7 ms·

As an aside, I was watching BBT just yesterday (on a long plane ride with limited entertainment options) and I was reminded how uncomfortably awkward it makes m

by novum 13y ago

As an aside, I was watching BBT just yesterday (on a long plane ride with limited entertainment options) and I was reminded how uncomfortably awkward it makes me feel. In short, the core problem is that the characters are not sympathetic -- you're meant to laugh at them, not with them, to say nothing of the show's terribly backwards gender roles. This essay was quite popular a while back and summarizes all this and more, quite well I think: http://butmyopinionisright.tumblr.com/post/31079561065/the-problem-with-the-big-bang-theory http://butmyopinionisright.tumblr.com/post/31079561065/the-p... Edit: Interesting to see many of you have a completely opposite take on these characters. That's fine with me, as long as we don't have to watch BBT if I'm over at your place. :) Edit 2: Can we at least agree that laugh tracks are awful, even on otherwise-phenomenal shows (Seinfeld)?

lionheart 13y ago
I don't know. In my personal opinion those critiques are overly critical. My circle of friends is pretty much exactly like the main characters in the show. Nerdy, 20-something PhD guys that play board games and watch sci-fi. A few were actually almost as bad as Raj in not being able to say a word when a woman was around. And I love the show. Loved it as soon as it came out just because it reminded me so much of my friends. And I don't feel like the characters are meant to be laughed at. So, just to say, there's more than one perspective on this.
- stormbrew 13y ago
  I agree with this. Insofar as you're supposed to laugh at the characters, I think it's true of pretty much all sitcoms. Sitcoms are almost always about broad stroke "laugh at yourself, because you are funny" kind of stuff. But more interestingly, often people who hold up this argument are fond of bringing up The IT Crowd as a counterpoint to BBT on this front and... I just don't get it. The people in IT Crowd are basically awful human beings I can't sympathize with, in spite of existing in a vaguely similar world as they do. The characters on BBT feel much more sympathetic to me. They're mostly trying to be good people at least.
- Camillo 13y ago
  I think the appeal of BBT is that some people like to see a reflection of their microcosm: they like to see people like them, situations like the ones they experience, references to things they like, etc.. It makes them feel relevant and part of an in-group. It's the same appeal that xkcd has. It has been called "referential humor", but I don't think it should be classified as humor, although for some people it seems to be a completely satisfying humor surrogate. Indeed, BBT and xkcd are both full of nerd references, devoid of actual humor, and enormously popular.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    > It has been called "referential humor", but I don't think it should be classified as humor, although for some people it seems to be a completely satisfying humor surrogate. I call them "tribal markers". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics
  - freyr 13y ago
    >> It has been called "referential humor", but I don't think it should be classified as humor, although for some people it seems to be a completely satisfying humor surrogate. You're just completely missing the point. The joke is not the nerdy references. The references are a backdrop, a framework in which to develop the show's humor. Do people really think, even for a second, that CBS developed a primetime network show whose jokes were targeted specifically to Caltech physics PhD students? Or even to self-identified nerds? Think of it another way. The show is produced by Chuck Lorrie, the same guy who produced Two and a Half Men, which featured Charlie Sheen as a Malibu playboy. Did you think Two And A Half Men was written to appeal primarily to Malibu playboys? Would you consider that referential humor? Do you think Malibu bachelors got their panties in a twist because some of the jokes poked fun at the show's main characters? Some of the characters on the show are quirky and flawed, and sometimes they're the subject of ridicule. Flip the channel to another sitcom. It's the exact same thing, but about jocks, or suburban families, or blue-collared delivery truck drivers. Only the nerd community has enough of an ingrained victim mentality to take it personally, to think the show should be about them, or that jokes about nerds should be off limits.
- mturmon 13y ago
  People who think the show is not "close enough" to real life don't know enough elite physicists or Caltech grad students/research scientists. Even within the world of tech PhD's (a small community in the scheme of things), Caltech is especially unusual. I have been impressed that the creators of the show can capture some of that oddness and make a go of it for a mass audience. The show does struggle with female roles. As does its real-life counterpart.
eco 13y ago
I once heard Big Bang Theory described as "blackface for nerds"* and it made me suddenly realize why I was so uncomfortable watching that show. * I hope no one thinks I'm trying to trivialize blackface which was, of course, far worse than what Big Bang Theory is doing.
- stormbrew 13y ago
  I really wish people would stop saying this. Even if you don't mean to trivialize what blackface actually was, that is basically the net effect. It's a terrible analogy on pretty much every level.
  - eco 13y ago
