Season 3, Episode 15: Just Desserts

We open at the Caldwell, and despite the prominence of the red Paoli’s Pizza sign, we find the cousins and the women who still aren’t their girlfriends yet finishing their Myposian meal.

Jennifer says that she’s surprised she didn’t throw up after eating Myposian food*, but who cares about that, because Mary Anne (Sagittarius) is just killing me with those high-heeled boots.

Balki accepts the compliment and lets us know that on Mypos, they use every part of the animal, and

um

Which animal would that be? And… did you grind its bones to make your dinner rolls?

Balki, in the same foreboding tone he used when he first spouted his catchphrase, tells us that they are now all going to eat bibibabkas, the dessert of kings**. That’s right, everybody, here’s a new Myposian thing that ABC is 100% sure that you’re going to like, so get ready for it to be said a million times in the next 23 minutes. Okay, I’ve actually been looking forward to this episode.  Not because I remember it, but because you can’t do any research on this show without coming across die-hard fans’ love of this episode.  There’s no question at this point that Perfect Strangers wanted to launch a renaissance of the kind of physical comedy setpieces that we all kind of remembered from the golden era of television.  And since ABC told Lucille Ball she could have a new show if she promoted their other ones, Perfect Strangers returned the favor by building an episode around that scene in “Job Switching” where Lucy and Ethel try to wrap chocolates.

We get a strong start to this episode with the history of the bibibabka: the first one was made by Ferdinand Mypos (if you remember, the founder of Mypos) to celebrate having successfully grown a  mustache. It’s one step further to Mypos becoming Wackyland, but I still laughed.

Larry bites into one just like any normal person would, which makes the audience laugh for some reason. They all just say “hmm” for a while, but then Larry starts tripping balls.

Larry: These not only taste good, they make me feel good! Like… listening to music. Like looking at great art! I feel… I feel… taller!

He goes on to say that he sees the basic cousin-ness of all humanity, and invites everyone in the building into his apartment to sleep over.

Cousin Larry tells Balki that he should try to sell the bibibabkas, and that doing so would be a good lesson in free enterprise. Yes! The episodes involving money usually do make some effort towards teaching Balki something about America!  Maybe this will be good after all!

Oh, no, wait, Balki does a shitty “Scotty from Star Trek” voice and I’m reminded that all Balki has learned about America is that he doesn’t have to learn anything about America.  Cousin Larry offers to take a bunch of bibibabkas around to restaurants, and all Balki has to do is “whip up a batch”.

Then Balki lets loose with a string of b-words, and I can tell we’re in for a whole episode of alliteration. What weenie writers, weighing ways to wow us, and winnowing them down to one: forcing phony fun from phrases filled with frequent phonemes. Feh!

Larry, whose lifelong dream has been to break into the food-making business, does some alliteration of his own and says that the four of them should work as a team to make the bibibabkas.  The women quickly agree, because this means they’ll get to stick around past the exposition scene.

After the act break, I feel like some essential part is still missing.  We’ve got the alliteration runner, we’ve got the looming tribute to I Love Lucy, we’ve got that lesson about free enterprise ready to throw out just as soon as we hit 22 minutes, but what else can we add? Ah! Balki’s about to be working! Can we get a song for this episode, Balki?

And here it is folks, the Bibibabka Ditty! Everybody sing along, and don’t forget to thrust your crotch forward and shake whatever kind of tits you have!

When you rolling out the dough

Just make sure to roll it slow

If you make the dough too quick

Bibibabka make you sick

Now the ladies!

When you pour the filling in

Just make sure you wear a grin

When you smile on what you bake

Bibibabka turn out swell

The meth-making scenes in Breaking Bad got nothing on this! But seriously, no wonder it takes all damn day to make these! That song was for constructing just one bibibabka from the requisite parts of two dough patties with cream in between them.  (By the way, the Bibibabka Ditty uses the tune of Chubby Checker’s “Limbo Rock”, but let’s go ahead and assume this counts as Reason #16.)

Larry runs in, excited to tell his news.  Now that the time period specified in the court order barring Larry from entering the Hyatt Regency Hotel has passed***, he went to see the chef at its restaurant.  The chef, in an ecstasy-induced euphoric state, ordered two thousand of the bibibabkas in just two days.  But–oh no!–it took Balki and the women all morning just to make 3 dozen!

Jennifer asks if Larry knows how many dozens there are in 2,000.  My beloved bouffant beauty butts in and gives the correct answer of 166 and ⅔ dozen.   Despite this, they all look at her like she’s dumb, so she explains that her father was a carpenter.  Then they all act like she’s even dumber. Guys, seriously, do you even KNOW how much math and trigonometry carpenters have to use?

