! I don't even know what a Tapa is really. Last time I was in a retirement home was when I was visiting my grandpa-in-law, and granted it was Manitowoc Wisconsin, not necessarily the cultural epicenter of the country, but it was still the same shit food and soap operas and Price is Right. Same was the case 10 years before in Portland Oregon when my grandma was in one. When all the boomers retire will they just hire fancy chefs and have Downton Abbey on TV all the time and play Bob Dylan instead of Lawrence Welk?


BHWW - 2015-02-20

YEAH, TAKE THAT CHARLIE SHEEN OVER EVENTS FOUR YEARS IN THE PAST ALREADY, AND THUS I CHUCK LORRE AM AVENGED


oddeye - 2015-02-20

what was all the piano dropping about?


EvilHomer - 2015-02-20

Perhaps Mr Lorre drives a Morris Marina...?


Dib - 2015-02-20

I think Sheen dropped a piano on his kid or his kid's dog or something.


BHWW - 2015-02-20

A whole episode devoted to getting back at a lead actor for flaking out years ago, I can only hope Lorre's next endeavor, perhaps a sitcom about a married couple whose antics make Leroy and Loretta Lockhorn appear pleasant in comparison, will go well for this master producer of extruded TV-based humor-type byproduct.


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2015-02-21

Oh, come on, is anyone really so painfully humorless and literal as to take this as some kind of "revenge"? its a joke, for christ's sake. I don't know enough about the context to have an opinion about whether it's a good or bad joke, but at this point, even Charlie Sheen has rebooted his career by making fun of his own meltdown.

It's pretty standard for a show to look back at its history for the finale. It's a way of tying the whole thing together.


RocketBlender - 2015-02-20

Hope you guys stayed for the bonus scene after the credits.


Hooker - 2015-02-20

So the show was all about Charlie Sheen even after he was fired?


Jet Bin Fever - 2015-02-20

I feel sorry for everyone involved with this and everyone duped into thinking it was good television.


Rodents of Unusual Size - 2015-02-20

Wait so Two and a Half men lost one of the men AND the half-man (halfling?) and so now it's Two men and a Hambeast?

Or was.


Bort - 2015-02-20

"Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place on Speed Dial"


dairyqueenlatifah - 2015-02-21

Charlie Sheen turned into a crazed drug addict, Angus Jones turned into a crazed religious fundie, and Ashton Kutcher divorced Demi Moore right after he took on the starring role. He also somehow ended up in that godawful Annie remake.

This show was fucking cursed.


duck&cover - 2015-02-20

Should have been a rusty chainsaw.


That guy - 2015-02-21

I honestly forgot what laugh tracks were like before I saw this.
They seem to be entirely self-parodying. How does anyone stand it.

Also, one of my college roomates/friends/enemies wound up writing for Chuck Lorre on Big Bang Theory.
He was the guy who stole jokes uncredited constantly, from friends and stand-up comedians. You had to call him on his shit constantly and he still didn't care.
He probably owns a house from working on that show.


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2015-02-21

>>I think you just explained why. You're covering a decade and you can count the breakthrough stuff on less than one hand.

Nonsense.

>>They're for people too old to have grown up with the internet, thus never being exposed to any deconstruction humor (Clerks came out at exactly the right time just before the internet took off; today its jokes are a dime a dozen on any given message board). To anyone who spends any time online, all the nerd jokes on BBT were played out 15 years ago, and nothing kills the appeal of wacky unsociable fictional nerds like knowing horrible unsociable real life nerds.

What? Two words, bitch: Monty Python.

Fuck your condescending bullshit about how we don't understand your humor. It's the laugh track. For decades, TV comedy was cued to the artificial rhythm of an imaginary audience reaction, and that meant it was locked into an archaic form that dated back to Vaudeville, and that was dictated by the artificial rhythm of the laugh machine. The networks demanded it. Back in the seventies, the producers of MASH complained bitterly about the network requiring a laugh track, and they deliberately turned it down, and released the excellent finale as as TV movie, thereby finally breaking free of the convention at the end. Other shows used a live audience to create a more natural live theater ambiance, but either way the writing was always structured around "laughs". You can always tell when the punchline is coming, because you're supposed to.

The Simpsons may have been the beginning of the long overdue change, but the earliest live action half hour comedy that I can recall that didn't have a laugh track was "Malcolm in the Middle". That was 2000. Fifteen years is a lot of time in a young person's life, not so much in mine. In that time, the old sitcom form has gone from the rule to the exception. I can't imagine anyone who didn't grow up with this shit tolerating the few holdouts.

Like I said, I've been forced to watch Chuck Lorre sitcoms back when I had fewer options, and while I will still only watch them if forced, shows like Two and a Half Men and the Big Bang Theory aren't really as terrible as they seem, they're just an archaic form like Greek tragediy, or Shakespearean comedy. If the roles of of Brita, Annie and Shirley in "Community" were played by men, as they were in the theater of Shakespeare, it would interfere with your enjoyment much the same way as this painfully artificial comedy dialogue does.

Incidentally, what about that Theme Song? Can anybody think of ANY television theme music more annoying than that insipid menmenmenmenmenmen bullshit?


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2015-02-21

God, I just can't seem to master the reply button.


EvilHomer - 2015-02-21

An archaic form like a *shit* Greek tragedy, maybe. A Shakespearean comedy that's *not funny and never was*! You're correct in that laugh tracks stunted your generation's growth (Wikipedia's got some really interesting quotes on the subject of laugh tracks that demonstrate just how cynical the TV hacks of your day were), but you are not correct in saying that Lorre's shows aren't as terrible as they seem. That is your years of laugh-track trauma talking.


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2015-02-23

Don't be a putz, Homer. Where does someone who takes such obvious childish pleasure in being a dick get off talking about anyone's growth being stunted? If my growth had been stunted, that would mean that I wasn't able to enjoy more sophisticated comedies like Community and Arrested Development. Also, saying that Two and a Half isn't as terrible as it seems isn't exactly setting the bar very high.

I am not a Chuck Lorre fan. I'm just trying to address the appeal of the show for older audiences, so there can be something on this page other than circle-jerking snobs demonstrating how superior they are by saying the same thing over and over.


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