    They both set up caricatures of an unpopular group for the audience to laugh at. Like I said, blackface is far worse but I don't see how the analogy is "[terrible] on pretty much every level". It's much less hateful and damaging, certainly, but it's there in tone. I was hoping to not have this debate that invariably comes up about how you can't compare anything to blackface because of how bad blackface was but I don't consider that a valid argument against the comparison.
    - stormbrew 13y ago
      Part of what makes blackface so horrible is the power imbalance that underlies it. In the days of minstrelry, black people were deeply and powerfully unequal in civil society. They had no recourse against the indignity done to them by blackface performance, and it was an indignity forced on them by a more powerful social class. Try replacing nerds with black people in that paragraph and tell me it's at all comparable.
      - warfangle 13y ago
        Put it in context of a high school / middle school lunchroom...
        13y ago
shib71 13y ago
I personally find the characters very sympathetic and laughing at the BBT characters is like laughing at myself. It's refreshing to see the extreme qualities which other shows merely caricature be shown in the context of fully fleshed out human beings.
- dkuntz2 13y ago
  BBT doesn't flesh out those characters. Most other shows I watch do. Ben Wyatt on Parks and Rec comes off as a much more realistic nerd than any of the characters on BBT. Abed Nadir in Community is also a whole lot more fleshed out than the characters in BBT. The BBT characters are the epitome of stereotypical, caricatures of nerds. None of them are ever shown to have interests other than the traditionally nerdy kind. If by "fully fleshed out human beings", you mean they happen to be main characters, sure. But by any other definition of "fully fleshed out" vs "caricature", they're much closer to caricature.
tedjdziuba 13y ago
The Big Bang Theory is nerd blackface.
soneca 13y ago
I started to feel this way watching Two and a Half Men, because of the character Allan. After some years of laughs I just felt awkward because there was this, incredibly unlucky, with no particular skill socially or professionally, mistreated by everybody, from his ex-wife to his brother's maid, humiliated by women, with no will-power to fight back. Really, it was just sad. Usually even the weak characters have some quality, some strenght you have to admire in them - as a pure heart. They stripped Allan from all that. But I guess other people started feeling the same way because they change it a little bit. They gave him a beautiful, nice girlfriend, some qualities, some character, some opinion. As a result it is a more human character now, not a freak show. And about BBT, I guess the writers give the characters some of these qualities, so I don't feel as awkward whatching it as I was watching 2&1/2Men.
- phaus 13y ago
  For me the awkwardness started when I realized that Charlie Sheen was playing himself. A morally deficient, manipulative, self-centered douche-bag who happens to be hell bent on self-destruction, yet he always narrowly avoids it due to his disproportionate amounts of luck.
- rpgmaker 13y ago
  I agree, they made Allan so pathetic. I also learned that Jon Cryer is an incredibly good comedy actor. Charlie wasn't really acting, he was just being himself but Allan was a real piece of depressing work.
- ajtaylor 13y ago
  I felt exactly this way too. You know how you just cringe about something, knowing exactly how awful it's going to be or feel? That describes most of my reactions to Allan, and is part of the reason I quit watching. The other was that the raunchy factor seemed to know no lower bound. I finally reached a point where I couldn't take anymore and quit watching (around the time Ashton Kutcher came in).
brazzy 13y ago
> In short, the core problem is that the characters are not sympathetic -- you're meant to laugh at them, not with them, to say nothing of the show's terribly backwards gender roles. For the record: I disagree 100% with every single statement in there.
- rpgmaker 13y ago
  For the record: I agree 100% with everything you said.
objclxt 13y ago
> Can we at least agree that laugh tracks are awful, even on otherwise-phenomenal shows (Seinfeld)? No. Multi-camera sitcoms with live audiences are very, very different in writing, tone, and end product to single camera comedies. They both serve different purposes. Shooting a sitcom in front of a studio audience radically alters the pacing, the way jokes are told, and the setup (you're inherently constrained to fewer sets). I think there is still a space today for comedies with live audiences (and the ratings seem to back this up). I love Arrested Development. I also love Frasier. AD would obviously never have worked with a live audience, Frasier would have been a far worse show without the laugh track. Now, I'm not talking about canned laughter. I think I can agree that adding laughter in post is bad. And Big Bang Theory is particularly guilty of 'sweetening' live audience reaction, meaning jokes that shouldn't be that funny often have huge waves of laughter. I don't appreciate that.
- millstone 13y ago
  Can you elaborate on why Frasier would have been a far worse show without the laugh track? One show which benefited from a laugh track was Married With Children, because it was an unapologetically trashy show about trashy people, and the audience hoots and jeers contributed to its low-brow atmosphere. But the Big Bang Theory suffers horribly for its laugh track. It's not just the disproportionate reaction to jokes, it's the laughter at things that aren't jokes at all. See for example this egregious example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN3qn92R0SE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN3qn92R0SE , in which the audience starts cracking up after "My new computer came with Windows 7."
- nikatwork 13y ago
