I don’t mean that the joke just isn’t funny, I want to know a joke that almost makes you want to fast-forward through the scene.
How rude they are to Jerry in Parks & Rec. Doing a rewatch of it now and wow it is way worse than I remembered, and starts way earlier. It’s not a flanderisation thing, there was a season 2 joke that made me have to pause and go online just to see how many other people felt the same way as me.
Watching Parks & Rec for the first time, and I also noticed this. IMO it’s missing something, maybe if only one of the characters acted that way towards him or something it would be better. He’s pretty much Meg from Family Guy, and I never really cared for that dynamic either.
I find it funny because of the sheer absurdity of it. There’s absolutely no reason to dislike Jerry. He affable and unassuming, a good family man and just generally a good guy. Yet everyone inexplicably hates him, even Chris. It’s makes absolutely no sense and that disconnect is what makes it funny to me.
If they hated him for a reason it would be mean spirited. Instead, it’s just over the top silly and fits in with the humor of the show.
The bit where Leslie throws his painting in the lake is one of my favorite moments. It’s just so exorbitantly stupid that it makes me laugh.
It’s the opposite of the Lil’ Sebastian thing, where there’s that horse that everyone idolizes for no discernible reason. Although with that, there’s the one character who doesn’t understand why they do that, so maybe that’s what the Jerry thing needed? Or perhaps that would have made it even sadder lol.
“no discernible reason”!? I would murder everyone in this room to bring Lil Sebastian back for 5 minutes.
Personally I don’t have as much of an issue with when they’re poking fun at him per se, but when they denegrate or damage things he has clearly worked hard on and put a lot of passion into, that’s crossing a line for me. It becomes incredibly mean-spirited.
There are two examples in this compilation video. One at the linked time, and another at 6:33. Especially with how happy he is to see Leslie in the second clip until she destroys his art. It’s honestly heart-breaking. The pie to the face that came a little bit before that was also hard to watch and really felt mean. Dunno if that’s because of how cold and calculated it was (vs the more usual off-the-cuff comments), or because it was a physical act rather than verbal, or something else. But I didn’t like it.
I think it works there because it’s just Michael Scott that despises him, everyone else sees him as fairly normal from what I recall.
