“TGS Hates Women”

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[photo of Abby Flynn, caption: Abby Flynn: Brand “Spanking” New Comic.]
[photo of Jenna, caption: Jenna Maroney: She’s the Worst.]

The Freshest Female Voice In Comedy

If you haven’t heard about comedian Abby Flynn yet, it’s just a matter of time. Miss Flynn has been gaining quite a reputation in the comedy clubs around town. Just voted “Most Hilarious Women Most Likely to Perform With A Hickey on Her Neck” by Hottie X-Press Magazine, Abby Flynn’s pictorial is now a fixture in men’s gym locker rooms all around the country. “It’s an honor to be recognized for being funny!”, Flynn cooed as she was photographed by the hungry paparazzi on the red carpet at the Hot New Comics of New York Awards.

The mainstream press is usually reserved when celebrating female comedy talent, however the opposite has been true since Abby hit the scene. “The comedy community has come to life thanks to Abby’s arrival,” Hugh Hefner observed. Even harsh comedy critics like Kenneth Dodd are fawning over Miss Flynn. “I heard that she did comedy or acting or something like that. She’s hot!”

At first as feminists here at JoanofSnark.com we were ready to dismiss Abby as a pathetic sex obsessed fame whore but then after much debate and deliberation at our weekly Femi-Vision roundtable in the basement of the Bluestocking books our secret club of famous feminists agree that Abby is bravely breaking new artistic ground with her controversial work. “She fearlessly flaunts her sexuality to such an obscene degree that she is making a statement about how women who use their sexuality to get ahead are just performing like sad clowns deserving the cruel jokes that the polite feminist world designs to shame them into thinking with their head.”

Scholars agree to disagree. Professor Yvonne Mojica says “She’s is [sic] destroying everything hat feminists fought for. Ignore her and save the world.” Profession Sloan Wells spoke about Abby at a conference for Women in Comedy. “Her act is pure genius. Every joke is designed to intrigue men into paying attention while making them see the ridiculous things they expect from the opposite sex. Hopefully, some time in the near future, thanks to comedy, true gender equality will be possible.”

That sounds good to us. Go Abby! We’re rooting for you! check out Abby Flynn for yourself and tell us what you think.

Why Does TGS Hate Women?

Feeling empowered? Glad to be born female? Well, tune in to NBC’s TGS some Thursday night if you want to experience a vicious woman hating corporate piece of crud live on your TV.

Every episode of TS opens with an insulting, gaudy, overly sexualized dance number performed by the TGS “dancers” who appear to be the least talented and most photogenic klutzes who are obviously only good at one thing: squeezing into the least amount of semi-transparent clothing allowed by network standards. After that the show is an avalanche of bad ideas crafted by misogynist minds who seem to be hell-bent on weakening America.

No one, and we mean no one who appears regularly on TGS angers us more than the most famous Blonde bimbo on the boob tube: Jenna Maroney.

Jenna seems to be perfectly happy to be depicted in sketch after sketch as a sex starved, empty headed, lose lipped, latex addicted degenerate week after week. If she’s not trying to crowbar her self into the hideous dance numbers we described earlier she is center stage, swaying, scantily clad, and caterwauling at the top of her lungs, bastardizing some ancient hit song or another.

Perhaps it’s time to cut Jenna some slack. Maybe she didn’t it was insulting to perform in “Suffragettes Strip Club Diaries” as a sexy Susan B. Anthony who conspires to get Harriet Beecher Stowe relegate to the back of the strip club for ruining business because, “she looks like a haunted house in a dress.” Maybe she is too daft to realize that it is anti-women and unAmerican to dress up as Michelle Obama just to burst out of her sleeves like the Incredible Hulk every time she puts her hand over her heart to pledge allegiance to the flag. It is possible that Jenna doesn’t understand that is it not funny to use her body and mind in concert with a fat suite and expensive CGI effects to create the illusions that Hillary Clinton is eating Bill’s paramours to keep a constant stream of post-Lewinsky sex scandals out of the press?

Maybe. Or maybe TGS just hates women. Tell us what you think.