  > Multi-camera sitcoms with live audiences are very, very different in writing, tone, and end product to single camera comedies. They both serve different purposes. Or, y'know, you could have single camera comedies with no laugh track. The British seem to manage that just fine. I personally find laugh tracks equal parts desperate and condescending. "Hey dummy! There's a joke here! Laugh damn you... LAUGH!!"
  - cdcarter 13y ago
SeanLuke 13y ago
> Edit 2: Can we at least agree that laugh tracks are awful, even on otherwise-phenomenal shows (Seinfeld)? BBT does not use a laugh track.
- BrianEatWorld 13y ago
  You are right that its not canned laughter, but a laugh track can more generally refer to a separate track for the audience's laughter. This can be edited to compensate for jokes that require repeated takes or have its level's adjusted just like the rest of the sound in the show. I don't watch the show, so I can't say for sure, but its possible that the way the laugh track is mixed makes it more obvious than other shows, such as 90s sitcoms.
  - SeanLuke 13y ago
    > I don't watch the show, so I can't say for sure, but its possible that the way the laugh track is mixed makes it more obvious than other shows, such as 90s sitcoms. Chuck Lorre, the producer for the show, is really ticked off at people who say that BBT has a laugh track, and has been very adamant that it does not.
    - forgottenpass 13y ago
      Chuck Lorre, the producer for the show, is really ticked off at people who say that BBT has a laugh track, and has been very adamant that it does not. Good for him. The television producer can split hairs about terms that have different industry and layman uses all he wants. Either way, there is still studio audience laughter embedded in the show's audio. Dude should be well aware that home viewers can disagree with the recorded audience on whether or not punchlines are powerful enough for audible laughs, and that when they disagree often enough the audience laughter becomes very grating to the viewer. And ultimately, that's what he is ticked off about. The way the laughs bother people is a indictment of the comedy in the show. When viewers agree with the recorded audience about what is funny, they don't notice the recorded laughs as much, so they don't complain as much.
dnautics 13y ago
I think a second core problem with BBT is that it really plays into the "trappings of being intelligent" - which is not how most intelligent people actually are. There are a TON of "signalling" devices, for example liking comic books, or having thick-rimmed glasses. Now, I'm not a physicist (chemist/biologist) and we may be more "down to earth" but I don't have a single scientist friend who HAS THE TIME to do a lot of those things that maybe in high school geeks/nerds did a lot of. I don't know anyone who plays D&D anymore, I don't know anyone who goes to Comic-Con (I'm in San Diego). We do stuff like - go hiking; I'm obsessed with social dance (where there are, incidentally, tons of engineers and scientists); I had a lot of math majors friends from college and of the ones that did math PhD programs, they wound up: climbing rediculous spires in red rock country, supermarathon running for fun... And one, after getting his PhD, joined the Navy and entered its pilot training program (he would have become a fighter pilot but there were no fighter billets available). So, what bugs me about BBT in addition to having really awful people (watch "BBT without the laugh track" on youtube if you doubt it), is not only that it perpetuates stereotypes, it perpetuates really dumb stereotypes... And the life of a scientist, I think, swings from incredibly boring times in the lab, to super-exciting times in the lab, to "relatively normal social life" outside of the lab, except that that last one gets a lot less time, since, we're in the lab all the damn time.
- lelandbatey 13y ago
  Indeed, I've heard the style of the humor on Big Bang Theory as "Stupid comedy about smart things." And I'd agree with that. The humor itself is really shallow, often mean spirited and uncomfortable. They can only pass themselves off as "smart" because they have peripheral details that relate to traditionally smart things.
- vacri 13y ago
  BBT bugs me for the same reasons. I've yet to find someone actually in the life that enjoys the show. It seems to be an outsider's view of 'what nerds and geeks do', rather than written by nerds and geeks. This is given away in the article when they say they had to be shown students' apartments to see what they looked like. It's interesting that the people I know who like it are the ones who like to be close to STEM or academia, but not actually in it. A sort of living-the-fantasy. Admiring the trappings you talk about, all wrapped around a fairly bog-standard sitcom.
contingencies 13y ago
It bothered me too, I thought about it and came to the same conclusion. Moreover, while watching the show (always at the behest of someone else, by now perhaps in four different countries) I am primarily left wondering how twisted the producers of such a show must be, and how sick the entire entertainment industry really is. If you ask me, Buddhism got it right: communicating trivialities, distractions and divisive speech are things fundamentally unhealthy to ourselves and our environments that we should seek to avoid. Hollywood, on the other hand, celebrates the same. Of course, people will interpret this as fundamentalism, and of course I'm not advocating zero entertainment (I believe we should all be free to make our own decisions about which company to keep and media to consume and produce). I am, however, advocating calling a spade a spade, and I do think novum's comments are right on the mark with this show.

