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Here’s an idea: Community is a postmodern masterpiece.
Though the TV show Community has never achieved huge ratings, it has a passionate cult following, including us here at Idea Channel. The show plays with genre and narrative in such a creative way that it brings to mind the cultural and artistic theory of Postmodernism. Previous TV series have been self-referential and culturally reflective, but none so successfully as Community. The show flips traditional expectations so consistently that it questions their importance in the first place. And it has brought the word “meta” into the cultural vernacular, to boot.
Special thanks to @Beerandnosh for the opening line and other community joke references
Links:
Liam Dryden talks about shipping real people:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0u_rKqqzFY
Vice – 3D Printing Guns Documentary:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DconsfGsXyA
The Jobs Act – CROWDFUNDING
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr3606enr/pdf/BILLS-112hr3606enr.pdf
Sources:
Jean-Francois Lyotard – Post-modern Condition
Christopher Butler – Postmodernism, a Very Short Introduction
Nicholas Zurburgg – The Parameters of Post Modernism
Roland Barthes – Image, Music, Text
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PostModernism
http://scrawledinwax.com/2010/04/05/lady-gaga-community-and-the-thing-that-comes-after-postmodernism/
Music:
Roglok: http://vimeo.com/musicstore/track/21166
Level 5: Room for the Homeless http://www.jamendo.com/en/list/a101325/level-5
Clockwork – Titan (geometry remix) https://soundcloud.com/wompworthy/clockwork-titan-geometry-remix
Chiptune – Kenzalol https://soundcloud.com/chiptune/kenzalol
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Hopefully I can prove that it is post-postmodern… as that's What I'm doing my dissertation on.
One amazing example of postmodernism in Community is the clip show episode where it pokes fun at other sitcom clip shows by having scenes that never actually happened, which adds to the comedy of it.
Postmodern masterpiece isn't a thing.
community is post-post modern
Go community!
Here's an eye
movie movie movie
No! Community is post-post-modern, and there IS an objective truth as Abed teaches us in Who's The Boss and Nicolas Cage studies class.
Um excuse me Philip Glass is NOT a postmodernist composer. Alfred Schnittke is a postmodernist composer.
no it's not and you can't do a better movie of Twin Peaks than FWWM. Wake up!
bro you sound like an annoying jake roper but it's nice
DREAMATORUM NKT IMMAGINARIUM
Hell-to-the-no , community is post-post modern sir
your beard is a postmodern masterpiece
Only watched up till 2:05 so far. Started yesterday but you said IMAGINARIUM o_o
IMAGINARIUM. O_O
That's where you render imaginated dreamscapes, come oooonnn~~.
I like that someone does a breakdown and analysis of Community, cause it's a very clever show. That being said, I do disagree that Community is a postmodern show for two reasons:
1. Community is more concerned with meta-fiction than postmodernism and not all meta-fiction is postmodern. In fact it predates post-modernism thousands of year, including works of Plato, 1001 Nights, Cervantes, Shakespeare and many more.
2. Not everything that doubts reality or objectivity is postmodern. That kind of doubt or perhaps even disdain for objectivity is an important part of postmodernism, but it does not have a copyright to it.
Overall, great video, mate!
This guy is exhausting to watch. He talks soooooooo fast. Couldn't he slow down just a little bit?
Its my whole Ideantity! see that's proof!
cool. cool cool cool.
"A joke really requires a hidden ground of grievance, for which the joke is only a figure sitting out front." Marshall Mcluhan.
In short? No. Only 3 out of the 6 seasons are above average television. Season 4 might well be some of the worst comedy of the 21st century.
Community is not postmodern, it's metamodern.
The best show
Here's my take: if you feel the need to critically analyse something, it has already broken the 4th wall and become the narrative and disregards the millennia of human story telling. Yes, Jeff goes through a the monomyth. But every other primary character does too. so by trying to read into it, that's the only thing that creates a post modern take.
This wrinkled my brain…
I come from the future. We've ended up in the Darkest Timeline. And this video is right.
What I can be sure of is that it's my favorite show.
All of you are the children of the summer! And winter is coming! So you had best learn to make a "meta" fire!
Being a postmoder, classic, future or modern, I just think it´s a fuckin masterpiece! Good video man… 🙂
i will fight anyone who says that this show is not a masterpiece
If you’re iffy about this show, I can understand that, while the first episodes are good, they are kinda generic and don’t really do a great job at capturing the awesomeness that is Community, but those episodes are necessary to build up your investment in those characters, if you started it and cant seem to get into it, at least make it to episode nine of season 1, that’s when the build of starts to pay off
Holy shit, postmodernism really IS evil when taken out of context.
I found this show by accident because I was bored. I was very thankful of boredom
what does relative mean? in reference to jeff's "truth is relative"
"Here's an idean"
Instant sub
Indeed it is!
You had me at i-Dean!
Can I just say the way Season 5 ends fits with the intro by “The 88”. They all just slowly leave one by one.
I half agree- Comminity is postmodern but definitely NOT a masterpiece.
Watching this in2018 community still awesome and am rewatching it
Community is a post-modern masterpiece. But I'm commenting because of something else. At the end you talked about Fire Walk with Me, and I have an interesting story about that. I was a freshman at NYU when that came out. We walked out of our dorm to go see that, and as we did my roommates called on people in the streets to join us. As we walked to the cineplex (this was 1990) people from the university and the neighborhood joined us. (NYU has no real campus. We made up most of Greeenwhich Village) people just started joining us, both from the college and from the neighborhood. By the time we got to the cinema, we had a crowd who had joined us. We ended up filling most of the screening and the next. It was really an amazing time.
yes, yes it is…