An analysis of two jokes from the
finales of season 4 of Silicon Valley
and season 3 of Bojack Horseman
SPOILERS
The golden
age of television (sorry correction: the golden age of saying it’s ‘the golden
age of television’). Supposedly we are
living in it and have been since seeing ducks in his pool was too much for Tony
Soprano in 1999.
Since then
our computer screens have been graced with a plethora of antiheroes, and our collective
cup runneth over with meth, advertising agencies, zombies and robot cowboys.
Unfortunately,
what often gets left out of this conversation about ‘quality TV’ is the
brilliant comedies that have been coming out hard and fast. Actually, that’s
not true. Parks and Recreation, Veep, Community, Broadcity have
all been praised for being of a high-standard. But the conversation about
comedy has been marginal to the one about drama. Supposedly, quality drama
challenges the viewer with its post-modern take on the protagonist and
morality, whereas quality comedy is just the big bang theory for people who
want cultural capital. Well, two phrases question the separation of these two
conversations. They are:
‘Spaghetti or not, here I come’
And
‘Suck it Jin Yang’
Let me
explain.
Silicon Valley and Bojack Horseman are both in some sense post-sitcoms. They are very
aware of sitcom tropes and are therefore meta, but not for the sake of being
meta because it’s marketable and cool. They use their awareness of the sitcom
form to mess with it. The most crucial rupture of the sitcom form is that they
give actions consequences. All actions. Every single one.
An episode
in these shows is not a vacuum. What happened last week (or 15 seconds ago for Bojack) affects what is happening now. More importantly, it has bearing on
the characters. It’s cause and effect on a human level. It extends beyond
romance, the place where sitcoms have tended to situate longer narrative arcs.
In every episode, new narrative threads are thrown in by the writers to give
meat for the characters to chew on, but not for the sole purpose of giving the
audience a feeling of resolution 22 to 30 minutes later. These narrative strands
are not discarded once the episode is over. These shows have a memory and use
that memory to craft complex self-referential jokes, which are the culmination
of several disparate narratives throughout that season (or seasons). Mapping
the creation of these jokes demonstrates the potential of taking cause and
effect seriously in television comedy.
Let’s start
with Bojack Horseman.
At the start
of the last episode of Season 3, character actress Margot Martindale is sailing
the seas on the boat she stole from Bojack. Character actress Margot Martindale
is spotted by blimp pilots, whose blimp is one of the ‘You are Secretariat’
mirror ads that Bojack insisted on having as part of the marketing campaign.
The blimp pilot also sees that character actress Margo Martindale is on a
collision course with a big trade ship, full of spaghetti. The spaghetti is for
the new restaurant of the ex-manager of Bojack’s restaurant Elephante, who was fired as a
misunderstanding before being fired for insulting Bojack. They crash and
spaghetti spills into the ocean. The pasta starts cooking when the mirror blimp
reflects the sun’s rays onto the site of the crash boiling the ocean water. Now
a huge load of cooked spaghetti is heading directly for Pacific Ocean city. A
news report begs for a saviour who happens to have a metric shit ton of
spaghetti strainers and access to a fleet of cars (wo)manned by strong swimmers.
Mr Peanutbutter, after getting out of a matinee, comes to the rescue in a
Fury-Roadesque convoy and utters the immortal words ‘Spaghetti or not, here I
come’.
 |
Mad Mr Peanutbutter: Hell
in a hybrid
|
That’s a lot
of narratives coming together in service of a pasta pun. They all come from
different moments in the series. Character actress Margot Martindale becomes a
wanted criminal after being pushed to do real live theatre by Bojack in episode
9 of season 2 and only appears briefly in episode 7 of season 3. In that same
episode, Bojack tries to make a powerful emotional statement with his choice of
the mirror ad, which completely backfires as an ad campaign and creates hazards
for people on the roads.
The manager
of Elephante gets fired in episode 9,
an episode that is about Bojack and Princess Carolyn’s relationship, and the
cycle of failure and disappointment they have been trapped in. Pacific Ocean
city is the setting of episode 4 in which Bojack is unable to make decisive
action making him feel powerless, magnificently realised through the lack of
dialogue due to a translator switch not being turned on. Both of these episodes
painfully highlight the Bojack’s fruitless attempts to do good.
 |
Happiness is an unsustainable
position. *unattainable
|
One of the
key elements for the delivery of the punch line (pun intended), is the
Cabracadra concept, which on its own is a satire of good-intentioned but
short-sighted and contradictory male thinking in terms of feminism. This
narrative comes out of one of Todd’s stream of consciousness ideas that someone
latches on to in episode 5, and develops over the course of the season.
The boat
itself is a significant symbol, as the sight of one of Bojack’s most haunting
transgressions: almost sleeping with the teenage Penny. This event comes up
several times in season 3, in episode 1 and 11, as it weighs heavily on Bojack,
highlighting the emotional pain of the cause and effect used in the show.
The piece de
resistance and the punchline of this joke is first introduced in episode 1 of
this season, when Mr Peanutbutter buys a factory load of spaghetti strainers.
No real reason is given for buying the spaghetti strainers at the time, and Mr
Peanutbutter is totally comfortable with that, explicitly saying it will pay off.
This winking and nudging to the audience about the inevitability of a payoff
for the spaghetti strainers continues in the next couple episodes and then
isn’t mentioned for the rest of the season. That being said, they are often
seen in the background, as are the secretariat mirror ads, again highlighting
the continuity and consistency of the Bojack Horseman universe.