Wow I probably shouldn’t have typed that out. It was longer than it looked. They had some pretty funny references in there, though.

Back to the show itself, Liz’s comment on the worst beach bodies is hilarious. That’s the realm of trashy women’s magazines you see at the supermarket checkout. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and… 77 at the time this episode aired and the eldest justice on the Court. They mentioned her before in S01E03 “Blind Date” when Pete was trying to figure out what famous person Liz resembles.

Courtney Thorne-Smith is an actress, most notably Alison Parker on Melrose Place and Georgia Thomas on Ally McBeal, which also starred… Jane Krakowski (Jenna).

I’m not sure if they were going for this, but it really reminds me of the scene from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home where Scotty’s trying to use a computer that… isn’t responding to his voice commands.

Amelia Earhart (1897-1937?) was a noted American aviation pioneer and author who disappeared somewhere over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 after suddenly getting her period. Oh wait actually no one knows what happened. They’ve recently found bits of bone and perhaps some of her personal effects on Gardner Island, indicating she may have crashed and lived for some time there as a castaway before passing away.

G-SPAN is probably a take off on C-SPAN (Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network), which airs non-stop coverage of government proceedings and public affairs programming.

I’m sure this is an actual theory but it’s the kind of thing that’s super hard to look up on the Internet.

This is wicked. A lot of purebred dogs end up with hip dysplasia, implying that you’d have to embark on some pretty serious eugenics over countless generations to pervert a woman’s genes to the point you could breed out jealousy, but you’d end up with a crippled lesbian at the same time.

Hank Hooper was introduced in S05E13: “¡Qué Sorpresa!” as, yes, the CEO of Kabletown and, since Kabletown bought NBC, Jack’s new boss.

Awesome!! Kaylie Hooper is played by Chloe Moretz, better known as Hit Girl from the fantastic 2010 movie Kick-Ass. If you haven’t watched this yet go watch it. Now. Stop reading and go now.

This would be where a kid with a trust fund, set up by rich parents so the kid gets sort of a pre-inheritance when they reach a certain age (18? 21? 25?), end up so wealthy they never need to work. Jack’s implication is they end up with no work ethic, drifting aimlessly through a meaningless life of bizarre leisure, free of all societal constraints. I think I just sold myself on this. It’s starting to sound good.

Jack’s odd misogyny comes through. He’s married to Avery, an incredibly strong woman and mother of his daughter, yet belittles women here. I’d like to say this in inconsistent with his established character, but it’s exactly consistent;)

AquaFem? This must be the “women’s exercise water” Liz mentioned a minute ago. Doesn’t exist. I love this statement. Products like this do exist, but maybe not as generic as water. Like you would need water marketed specifically to women. It’s water. There’s nothing inherently masculine or feminine about it, but look at Coke Zero. You know why there’s Coke Zero? Because men don’t “diet.” That’s for women. So why would they drink Diet Coke? Nutty.

They had a bit like this in S05E03 “Let’s Stay Together” where Lutz gets in trouble for eating the women’s sports bars.

Okay here’s another inconsistent bit in this episode. Apparently Cerie’s actually really clever, not just a (very) pretty face. She’s right, though.

I swear Frank dressed up something like this before, but I can’t remember when. Anyone? [update:] Ah yes! Clever memory man Blake tells us it was S03E13 “Goodbye, My Friend” where Frank dressed up as a lawyer. Similar in look but without the douchey blue-with-white-collar-and-cuffs shirt.

Sir Ian McKellen is a distinguished (you get that prefix at the same time as “Sir”) British actor, most recently known for his roles of Gandalf in the The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and Magneto in the X-Men Trilogy. [update:] Reader C Jenkins also points out that Sir Ian is known to be quite gay. HOWEVER that does NOT mean he isn’t knee-deep in boob. In fact, every gay man I know absolutely loves boobs. And who gets to see/try out a new boob job first? The gay friend.

Xbox Kinect is a peripheral for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 gaming console which basically points a camera at you so you can control a game just by flailing around madly — no controller required.

