I Dream of Community

I cried into Jeff Winger’s bulging pectorals last night. It was a weird dream.

The most successful art is something that perfectly imitates life but does it in a way that convinces us that it is actually nothing like life at all. It can be fanciful or gritty or anything in between, but as long as it tells us something about ourselves and our lives and it allows us to believe that it, in fact, has nothing to do with us or our lives, it’s good art. (This is a stupid paragraph.)

I feel like that’s what make Dan Harmon’s Community so brilliant. It’s so filled with references and odd scenes and interesting characters. But it, the show, is still grounded in something that is entirely authentic, entirely real.

The most important element of Community, of any show, book or play, is the characters. What I particularly love about the cast of Community is that, sure they are archetypal and broad, but they have incredible nuance. They, unlike most sitcom characters, have nuances. Somehow Dan Harmon managed to create real people, like actually real people that I (at least) feel like I could find and know and befriend in real life, and put them into a television show. None of the study group are one-note. None of them are mostly this but (predictably) also a little that. The main characters don’t have this single, debilitating and humanizing flaw that makes up for a bland and vague (and I guess relatable) personality.

They’re real. I guess that’s what makes the show great, in my opinion. It has always struck me as being completely, genuinely real. Sure, the main characters end up reenacting the movie Dinner with Andre, or having a massive paintball war on their community college campus. But everything seems so real. So that’s why people don’t like it.

In my dream Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) did what he does almost every episode. Like JD in Scrubs (who did it sincerely) and Kyle in South Park (who did it mockingly), Winger ends most conflicts by making some monologue-ish speech to his friends about how they learned and came together. I don’t know if Community’s show-ending speeches are sincere or not, but I hope they are, even if the message is “cheesy” (which is what I said in my dream, as tears streamed down my face). But that’s what makes the show even more real to me. What is a closer representation of reality than a group of people struggling, growing and enduring conflict, then, when everything is resolved, reflecting and come up with a clichéd, stale summation to make the whole experience more palatable?

I have weird dreams.