Why Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Season Two Feels More Like 30 Rock

[TMC]

http://www.vulture.com/2016/04/unbre...e-30-rock.html

If you've ever seen how the crowd reacts to an insane crossover or dunk in a street basketball highlight mixtape, physically jumping into each other, you have a sense of how I respond to great jokes. I liked Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt's first season, but it didn't cause much of this. That made what happened in the first episode of season two that much more exciting.

A third of the way through, Kimmy goes to talk (and eat ice cream) with Titus's ex-wife, Vonda, who he abandoned on their wedding night. Vonda explains that they loved each other once, and the show flashes back to her and Titus making out in the '90s, with a TV on in the background. She narrates from the present, "I knew he liked men," while from the TV in the past, Saturday Night Live announcer Darrell Hammond introduces, "With Tim Meadows" — Titus immediately looks over mid-kiss at the sound of his name. I laugh, assuming that's the end of a very specific joke about Titus’s romantic preference, that also winks at the fact that both Tina Fey and Robert Carlock overlapped with Meadows at the show. But the joke continues: Vonda narrates, "But he knew I liked skinny white boys," and Hammond again chimes in, "David Spade." This time Vonda looks over. Queue the rule of threes: Hammond comes in one more time with "Musical Guest: Hootie and the Blowfish." They both look over. Boom! I'm like all the guys in the Oh Snap! meme at once. I rewatched the joke immediately like I was the 1925 audience after seeing Charlie Chaplin's dinner roll dance. That is a good joke. That is a hard joke. That is a 30 Rock joke.

Four years ago or so, I recapped 30 Rock’s jokes in the form of infographics. It might sound silly, but it allowed me to live inside 15 or so 30 Rock jokes a week. In doing so, I realized that 30 Rock jokes are spatial – they take up space. Or, more specifically, they take up time, time that most sitcoms use filling with characterization, and, to a lesser extent, story. It's important for a show to be funny, but, in most cases, people come back because they love the characters. 30 Rock subverts this — the main character in many of its jokes is not the people saying or performing them, but the people who wrote it. (There are plenty of exceptions – Jack wearing a tux after 5 joke, for example, is very much a in-character joke – but I am not focusing on those here.) There are a few ways to think of what we'll call writers' jokes, which is when the writing stands out more than the character saying it.

1. They stall the narrative momentum of the episode.
2. You can imagine them written down.
3. They include information that the character saying it wouldn't know or actions they aren't aware of. (In Vonda's case, she is entirely unaware of the flashback.)