I wonder if Kinect will become the new go-to cover story for spousal abuse. “Hey Marinko, how’d you get that black eye?” “This? Oh, uh… Jen and I were playing Xbox Kinect and I took one in the face.”

True story! J. Fred Muggs first appeared on NBC’s Today Show on January 28, 1953 and was a regular until 1957.

And yes, NBC is still a network. Despite being down in the ratings and recently bought out by Kabletown. I mean Comcast.

Jack’s trying so hard to appeal to the youth, drawing back on the last time he payed attention to what kids may be watching, reaching back to 1978’s Diff’rent Strokes with (the late) Gary Coleman and his catchphrase “What’chu talkin’ ’bout, Willis?”

Jack also seems to know about Justin Bieber, but horribly mispronounces his last name.

A cleaner wrasse is a little fish that hangs out on coral reefs and cleans other fishes’ teeth. Other fish know this and come to the cleaner wrasse reefs to have their teeth cleaned. They do not eat the cleaner wrasses, much in the same way you avoid eating your dental hygenist.

I love that they voted a “slut” in as Kaylie’s school mascot;)

Dr. Ballard did do these things. He’s a deep-sea explorer, investigator of numerous shipwrecks and, most famously, discoverer of the final resting place of the RMS Titanic in 1985. He also spoke at TED in 2008 on the importance of exploring the oceans.

Jack mentioned his relationship with Ballard before in S05E11 “Mrs. Donaghy” where Ballard was supposed to be Jack’s best man but got sick from eating some bad toucan, and again  in S04E09 “Klaus and Greta” when he told Liz celebrating New Year’s party with him and got horribly ill on an amphora of 2000 year old wine from a sunken Phoenician trading vessel.

The closest we get to a home page is his faculty page at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography. Oddly enough there’s no mention of cheesecake.

The American Museum of Natural History can be found in New York City on the west side of Central Park. Wow, it has “25 interconnected buildings that house 46 permanent exhibition halls, research laboratories, and its renowned library.” Good on ‘em!

30 Rock also loves Brian Williams. They keep either mentioning him or having him on the show.

J. Fred Muggs, despite making his first appearance on NBC’s Today Show in 1953 is still alive! And he has a girlfriend, Phoebe B. Beebe.

Lutz is talking about football (soccer for you Yanks). West Ham is West Ham United based in Upton Park, Newham, East London. “Wolves” refer to the Wolverhampton Wanderers out of Wolverhampton, England. Nil-nil would mean 0-0; no one scored any points. I have to give the credit to Vanity Fair on this one; I couldn’t even figure out what Lutz was saying;)

Awesome. Toofer used the singular of graffiti.

I love that they keep slipping Subhas in. I want to know the story behind this dude! I mean, the actor’s real name is Subhas. Subhas Ramsaywack. [update from reader C Jenkins:] (And I love this!) “According to a commentary on the DVD box set, he is actually the studio cleaner – Alex Baldwin didn’t realise this and commented that he was an ‘awful actor’.”

Douchebaggery = awesome word and needs to be used more.

Femolution = not a word, but the High Plains Reader (website/magazine) seems to have a regular series of articles under that title.

Tracy Chapman is a woman (and a singer), but I always wondered back when I was a kid (about the woman part).

Oprah is Liz’s version of a femotopia God.

Oooo another clue in the ongoing mystery of Kenneth the Immortal. Child actress Shirley Temple was born in 1928, so she would have been eight in 1936. In 1936 Shirley Template made four movies (Captain January, Poor Little Rich Girl, Dimples) and NBC has just moved into 30 Rockefeller Center three years earlier, and two years before NBC launched their television network. So Kenneth was there at the Beginning.

Sounds like a riff on Liz’s hilarious line from S02E13 “Succession”: “Hey, nerds! Who’s got two thumbs, speaks limited French, and hasn’t cried once today? [pointing both thumbs at herself] This moi.” Liz’s was way funnier.

Frottage: Consensual sexual rubbing between partners. “Consensual” here being a matter of interpretation. When Linda Ronstadt (80s pop star) licensed her image for reproduction, was there anything prohibiting frottage? Is it implied consent? We need a date rape lawyer on this one.