Larry says that this is their chance to live the American dream, to control their own destinies… to, you know, appropriate a cornerstone of someone else’s culture and sell it at a profit. Balki, disbelieving, says that his cousin is not the type of person to take such big chances. But then Jennifer and Mary Anne say that they also want to go for starting their own business. Besides, this could mean that they stick around for the whole episode, something they haven’t done since last season.

Larry does that thing where he tries to convince Balki by hooking him with one of his desires; this time, it’s with the promise that this could make Mypos famous for more than being one of the prime animal-sex tourism spots.  When promises of owning a business and global fame don’t work, Larry ditches debate, drops the demagoguery, and detours in a different direction, deet-deet-deeing that dumbass Ditty.

Then the women start singing, and the four of them just dance until the act break.

When we return, Larry is walking around with a clipboard and Balki is wearing a pope hat.  Larry announces that, after 24 straight hours of working, they’ve reached the halfway mark.

Mary Anne reaches for some flour or something, and bumps into Jennifer.  Jennifer gets mad at Mary Anne, which I’m not going to dignify by calling it a “personality trait”. Being mad at Mary Anne is simply the only way to give Jennifer lines that the writers have figured out.  They argue for a minute about bumping, and Mary Anne talks about how great her hat is (she’s not wrong), but really, this is just a systems problem. These women were brought in to rework the layout of the show, yet it doesn’t occur to them to rearrange their workspace.

Pope Balki rushes in and tries to broker a peace between Israel and Palestine.

He’s upset because they are expressing negative emotions in front of the Bibibabkas.

He then caresses a Bibibabka because, as the song says, “if you smile on what you bake/Bibibabkas turn out swell”.  Believe it or not, this actually pre-dates Masaru Emoto’s “research” on the effects of positive and negative emotions on the basic structures of water, which would then be expressed as how “beautiful” the water’s crystalline structures were when frozen.  Masaru even claimed that polluted water could be cleaned through such a process.  I’m going to admit that I’ve basically just read Masaru’s Wikipedia page, but I do remember hearing about this whole water thing in the mid-2000s.  I was dating a girl in high school whose mother was into this kind of thing, and would write happy words on water bottles for her health. And it really wasn’t until I saw Balki expressing this same idea while wearing a mitre that I finally was able to put holy water in the same category.

Larry expresses my thoughts on the whole thing:

Larry: Love, right, okay. Look, we are falling behind.

The women tell him to start pulling all of that sickening weight of his and do some actual work. He responds with this “hey, hey heyheyheyheyhey” bit that made me laugh.

The women complain about the working conditions, and we find out that Jennifer has another personality trait: when she’s tired, she wants to go to sleep.  So our first lesson in free enterprsie is that handshake agreements aren’t a good foundation for building a business. The women say they know that Balki and Larry are desperate to find a way to turn baking into an excuse for touching each others butts, so they quit.  These four sure do have fun when they get together, don’t they?

Larry acts like he’s doing Balki a big favor by helping out with the Bibibabkas. So, without washing his hands, he starts touching the food.

Hey, by the way, where did they get this giant table and all these sheet pan racks on such short notice?

Balki sings the Ditty and Larry makes it painfully obvious how the song fucks up the whole process. He tells Balki the song’s got to go.  You know what? I understand that this episode has to follow this progression, but come on. They’ve been doing this for 24 hours already. Wouldn’t he have already seen the problem with the song?

Balki shows that language is strength by spitting out another alliteration.  Larry says that they need to streamline their work, but the word “mass” prompts a misunderstanding by Balki, who tells Larry to not bring religion into this. Aha! The surface confusion mirrors a deeper one. Balki does not realize that his hat–and by extension, the cultural belief system behind his baking–come across as a religion. The process of making bibibabkas rests on magical thinking, but Balki just sees it as the way the world is. When you know the truth, every other approach cannot be based on facts and must be a belief system. How many times have you heard a religious person argue that atheism is a religion?  As in real life, the introduction of a science (in this case, Business Process Optimization) is discounted.

So the cousins fight about this by alliterating at each other, and I’m not going to gripe about their deadline, or padding, because it’s nice to see the cousins trying to top each other. Remember back in “Dog Gone Blues” when they just bragged about their dogs’ impossible abilities?

Larry lets Balki win the spoken alliteration fight, but gives him a look that says “Once this batch of bibibabkas is baked, baby, I’ll be bout to boff both them beaut buttocks”.

And because everything’s funnier when it’s faster, here we go ONE MORE TIME! Balki just shakes his imaginary tits around until Larry just can’t contain himself and takes his cousin into his arms.

Balki accuses Larry of being evil, and not caring whether Mypos becomes famous for its snack treats, and Larry admits it. Balki quits, and Cousin Larry tells him to get out of his kitchen. I think we know now who’s been paying the majority of the rent.