by novum 13y ago

lionheart 13y ago

I don't know. In my personal opinion those critiques are overly critical. My circle of friends is pretty much exactly like the main characters in the show. Nerdy, 20-something PhD guys that play board games and watch sci-fi. A few were actually almost as bad as Raj in not being able to say a word when a woman was around. And I love the show. Loved it as soon as it came out just because it reminded me so much of my friends. And I don't feel like the characters are meant to be laughed at. So, just to say, there's more than one perspective on this.

stormbrew 13y ago
I agree with this. Insofar as you're supposed to laugh at the characters, I think it's true of pretty much all sitcoms. Sitcoms are almost always about broad stroke "laugh at yourself, because you are funny" kind of stuff. But more interestingly, often people who hold up this argument are fond of bringing up The IT Crowd as a counterpoint to BBT on this front and... I just don't get it. The people in IT Crowd are basically awful human beings I can't sympathize with, in spite of existing in a vaguely similar world as they do. The characters on BBT feel much more sympathetic to me. They're mostly trying to be good people at least.
Camillo 13y ago
I think the appeal of BBT is that some people like to see a reflection of their microcosm: they like to see people like them, situations like the ones they experience, references to things they like, etc.. It makes them feel relevant and part of an in-group. It's the same appeal that xkcd has. It has been called "referential humor", but I don't think it should be classified as humor, although for some people it seems to be a completely satisfying humor surrogate. Indeed, BBT and xkcd are both full of nerd references, devoid of actual humor, and enormously popular.
- saraid216 13y ago
  > It has been called "referential humor", but I don't think it should be classified as humor, although for some people it seems to be a completely satisfying humor surrogate. I call them "tribal markers". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics
- freyr 13y ago
  >> It has been called "referential humor", but I don't think it should be classified as humor, although for some people it seems to be a completely satisfying humor surrogate. You're just completely missing the point. The joke is not the nerdy references. The references are a backdrop, a framework in which to develop the show's humor. Do people really think, even for a second, that CBS developed a primetime network show whose jokes were targeted specifically to Caltech physics PhD students? Or even to self-identified nerds? Think of it another way. The show is produced by Chuck Lorrie, the same guy who produced Two and a Half Men, which featured Charlie Sheen as a Malibu playboy. Did you think Two And A Half Men was written to appeal primarily to Malibu playboys? Would you consider that referential humor? Do you think Malibu bachelors got their panties in a twist because some of the jokes poked fun at the show's main characters? Some of the characters on the show are quirky and flawed, and sometimes they're the subject of ridicule. Flip the channel to another sitcom. It's the exact same thing, but about jocks, or suburban families, or blue-collared delivery truck drivers. Only the nerd community has enough of an ingrained victim mentality to take it personally, to think the show should be about them, or that jokes about nerds should be off limits.
mturmon 13y ago
People who think the show is not "close enough" to real life don't know enough elite physicists or Caltech grad students/research scientists. Even within the world of tech PhD's (a small community in the scheme of things), Caltech is especially unusual. I have been impressed that the creators of the show can capture some of that oddness and make a go of it for a mass audience. The show does struggle with female roles. As does its real-life counterpart.

eco 13y ago

I once heard Big Bang Theory described as "blackface for nerds"* and it made me suddenly realize why I was so uncomfortable watching that show. * I hope no one thinks I'm trying to trivialize blackface which was, of course, far worse than what Big Bang Theory is doing.