I remember her! Clara Peller (sad! she passed away in 1987) starred in a series of 80s commercials for Wendy’s and this was her catchphrase.

Okay completely unrelated, but for some reason the first related video on YouTube is for a Japanese McDonald’s commercial with a smokin’ hot chick dressed up like Ronald McDonald. Go Japan!

Double-teaming: Sex in a threesome. I’ll refrain from going into any more detail for this scene because I fear jail time.

Jamie Lee Curtis is an actress who at one point had a super hot body. I don’t know if she does anymore, but she’s 52 so I’d be shocked and amazed if she did. [update from reader C Jenkins:] (And I DID see this and failed to post it!) Jamie Lee Curtis was rumoured to be… a hermaphrodite from birth. But they removed the offending penis. How do they decide which sex s/he should be? No idea if it’s true or not.

As of the date this episode was written up, Jamie Lee Curtis does not have two butts. That is a slanderous lie.

Bobert?? It actually is short for Robert;)

However, despite what Wikipedia says about this episode, this is not the real Robert Ballard. It’s actor Terrence Mann. Mann’s a stupid last name. It just doesn’t sound right. What are you going to do, wander around your whole life telling people “I’m the Mann!” or calling yourself “Mister Mann”? Kch.

[Update:] In a April 20, 2011 talk at Google Tina Fey mentioned (at 27:00) they tried to get the real Bob Ballard but he wasn’t available.

Okay I think that’s what Jack said, but it doesn’t sound anything like the scientific name for the humpback anglerfish, melanocetus johnsonii. The rest of it’s mostly right, though. It’s a friggin nightmare, though: “When [the male] finds a female, he bites into her skin, and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body, fusing the pair down to the blood-vessel level. The male then slowly atrophies, first losing his digestive organs, then his brain, heart, and eyes, and ends as nothing more than a pair of gonads, which release sperm in response to hormones in the female’s bloodstream indicating egg release.” MOTHER OF GOD that’s frightening.

Dr. Ballard’s wife’s name is actually Barbra.

Giant tube worms: They have been found living clustered around deep sea hydrothermal vents. It was originally assumed the depth, high concentrations of hydrogen sulphide, and scalding water temperatures near the vents would preclude the possibility of life, which made it all the more surprising when the tube worms were found.

Arctic jellyfish: They’re constantly dredging the oceans and finding all sorts of stuff they’ve never seen before.

Kelp: Contains alginate which is excellent at taking molds of things (dentists for teeth, special effects artists for faces and body parts), and is also used as a commercial thickening agent in jelly, salad dressing, toothpaste, and, yes, ice cream. It doesn’t help the headaches, though.

Dr. Ballard created The JASON Project in 1989 and is designed to motivate and inspire students to pursue interests and careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. I assume he named it after the Greek hero Jason who, with his Argonauts (sailor-heroes named after their ship, the Argo), went on a quest to recover the Golden Fleece. Ballard named one of his subs the Argo, and does seem to have an Argonauts program where students and teachers can sign up to be part of expeditions. Don’t know if they have stickers, though;)

Poseidon is the Greek god of the sea, billy. Known as Neptune to the Romans. Because they took everything Greek and renamed it and pretended they invented it. I bet the Greeks invented pizza.

Never heard that one before, despite the fantasticness of the whole thing. It’s slang for “losing your virginity.”

A bit more of Liz’s weird “clown college” history comes out. In S05E05 “Reaganing” she tells Jack she was rejected by two guys who later went to clown college. Apparently not before losing her virginity on clown campus.

[Update:] Oo! Reader Blake points out that in S03E03 “The One With The Cast Of Night Court”, Liz talks with Jennifer Aniston’s character about how Liz dated Joel Sucheky and he was the head clowning instructor. He later dated Aniston’s character. So it’s likely that Joel is the one who punched Liz’s V-card.

I honestly have no idea what “Belevedere’d” means. [update:] Reader C Jenkins (Cathy? Carl? Cryostat?) dug further than I and came up with “To sit on one’s testicles, presumably by Actor Christopher Hewett, who played Mr. Belvedere on the eponymous comedy show, once sat on his testicles at a staged script reading and yelled so loudly from the pain that the fluorescent lighting shook.”