We get a beautiful shot of the sunrise in Chicago, set to the piece of stock music that came closest to sounding like “Morgenstemning” from Grieg’s Peer Gynt.

These bibibabkas look nothing like what they ate at the top of the episode, but I’m more concerned with the fact that they’re not refrigerated. I seriously doubt that neither Balki’s recipe–nor the corner-cutting one that Larry has no doubt come up with–uses any sort of preservative.

Larry says there’s a valuable lesson here and Balki’s like “yeah, what” and Larry’s all like “I just cut some corners, because business”.

Balki sees that Larry has become the monster that is commodification, and he’s afraid to be touched, lest he take on this leprosy.

Then something explodes in one of the pink boxes.

Where Balki wanted the bibibabkas to grow up in a supportive, happy environment, Larry has not treated the Digimon well, and now it’s turned into that slug that shoots poop out its mouth.

More bibibabkas start exploding inside the boxes. Now that things have gotten serious, Balki’s grammar and pronunciation reach pro levels as he tells his cousin not to open the boxes.

Ah, it’s nice when I can just trust that you all thought the joke, and I don’t even have to say it.

But it turns out that Larry did indeed bring religion into this–he went too far, meddling in the forbidden areas of culinary science. He tried to play God! They called him Madison at the university!

Balki informs us that when you cut corners, “the bibi in the babka goes boom”, which I only mention for the sake of those of you trying to create a Myposian-English dictionary so that you can translate the Bible for them. So, bibi must mean “cream”, and babka either “dough” or “pastry”.

Anyway, then lots of bibibabkas start exploding. So just market it as a novelty gag pastry, guys! Sell it to other sitcoms!

In the pre-credits scene we find out that the hotel chef was upset and swore at Larry… what, because they could only deliver 1000 on short notice with just four people working on them?

Larry keeps talking and Balki keeps asking when he gets to talk and deliver the pat lesson.

Balki: There are some things that just can’t be rushed… like antiques… redwoods… a really good episode of Moonlighting.

WOULD YOU SHUT UP ABOUT THAT SHOW

Larry starts whining about whether Jennifer and Mary Anne will still be his friend, a bibibabka explodes, and that’s it.

So let’s talk about how “Just Desserts” measures up against “Job Switching”.  I watched that episode before reviewing this one. In some ways, a comparison isn’t fair. I Love Lucy was groundbreaking television, and besides, the television landscape had changed in the 35+ years between that episode and this one.  Perfect Strangers had to compete against many more channels and shows, especially for those who didn’t take ABC’s advice and cut off their cable line. I’ll admit I haven’t watched a lot of I Love Lucy, and “Job Switching” is probably the only full episode I’ve watched in maybe 20 years. But “Job Switching”, at first glance, appears to be a commentary on how the sexes are doomed to their own roles, because they can’t manage to do the others. At second glance, it’s more of a commentary on how men don’t know how to do women’s housework. Lucy and Ethel may have failed at candy-making, and failed spectacularly at candy-wrapping, but the episode made it abundantly clear that the “man’s world” of work was comprised of many different jobs, most of them requiring specialized skill sets, and that candy-making was simply the only one open at that moment that Lucy and Ethel thought they could do. On the other hand, cooking and cleaning are always cooking and cleaning.  “Job Switching” was a delight to watch; my favorite part was the women in the audience losing it every time Ricky or Fred did or said something that made it painfully clear how little they knew (Ricky thinks one pound of rice is a serving; Fred thinks you mix frosting in with cake batter). Also, both pairs of characters were given comedy situations to work within, something I doubt we’ll ever see from Perfect Strangers.  And where the most memorable part in “Job Switching” was simply one of many physical comedy setpieces, making bibibabkas was the whole episode.

And you know what? I get it. The social commentary of the 1970s sitcom had given way to the “audiences just want to laugh” mentality of the 1980s. The self-contained pastry seen at the beginning of the episode had, by the end, morphed in a monstrosity that could no longer contain the cream filling.

I could make this episode punch itself all day with such meta-analysis, but in the end, I actually had fun watching this episode. Balki shaking around really fast, the alliterative dialogue (and you could tell that the actors enjoyed saying it), and even the pastries exploding at the end. Compared to “Job Switching”, “Just Desserts” is nothing but cream filling, but sometimes that’s all I really require of 22 minutes of television.

Join me next week for another episode about food, “Better Shop Around”!

