Have you ever sat in a room where everyone else is speaking a different language? You sit there and have no idea what these people are talking about. You think, are they talking about me? This is often how I felt when people would start quoting random Arrested Development quotes. I mean, I had seen many an episode but everyone assured me I would have to sit down and watch them all in a row to fully understand the genius behind the writing of the show. I now feel like I have taken an introductory course in the language of Arrested Development.
The style the show is presented in is most definitely a modernist one and definitely an irritating one. The time line jumps around a bunch and there are a ton of flashbacks that are used to explain current happenings in the show. This bothered me until one of the final episodes when a recurring joke made me appreciate it. Instead of flashing back to the explanation the screen simply said "footage not found." The first time this happened in the episode it made me grin, the second and third times i outright laughed out loud.
Another set of running jokes that took me some time to appreciate were the jokes regarding the strange man "hermano" that Gob's girlfriend Marta was supposedly cheating on him with. We all knew it to be Michael that she was cheating with but they pussyfooted around the joke by having Gob call Michael mon frere which is obviously brother in french and he follows that up by saying, "that is brother in french I don't know why I know that because I took six years of Spanish."
My favorite of all the running jokes however was the name of the adopted Asian child is Annyong. After everyone says his name he responds by repeating it back to them because it is the word for hello. At first this was simply annoying and as it developed over several episodes it started to become funnier every time as the other characters started to get more annoyed with it. My favorite was the time that Lucile Bluth said it and he responded with it and she just simply stared him down for ten seconds.
It is this style of using the same joke over and over that I believe everyone has fallen in love with. That combined with the fact that all these characters seem to be fucked in the head.
I have in my possession the other two seasons and I will be sure to watch them as soon as possible for several reasons. First because a girl told me that not having seen all the episodes is a "personality flaw." Second because I have been lost at sea so to say with no idea what I should be logging and this is the perfect opportunity to redeem myself in the eyes of my fellow back loggers who should be ashamed of me for my recent lack of posting and finally I will continue to log this show because it is good and because Sweeney wont lend me any books until I give him his seasons back.
Nuff said!
Welcome aboard.
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