Community 101 Summer School Art Battle - (The Prompt)

1x01 Pilot

Professor Duncan: I’m asking you if you know the difference between right and wrong.
Jeff Winger: I discovered at a very early age that if I talked long enough I could make anything right or wrong. So either I’m god, or truth is relative. And either case booyah.

3x22 Introduction to Finality

Jeff Winger: I mean, guys like me, we’ll tell you there’s no right or wrong—there’s no real truths. And as long as we all believe that, guys like me can never lose. Because the truth is, I’m lying when I say there is no truth. The truth is—the pathetically, stupidly, inconveniently, obvious truth is, helping only ourselves is bad and helping each other is good. 

1x01 Pilot

Professor Duncan: The average person has a much harder time saying ’booyah’ to moral relativism.

3x22 Introduction to Finality

Pierce Hawthorne: Booyah, good person!

Anonymous asked: I read something where you mention that The Art of Discourse is one of your favorite episodes. It's one of mine, too. So many people get wrapped up in Modern Warfare, Cooperative Calligraphy, Paradigms of Human Memory, etc. - which are all amazing, don't get me wrong - but The Art of Discourse is wall-to-wall excellence. Especially from Troy and Britta. "They're making us walk around with pretzels in our butts; I put mustard on mine *like an idiot.*

Yes, it’s one of my favourite episodes, and it contains one of my all time favourite Community moments. The moment when Britta realises how she and Jeff can defeat the schmitty kids. YOU NEED TO BANG THAT KID’S MOM! They’re just so giddy about it. They’re jumping on the spot, pumping their fists, giving each other secret backward fivesies. At one point Britta’s practically shrieking she’s that ecstatic about it. It never fails to make me laugh.

Most of the reviews and comments I read about the ‘The Art of Discourse’ are mainly negative, and the reason given is that the schmitty kids were so annoying it made it hard to even watch the episode. I think the reason the schmitty kids got such a bad reaction from a lot of fans is because we all know some schmitty kids. We went to high school with the schmitty kids, and that’s pretty much what they represent. They’re the shitty side of high school. They are high school. 

And yeah, the schmitty kids are annoying, but they never actually annoyed me - I just found them amusing. They annoyed Jeff and Britta and seeing these two get riled up and unite together to take these kids down was hilarious. I mean, even Pierce wasn’t fazed by them, and he’s Pierce. This dude went on a mission to destroy Vicki’s political campaign because she didn’t lend him a pencil. (Okay, Pierce may have been a little distracted with the pantsing of Shirley and getting ousted by the group, but Jeff and Britta have the two most fragile egos of the group.)

It was mentioned in the DVD commentary that ‘The Art of Discourse’ was like the opposite of ‘Physical Education’. In ‘Physical Education’, we got this pool game that kept getting bigger and more epic (also naked) as the game went on. Whereas the Duh-off was pathetic to begin with, and delved to even lower depths of idiocy as it dragged on. Which again, played on that whole high school angle, and those trivial arguments and situations that seem so important at the time but really amount to nothing, and years later you look back and think: Why did I care so much? Why did I get so worked up over that? Why didn’t I just think ‘Fuck it, let’s have a food fight!’. I also liked how all the stories joined together at the end. Shirley and Pierce realised that they were both needed in the group, and pantsed the schmitty kids which meant that Jeff and Britta “won”, and Abed got to tick off food fight on his quintessential college experiences. 

There are so many great moments in this episode: Troy getting pantsed, Abed getting pantsed, Shirley getting pantsed (I had that same stunned shocked look the study group members had when I watched it the first time, I was all ‘OH NO, PIERCE! NO! WHAT DID YOU JUST DO?!’), the new Pierce argument, the ‘escape’ goat, the duh-off, britta’s banging realisation, disc-mans are retro!, boob-a-tron…

….Annnnnnnd, I’ve rambled on too long, so if TL;DR:

I LOVE THIS EPISODE!!! FAVOURITE, FAVOURITE, FAVOURITE :D