______________________________

Catchphrase count: Balki (1); Larry (0)

Boner count: Balki (0); Larry (0)

*yeah, we had an episode about that last season around this time…

**now we know why he weighs 300 pounds

***see Season 1, Episode 2 “Dolly This”

Season 3, Episode 13: My Lips Are Sealed

Last week’s episode certainly had the most misplaced title ever, but this one’s perfect, because I ain’t saying SHIT this week. Instead, you get a lesson from Professor D, who teaches sociology at University of [undisclosed]! I never took sociology in college, so I’m just going to:

_______________________________

In this episode, Larry and Balki find themselves trapped in a capitalist system that values only their productive power. They have no humanity in the eyes of the newspaper. They are replaceable cogs in the machine. Their situation is best understood using the work of the economist and philosopher Karl Marx.

According to Marx: the cause of human behavior, his conception of society, and the source of social change, all of which can be gleaned from the following quote:  “Man makes his own history, but he is not free to make it as he wishes. He makes it under circumstances and conditions not of his own choosing.” Who we are is determined by our social circumstances, the where and when of our lives. Thus we could say that Balki and Larry make their own history, but they are not free to make it as they wish. They are bound by the economic circumstances in which they find themselves.

To paraphrase another famous Marx quote, it is not consciousness that determines men’s existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.  That is, social context—our interactions with other people, the type of work we do, the historical moment in which we live, the amount of power we have—takes precedence over innate human behavior in shaping who we are.  Therefore, one of Marx’s main intellectual projects was to describe how social formations (such as the economy) fundamentally determined the form of society and hence human behavior.  He did this through his theory of historical materialism.

In terms of the causes of human behavior, Marx said, “The nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production.”  This means that man’s material conditions—the type of economy he lives in, the type of work that he does—produce his culture, his beliefs, and his ideas.  For instance, a man living in a capitalist society is likely to believe the salary you make should be dependent on how hard you work as an individual; a man living in a socialist economy is likely to believe that society’s resources should be divided up so that everyone’s needs are met. Though it is unclear what kind of economic formation is found in Mypos, it is clear that it is an underdeveloped pre-industrial agrarian economy. This shapes Balki’s orientation toward work, other persons (including Larry), and sheep.

Marx’s conception of society also stems from this notion. He believed that the economic sector was the base, or the most important aspect of society.  Other parts of society, like religion or family or culture, were the superstructure, or dependent on the economic.  That is, the superstructure is a reflection of the base. Marx saw the satisfaction of material needs as central in understanding how people behave and felt that people engaged in an ongoing conflict – another central part of Marx’s theory – in order to try to satisfy their needs.

This means that Marx saw history as teleological, progressing through consecutive stages, from agrarian societies to feudal societies to capitalist societies, which were emerging when Marx was writing and which we still have today.  For this reason, Marx was centrally concerned with capitalism, trying to understand how this specific mode of production, or type of economy, affected human relationships.

How does Marx define capitalism?  First of all, land and labor both become commodities; they can be bought and sold on the open market. He sees the world as divided into two groups: the owners, who own the means of production, and the workers, who sell their labor. If you were not an owner, then you have to be a worker; you have nothing to sell, no way of surviving, except through your labor. In this way, Larry and Balki survive through their labor at the newspaper.

The building up of profit is also new: before this moment in history, there was not much surplus: people either could not store food or wealth, or they didn’t, because they would rather spend the few extra dollars at the local pub getting drunk (or, in the case of Larry and Balki, eating the Sears Tower Ice Cream Sundae). Under capitalism, however, we have profit for profit’s sake. And, at the center of capitalism, is profit.   How do the owners make a profit? Marx answered, by paying the workers less than what they produce is worth. For example, if you are an owner of a shoe factory, and you have to pay a worker two dollars to make a shoe, how much are you going to sell that shoe for? More than that. For this reason, Marx saw the relationship between the owner and the worker as fundamentally exploitative; that is, you get paid less than the value of what you make. Thus Larry and Balki’s employers seek to extract as much labor as possible from them in order to make a profit.

This sort of antagonism leads to alienation, which Marx defined as “the separation of things that naturally belong together, or antagonism between things that are properly in harmony.” This sounds complicated, so let’s go back to our example of the shoe factory: imagine you are a worker in a shoe factory. You probably make a tiny piece of the shoe on an assembly line, for example, maybe you punch in the holes for the laces. Of course, you don’t get to take home the shoes that you make—you just work for twelve hours a day so you have enough money to go home, go to sleep, and come back and make shoes the next day. Marx would say you are experiencing alienation in three ways:

You are alienated from the product, because you do not own the fruits of your labor.  So the shoe factory worker doesn’t get to take home what he produces . Of course, Larry and Balki could take home a newspaper, but only if they purchased it.

You are also alienated from the process of production, because, using our example, you only make a tiny piece of the shoe and never see the end result. Larry and Balki do not understand the entire process of how to make a newspaper. They are responsible for only a small part of the production process. If left to their own devices, they would not be able to produce the newspaper themselves, though that would certainly make for an interesting episode.