It is a little odd that Lutz is so worked up over Abby. It was pretty heavily implied he was gay. Though maybe he’s just bisexual.

The whole title is “Jack Attack: The Art of Aggression in Business.”

Jacques Costeau (1910-1997) was a famous French ocean explorer and filmmaker and inventor of the aqua-lung (a.k.a. scuba set) in 1943.

Because Kenneth is a hick and believes women should be uneducated. An immortal hick. How can you be that old and still be a hick? I thought age brought wisdom and wisdom destroyed ignorance. Maybe I’m naive.

There was an erasable pen in the 80s! This episode has a lot of 80s references. They became instantly popular and then slowly died as they smudged as badly as pencil.

Beanie Babies! Do they still make those? Why yes, yes they do. They started in 1993 and stopped in 1999, but Ty Warner Inc restarted production due to consumer demand. There were a lot of limited runs of certain Beanie Babies, leading to a collector’s market. Jack seems to be a poor Beanie Baby speculator.

The banner above Kaylie’s school entrance is fantastic. It reads “Congratulations Sluts Volleyball, 2011 IAL Champs” and around the aforementioned banshee-like screaming slut it says “Ceffyl Gwain Sluts.” Ceffyl Gwain looks like a modified version of Ceffyl Gwyn, which means “White Horse” in Gaelic. I know this because I’m fluent in Gaelic. Or maybe that Google auto-suggested it when I typed in “Ceffyl Gwain.” I like the sound of the first one better. Pog Mo Thoin!

[Update:] Intrepid reader Curtis wasn’t satisfied with this answer. He translated from Welsh to English. Guess what it means then? “Horse vagina.” Rah, Curtis!

Chalk hands!? Nice. Oddly enough I haven’t heard a lot of derogatory terms for teachers. You would think the millions of disgruntled children worldwide with nothing better to do than sit sulkily in class would have come up with a few more.

Not a real thing, but there are a few of these out there. It seems to follow this pattern: find a thing kids are into these days (like Justin Bieber or sparkly vampires), adapt it into every other possible medium, and whore it out. See also: Harry Potter.

[Update:] Reader RoyalSphincter (nice one;) points out: One of Chloë Moretz’s early roles was Darby, a “Super-Sleuth” on Disney’s “My Friends Tigger and Pooh.” Later, Moretz would play a tween vampire in “Let Me In.”

So Sue LaRoche-Van der Hout seems to be fluent in Dutch. “Struikgewas” means shrubbery in Dutch, also known as “bush.” So Sue wants Abby to sit on her bush. This is our first hint that Sue may be gay. [update:] INCORRECT! Reader Debs points out my hideous lack of memory and ability to research anything, saying “Actually, there have been several intimations that Sue is gay – she wanted to go to Tasti D-Lite and Pinkberry strip clubs and her predilection for watching porn with the other boys is often referred to. She even umpired a porn title-naming contest between Lutz and Frank.” Nice work, Debs. Nice work. [Update 2:] Readers Monica and @mccue points out that Tasti D-Lite and Pinkberry are frozen yogurt chains. They’re pretty good, but they’re no Yogurtland!

Whoa, this one has a storied history. The original phrase is actually something like “said the actress to the Bishop,” implying a double entendre, and may have been used in Britain back in Edwardian times.

The newer “that’s what she said” version was actually popularized by Wayne’s World, a Saturday Night Live sketch later made into a 1992 movie of the same name (see glorious youtube clip of that very scene here). It later became Steve Carell’s catchphrase in the TV show The Office.

Okay it sounded like Liz started staying “We are all-” but, despite the number of Eleanor Roosevelt quotes out there, none of them start with “We are all.”

Sleeping With the Enemy is a 1992 movie starring Julia Roberts trying to escape an abusive and brutally obsessed husband.

Nice! This scene even mimics the one in the 1995 movie Seven, which is actually right at the end. I won’t ruin it any further. It’s a fantastic movie. Go watch.