All of these
elements are developed independently from one another, servicing a narrative or
character arc in their own right. The tone and emotional intensity of these
narratives varies widely and the joke manages to bring all of them to a
conclusion in a magnificent crescendo of self-aware comedy that does justice to
all these narrative threads. It also has thematic resonance as every element of
the catastrophe can be linked to Bojack’s actions and its resolution is
entirely dependent on Mr Peanutbutter being the saviour, thus displacing the
show’s own protagonist from the hero role. Bojack’s decisions whether they be
selfish, misguided or spiteful all have negative consequences. Mr Peanutbutter
on the other hand, acts out of a desire to do good (which in other shows would
be cynically derided as naivety) and is rewarded by falling ass-backwards into
being the hero. Speaking of falling ass-backwards, Silicon Valley takes cause and effect and ramps it up past the
theoretical Weismann limit and then some.
Whereas
Bojack Horseman’s use of cause and effect is primarily as a way to make Bojack
feel the weight of his actions and of the hurt he causes, Silicon Valley uses cause and effect with a scientific precision to
create a sense of powerlessness for its characters and dread for the audience.
But, like for jokes.
 |
The birth of great technology
|
At the end
of Season 4 of Silicon Valley, Richard has bent a lot of rules and exploited
all options trying to prove that his new internet works. It hasn’t gone well.
No amount of morally corrupt utilitarian reasoning has been able to save him
and he must now face the music (Pied Piper! Get it??). He is joined by his team
of guys in the lobby of the insurance company whose data they think they have
lost. An employee of the company mentions to them that the network they built
is pretty cool and is working great. Confused, they check and find that the
network is alive and prospering on a host of smart fridges, exactly like the
one that Gilfoyle hacked into in episode 7. Dinesh then asks the very valid
question of ‘why did Dan Melcher want to see them?’, the answer to which is
revealed when Melcher unceremoniously tackles and starts beating on Richard,
having recently found out that Richard and his fiancée had a sexual romp
earlier in Season 4.
Here’s a
clip (with the original fridge gag from season 7 at the start) that makes the
last paragraph close to pointless:
This is a
little more complicated than Bojack because
Silicon Valley is much less
serialised than Bojack. An episode of
Bojack has several narratives as does
Silicon Valley, but the central
narrative of Bojack is pretty much
always contained within that episode. For Silicon
Valley, by nature of the subject of the show, namely a small tech companies
attempt at success that more often than not means just surviving, the central
narrative is usually a direct continuation from last episode. Gilfoyle will
mercilessly mock Dinesh for some fashion choice and Ehrlich will exploit
Bighead, whilst Richard tries to keep the company from going under.
The beauty
of the fridge joke is that it uses a Gilfoyle side narrative from a random
episode in the season to provide the saviour of the company, in the same way
that Dinesh’s narrative in which he applies the Pied Piper algorithm to vid
chat, gave a lifeline to the company at the end of season 3. The company isn’t
saved by some brilliant planning. In fact, plans always fall apart. It’s fixed
by Dinesh and Gilfoyle using the application for personal use, exactly what
Richard wants to facilitate on a global scale. In terms of narrative, Dinesh’s
vid chat propels the narrative forward at the start of season 4, and is thus
tied to the punch line.
 |
The Ghostface Killah of
HBO
|
Let’s talk
about the punch line. In Episode 7, when Gilfoyle originally hacks into Jian
Yang’s (misspelled as Jin Yang on the fridge) fridge because he hates the
dumbing down of powerful technology for it to seem more approachable. It’s an
anti-humanist view of the purpose of technology, which is directly reflected in
Gilfoyle’s own machine that he built in the garage; Anton. Gilfoyle uses Anton
to brute force his way into the smart fridge, thus linking the two machines.
The self-correcting network technology on the fridge, extends that connection
to all the same models of smart fridges. Thus, when Richard’s last Hail Mary
attempt to save his decentralised internet fails after having alienated Jarod,
exploited Big head, and killed Anton, the smart fridges all ‘correct’ and
‘update’ with the data from Anton. The joke relies on this new technology and a
characters averse response to what he calls ‘solutionism at its worst’. It uses
the rules and reality of its characters and world to find a satisfying resolution. In other
words, it’s damn good writing.
 |
| Like this but with pens and paper |
The final
piece of plotting genius, is in the joke after the joke. Melcher’s tackle comes
in fast, breaking up the slow montage rhythm reveal of the smart fridges all
with ‘suck it Jin Yang’ and the insurance companies’ data on them. The slowly creeping
resolution of the joke, is immediately followed up by the tying up of a
narrative started in episode 6 in a moment that is both self-referential
(Ehrlich was also attacked by Melcher when he found out he had slept with his
second wife at the end of Season 1) and great physical comedy.
Spaghetti
strainers and a French mime sucking an endless cock. That is the saviours in
the season finales of these shows, and the way forward for sitcoms. Both tie
together several unrelated narratives, built up throughout their respective
season. For Bojack Horseman, it’s
another example Bojack’s toxicity and for Silicon
Valley, it demonstrates the futility of planning for success in the tech
industry. Both jokes are plotted from a long way back, and require writing with
forethought and intention. By using cause and effect on a human and narrative
level, they create finely crafted jokes that are not only hilarious and
extremely satisfying for fans, they are microcosms of the respective shows’
themes. It's TV that would make the Vince Gilligan and Jenji Kohan's of this world proud.