And most importantly, you are alienated from other people.  You only relate to them as workers on an assembly line.  And you are competing with them!  For example, Larry makes himself and Balki into competitors. It is a symptom of the larger alienation felt by workers in the capitalist system. Larry treats his relationship with Balki like an economic exchange. (In fact, Larry reduces everything to economics. He seeks fulfillment in material goods rather than meaningful human relationships. Instead he becomes fixated on buying a classic sports car.)

Do you understand alienation now, Balki?

Let’s bring in a comparison.  Think about how shoes used to be made prior to the Industrial Revolution: It used to be the case that shoes were made by people involved in the entire process of production (the leather, the craftsmanship); that you saw the shoe as an end in itself, something you are proud of making, not as a means to an end. And finally, you would relate to other people in a personal way—as friends, as neighbors—not an impersonal way, as managers, as people you have to compete with for your job, for survival (e.g., what if the guy next to you speeds up? agrees to work for lower wages?). But now with the shoe factory worker, YOUR LABOR DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU. This would not be the case if Larry and Balki produced their own newspaper from start to finish. But, because they are laborers for the owners of the newspaper, their labor does not belong to them, but to the owners of the newspaper.

So we see that for Marx capitalism is fundamentally exploitative.

So, what about the superstructure: ideas, morals, laws culture, and religion? They are both the reflection of the ideas of the ruling class and an expression of dissatisfaction with the ways things are. Marx famously wrote, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ideas of the ruling class.” Thus the idea of conspicuous consumption is thrust upon Larry (and Balki), making it seem as if the purchase of the sports car is the only way for him to find meaning in his everyday life. In trying to secure the money for the car, Larry essentially tries to sabotage his one potentially meaningful relationship, that with his cousin, Balki. The bourgeoisie would be thrilled by Larry’s efforts.

Marx also said famously, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.” Think about the beliefs within Christianity—it’s better to suffer on earth for your treasure is in heaven.  For Marx, religion then acts as an escape for workers, a way of dealing with their misery.  At the same time, Marx sees religion as a symptom of a larger problem when he says it is the sigh of the oppressed creature. Similarly, the Sears Tower Sundae is the sigh of an oppressed Larry and Balki.

So Marx saw religion in quite a negative way, but he also realized its purpose as a cry for help.  Religion and morals are what keep people from rising up against the exploitation in their lives but at the same time they allow for solace in the face of misery.  This is what Marx calls false consciousness.  Marx predicted that eventually, however, people’s lives would get so terrible that they would have nothing left to lose, and they would see through the ideology of the superstructure, shed their “false consciousness” and become aware of their shared circumstances with other workers—they are the same social class—and revolt. Eventually, the workers (or the proletariat) would establish a society in which everyone shared the means of production and there was no alienation—this is Marx’s utopian vision of true human freedom.

Although Larry and Balki do not achieve class-consciousness by the end of the episode, they do, to a certain extent, begin to poke holes in the ideology of capitalism. Larry realizes that being overly materialistic is ruining his relationship with Balki. He comes to see Balki as more of a human and less of a competitor. Together they propose eating Sears Tower Sundaes, which will potentially provide them with the fuel they need for the inevitable proletarian overthrow of the capitalist system. Maybe next episode?

________________________________

Those sure were sociology words! It sounds like this episode was about Larry not buying a car and then Karl Marx bought them some ice cream? I don’t know and NEVER WILL.

See you next week for “The ‘Pen’ Pal”.

Catchphrase count: Balki (1); Larry (2)

Boner count: Balki (0); Larry (0)

Reason #14 that neither you, nor I, nor even Professor D will buy this season on DVD:  Balki sings a parody of Patti LaBelle’s “New Attitude” (“Pneumatic Tube”) while shaking his imaginary tits around

Season 2, Episode 20: Get a Job

We open with a shot of the Ritz Discount from ground level, teasing us with whatever’s down that side street.  So mysterious, like back when I played my first Zelda game, Link’s Awakening, and you could see cool stuff on certain screens that you couldn’t get to yet because you didn’t have the Power Bracelet yet. Like, you know, maybe there’s a better sitcom down that street. Maybe there’s even a building where no sitcoms take place. But I won’t be able to get there with just my bare hands.

Balki and Larry are so sure they’re going to get a raise that they’re offering to take Jennifer and Mary Anne (Sagittarius) to a classy restaurant.  Jennifer is wearing an outfit we’ve seen her in before, but Mary Anne has chosen to dress up as a strawberry Starburst for the occasion.  You’re rocking that dress, Mary Anne, but you’re getting a little wild with the eyeliner.  We’re towards the end of the season, here; don’t become another Tina.

Anyway, Larry had demanded a raise from Twinkacetti the previous day and is 100% certain that he’ll get it when Twinkacetti comes in that morning.  Larry has forgotten that you’re not supposed to be certain of anything while they’re still showing the producers’ names on the screen (and, besides, you’re only ever supposed to be certain that love of family trumps all).  But Twinkacetti comes in, rushing towards his office.  He pauses briefly to establish character

Twinkacetti: Uh, I’m mean or something. Yeah. Ruff!

before closeting himself away in his office.  Larry and Balki confront him, so he pops back out briefly.

Twinkacetti: Okay, whatever’s the opposite of what you wanted, just go do your lesson about how Balki’s better.

But Larry doesn’t give up, so Twinkacetti finally just decides he can masturbate to the S&P (Skene glands and perinea) 500 later and tells the cousins that they don’t get a raise because he hired another employee and lowered their salaries.

Evidently, Larry’s been working all through season 2 to grow a pair, because he finally stands up to Twinkacetti.  He calls Twinkacetti out on how he overworks them, underpays them, and insults them. Cousin Larry also goes on about how discount shops just aren’t the best setting for sitcoms, and how they’ve pretty much done every story they can with this setup, so he quits.  Balki backs him up on it, pointing out that they’ve also already done the “Larry stands up to Twinkacetti” plot. I like where this episode is headed!  The show needs to break out of this rigmarole at this point; I mean, look, I was fucking talking about Zelda games up there with the opening shot. Let’s move on already.

Twinkacetti:  Whatever, I just landed a role on A Fine Romance and it’s gonna be better than this trainwreck.

Larry and Balki pretend to laugh triumphantly, but it quickly sinks in that their courage has left them unemployed. They have made a mistake.  In other words, Larry and Balki have a good laugh about their boner. (Nailed it!)  But Larry quickly regroups and remembers that this show is about pursuing the American dream, and that they can do whatever they want.

Balki wants to be the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and Larry tells him to save that dream for season 6, they’ll need it by then.

And here’s the most I’ve ever gotten excited about a third location.  I’m even in love with how brutally fake those signs are. I’m actually curious how they did both the neon, as well as the slight 3D, effects.  And I don’t know why the idea of these guys working in a burger joint thrills me, but it does. The tacit promise of a grease fire, probably.

That jukebox.  Awww yiss things are getting good.  Larry makes an actually decent joke about how meth-heads probably come to the restaurant, but it’s a little punctured by the fact that the restaurant doesn’t look anywhere near as awful as it’s supposed to. I mean, it’s no Tony’s Mambo Room, but still.

Then we meet “Fat Marsha” Manning herself.

She’s a party girl.

I’m in love.

She instantly comes on to Balki. In the next breath she comes on to Larry. Then she comes on to Balki again.  The show is placing the cousins in a setting, and with people, which 1) Larry has been trained to think of as low-class and which 2) Balki will accept, if not because he has no sense of American social strata, then because he’s open and loving.  And bravo for doing that, since it functions as the the counterpoint for “Tux for Two”.

BUT

The show is trying to tell us that Larry is coming face-to-face not only with a gross restaurant, but a gross woman.  That shot is instructive, I think. The white-collar hopeful is completely put off by the blue-collar woman. Even Balki knows something’s wrong!

But I get the impression that actress Susan Kellerman is rejecting some aspects of the role that the show gave her.  Sure, she’s sexually harassing potential employees seconds after they enter her the business she owns, which is maybe not a great step up from working under a guy who insults you. The difference, though, is that Fat Marsha fucking owns it.  She’s made it on her own in the big city: part of her backstory is that she lost something like 200 pounds (!) after opening the restaurant.  You get the sense that Twinkacetti is miserable with his station in life, and that this only feeds his negative personality.  But Fat Marsha is having the time of her life; sure, she’s coming on strong, but I’ve come to learn that flirting is just a way of relating to others for some people. On top of Kellerman putting such verve into the role, I think the fact that the other female characters get so little personality makes this all the more effective.

Fat Marsha smacks Larry on the ass.

Balki looks at Larry’s ass as if this move has never occurred to him.

Fat Marsha trains the cousins on making burgers; she comes on to Balki again, leading to the best joke of the episode.

Fat Marsha:  Do you ever arm-wrestle naked?

Balki: Oh! No… that would be cheating.

Man, why can’t I get rewarded like this when I come up with good punchlines? I like boobs!

Heehee!  Man, I love Fat Marsha.

She leaves for the gym (Reuben’s Perfect Body, I assume), having only taught the cousins how to make and serve a plain burger – not how to make gyros, fries, steaks, or even work a cash register from the current decade.

Balki the Kid shows up, excited primarily at how they’re in a new environment with new toys he can play with.  He’s so excited about ringing the bell that he starts this shit again.

Balki shakes his pretend tits and sings “9 to 5” for the 50th time while making fries. I’m going to try to say this just once and get it out of my system: since I’m on immunosuppressants and have just the one white blood cell these days (I have to lie down occasionally so it can travel back out of my legs), I am deeply, deeply disturbed by how these guys keep touching multiple surfaces and then touching food that people are going to eat. Like, gag me with a spoon.

Larry takes an order from Lewis, patriarch of the Arquette clain, who likes his food as awful as possible.

Balki forces Larry to adhere to the rules of the hanging wheel that you stick the order tickets on, denying a restaurant patron an order of fries. I was going to make a joke about him being power-mad, but I think this is Roger Rabbit Balki rearing its head again–he can only break character like that when it’s funny.

And now, for the final aspect of the crazy situation that Larry and Balki find themselves in:

Angry hockey fans flood the restaurant! And… and… oh yes

JERSEYMAN 2: RETURN OF JERSEYMAN

We come back from the commercial break with a bunch of burly, angry men in blue just shouting at Larry.  It’s the episode of Perfect Strangers I didn’t know I needed.

This guy shouts at Larry.

This guy shouts at Larry.

They’re all shouting at you, Larry! Balki, meanwhile, has lost track of the order wheel.  Larry grabs Balki’s ears and then touches a bunch of food.  Like, gross me out the door!

This guy over here keeps demanding a chili dog, and we finally realize just how bad the job at the discount store has been for Larry.  If he had gotten a chance to interact with more than one customer every 10 episodes, he’d have enough customer service skill to be able to try at least one tactic to calm this guy down.  Even Balki’s a little scared of the guy; I guess there’s not enough Myposian virtue in the world to overcome a guy shouting about a chili dog.

So they serve him what, if I remember correctly, was the result of my last mineral oil enema. Because he’s lower-class, Chilidude leaves, if not satisfied, then at least not shouting.  On his way out, Chilidude has an altercation with Jerseyman.

Remember where you are. This is Burgerdome. The Sitcom Gods are listening, and will take the first man that screams. Larry tries to intercede.

Larry: No, no, look at his face! He’s got the mind of a child! It’s not his fault!

WHO RUN BURGERTOWN? JERSEYMAN RUNS BURGERTOWN

Then Balki runs in, and what, Balki, were you going to tell them that they’re family and family always sticks together? The only lesson Chilidude’s ever had to learn is to stop putting a space between the words “Black Hawks”.

Fat Marsha comes in and blows a whistle to calm down the hockey fans, and that’s my favorite non-dialogue joke this episode.

Fat Marsha: What’s this? What’s this?! You think I don’t know the law? You think I don’t know the law? Wasn’t it me who wrote it? And the law says: “bust a deal, you get no meal”.

Before they leave, it’s revealed that both Chilidude and Jerseyman are in a sexual relationship with Fat Marsha. Larry sits down before Fat Marsha can touch his butt again, so she sticks her finger up Balki’s butt as much as she can through his pants.

Balki and Cousin Larry come back home maimed and finally, for once, we got to see the maiming. You have no idea how much I appreciate this, show.

The cousins do a little post-mortem on how bad the whole experience was, and Balki refers to a commercial where a woman checks the waistbands of men’s underwear. I can’t find the commercial, but I’m sure it was real.  Does anyone remember it?

Hey, it’s Mrs. Twinkacetti! But lest you think that this episode equals “The Rent Strike” for named female characters speaking, Mary Anne only says “bye” in her earlier scene, so “The Rent Strike” is still at the top.

Mrs. Twinkacetti has brought her husband by to ask the cousins to come back to work, because it turns out that the new guy was stealing from the discount store. (Nobody uses the word “fired”, so I think it’s safe to say they let Pugsley and Wednesday “play” with him.)  Larry tries to shush Balki when he brings up their new jobs (maybe that lesson about lying stuck?), but then he realizes that Balki’s trying to haggle for higher pay. They get their jobs back, as well as the raise they asked for, and they even get Twinkacetti to agree to stop calling them losers. Just for that last part alone, you really couldn’t have had this episode anywhere but towards the end of the season.  I mean, that’s half of Twinkacetti’s lines gone right there!

Don’t you just love Belita Moreno?  I love Belita Moreno. The best part of this scene is how she keeps having to tell Mr. Twinkacetti what to do.

The cousins try to do that Roxbury Guys bit.  I feel you, guys; women make that same face every time I try it, too.

The music comes on, but Balki and Larry realize that they don’t feel happy, so they engage in a little bit of self-deception, telling each other that someday they’ll graduate night school and land a photography job, respectively; they may have trials here below, but they’re bound for Canaan land. (The joke is that they’ll never achieve these their dreams, that all hope is falsehood sold by the elite to keep the slave class docile, life is drudgery. We like to have fun around here.)

Now they are so illusioned by their own brains’ chemical imperatives to not be sad, they do the dance of joy!

No, you don’t get a gif of it this time.  You get a gif of Fat Marsha, because that’s what I want to leave open in a browser tab all next week.

Okay, now that we’re done with the jokes, let’s have a little talk about women and girls, since we had four of them this time around (okay, there’s a fifth one in the restaurant, but she just wanted fries). Every time I want to talk about Jennifer and Mary Anne in a collective sense, I have to overcome the urge to refer to them as “the girls”.  Part of this is because Balki and Larry call them that; part of it is this weird mental holdover of my own. I don’t know why I feel the need to mention this, and I hope I’m not back-patting.  I have to imagine that this show was one of thousands of places I heard fully-grown women referred to as “girls”, and thirty years later, it’s still something I’m trying to exorcise from my system. I didn’t mention it at the time, but the #1 gross-me-out sexist moment on this show so far was back in the Christmas episode, where Larry kisses Jennifer under the mistletoe, walks away, and jerks his thumb over his shoulder to signal to Balki that it’s his turn; a move that says “get in there”. I like joking about how they don’t give the women any lines or traits of their own, but that instance was a little too much for me, and I wasn’t sure how to express that.  So let’s talk about othering.

I’ve mentioned before how I, as a child, I was intrigued by characters who were the wild “other”, who managed to carve out an existence removed from typical social interests.  Usually this came in the form of the “wacky neighbor”, but when you remove the “neighbor” part, as here with Balki, it better articulates the “wacky” aspect as simply an unfettered Inner Child.  There’s no doubt that’s what appealed to me–getting to be silly in situations where one is supposed to be proper (sidebar: what in the 80s was cathartic is now de rigueur in terms of the man-child, but that’s another topic for another day).  For adults, Balki was the “other”; for children a compatriot (which, by the way, now that I’m thinking about it, props to mid-80s ABC for creating a long-running family sitcom with no family in it).  But this show presents a more sinister “other”: the woman. In the pop culture world, even today, man is more often than not presented as the norm, something that the audience is supposed to relate to regardless of their gender. Despite Larry and Balki’s differences, women are the same impenetrable, inscrutable type of being, and the not knowing scares them.

There’s a lot going on here with sex and power and personality, way more than I’m qualified to talk about, but I’ll say a few things.  Jennifer and Mary Anne are often basically the same person; “Trouble in Paradise” aside, the main difference is that Mary Anne has no brain, while Jennifer is, I dunno, taller. But they have something that Larry and Balki want to possess.  I’ll give the show credit for having Larry’s outdated attempts at domination through puffing meet with failure, but it’s still the men who are making the first moves.  Yes, the nature of a show about two men may be forcing that perspective, because it’s their desires at the forefront, but that begs the question of why we primarily get that perspective.  Even in the Christmas episode, when Mary Anne kisses Balki, it’s played for laughs; Mary Anne is so thoroughly “the dumb one” that her forwardness really can’t be separated from that.

This episode began with the cousins trying to use luxury to woo women.  They were then forced into a world that was ruled by a woman ; ruled so thoroughly, in fact, that she had no fear of having her own personality and owning her sexuality.  Chilidude and Jerseyman symbolize, perhaps, that Larry and Balki would then be placed in competition with each other to be the sexiest, most desirable partner for the mate with the most economic power.  So they flee back to their familiar, comfortable habitat, where the only woman with power is Mrs. Twinkacetti; and it’s clear that her power, as well as being played for laughs, serves as punishment for the evil ways of her husband.  But, the point that I’m trying to make is, women as portrayed on shows like this end up being the other, and others are scary.  Larry was fearful of Balki’s arrival, which almost cost him his job.  And potentially, waiting inside every Jennifer or Mary Anne is a Fat Marsha or a Mrs. Twinkacetti, so the goal is to keep trucking along with the 9 to 5 in hopes that one day you can advance enough to win a woman who, because she symbolizes new life, also symbolizes your own mortality if you cannot impregnate her.

Anyway! I could have threaded a lot of that previous paragraph into the recap, but this seemed important enough to be serious about. Plus, I wanted to make some Mad Max jokes. But goddam I made an episode about the best one-off female character into a depressing quagmire of gender portrayals.    Let’s just all scroll back up to watch that gif again.

And next week, good grief, it’s an episode about Larry’s sister: “Hello, Elaine”.  Miss me with the sexism, okay, show?

 

__________________________

Catchphrase count: Balki (0); Larry (0)

Boner count: Balki (0); Larry (0); Me, for Fat Marsha (not telling)

Dance of Joy running total: 8