stormbrew 13y ago
I really wish people would stop saying this. Even if you don't mean to trivialize what blackface actually was, that is basically the net effect. It's a terrible analogy on pretty much every level.
- eco 13y ago
  They both set up caricatures of an unpopular group for the audience to laugh at. Like I said, blackface is far worse but I don't see how the analogy is "[terrible] on pretty much every level". It's much less hateful and damaging, certainly, but it's there in tone. I was hoping to not have this debate that invariably comes up about how you can't compare anything to blackface because of how bad blackface was but I don't consider that a valid argument against the comparison.
  - stormbrew 13y ago
    Part of what makes blackface so horrible is the power imbalance that underlies it. In the days of minstrelry, black people were deeply and powerfully unequal in civil society. They had no recourse against the indignity done to them by blackface performance, and it was an indignity forced on them by a more powerful social class. Try replacing nerds with black people in that paragraph and tell me it's at all comparable.
    - warfangle 13y ago
      Put it in context of a high school / middle school lunchroom...
      - 13y ago

shib71 13y ago

I personally find the characters very sympathetic and laughing at the BBT characters is like laughing at myself. It's refreshing to see the extreme qualities which other shows merely caricature be shown in the context of fully fleshed out human beings.

dkuntz2 13y ago
BBT doesn't flesh out those characters. Most other shows I watch do. Ben Wyatt on Parks and Rec comes off as a much more realistic nerd than any of the characters on BBT. Abed Nadir in Community is also a whole lot more fleshed out than the characters in BBT. The BBT characters are the epitome of stereotypical, caricatures of nerds. None of them are ever shown to have interests other than the traditionally nerdy kind. If by "fully fleshed out human beings", you mean they happen to be main characters, sure. But by any other definition of "fully fleshed out" vs "caricature", they're much closer to caricature.

tedjdziuba 13y ago

The Big Bang Theory is nerd blackface.

soneca 13y ago

I started to feel this way watching Two and a Half Men, because of the character Allan. After some years of laughs I just felt awkward because there was this, incredibly unlucky, with no particular skill socially or professionally, mistreated by everybody, from his ex-wife to his brother's maid, humiliated by women, with no will-power to fight back. Really, it was just sad. Usually even the weak characters have some quality, some strenght you have to admire in them - as a pure heart. They stripped Allan from all that. But I guess other people started feeling the same way because they change it a little bit. They gave him a beautiful, nice girlfriend, some qualities, some character, some opinion. As a result it is a more human character now, not a freak show. And about BBT, I guess the writers give the characters some of these qualities, so I don't feel as awkward whatching it as I was watching 2&1/2Men.

phaus 13y ago
For me the awkwardness started when I realized that Charlie Sheen was playing himself. A morally deficient, manipulative, self-centered douche-bag who happens to be hell bent on self-destruction, yet he always narrowly avoids it due to his disproportionate amounts of luck.
rpgmaker 13y ago
I agree, they made Allan so pathetic. I also learned that Jon Cryer is an incredibly good comedy actor. Charlie wasn't really acting, he was just being himself but Allan was a real piece of depressing work.
ajtaylor 13y ago
I felt exactly this way too. You know how you just cringe about something, knowing exactly how awful it's going to be or feel? That describes most of my reactions to Allan, and is part of the reason I quit watching. The other was that the raunchy factor seemed to know no lower bound. I finally reached a point where I couldn't take anymore and quit watching (around the time Ashton Kutcher came in).

brazzy 13y ago

> In short, the core problem is that the characters are not sympathetic -- you're meant to laugh at them, not with them, to say nothing of the show's terribly backwards gender roles. For the record: I disagree 100% with every single statement in there.

rpgmaker 13y ago
For the record: I agree 100% with everything you said.

objclxt 13y ago

> Can we at least agree that laugh tracks are awful, even on otherwise-phenomenal shows (Seinfeld)? No. Multi-camera sitcoms with live audiences are very, very different in writing, tone, and end product to single camera comedies. They both serve different purposes. Shooting a sitcom in front of a studio audience radically alters the pacing, the way jokes are told, and the setup (you're inherently constrained to fewer sets). I think there is still a space today for comedies with live audiences (and the ratings seem to back this up). I love Arrested Development. I also love Frasier. AD would obviously never have worked with a live audience, Frasier would have been a far worse show without the laugh track. Now, I'm not talking about canned laughter. I think I can agree that adding laughter in post is bad. And Big Bang Theory is particularly guilty of 'sweetening' live audience reaction, meaning jokes that shouldn't be that funny often have huge waves of laughter. I don't appreciate that.

millstone 13y ago
Can you elaborate on why Frasier would have been a far worse show without the laugh track? One show which benefited from a laugh track was Married With Children, because it was an unapologetically trashy show about trashy people, and the audience hoots and jeers contributed to its low-brow atmosphere. But the Big Bang Theory suffers horribly for its laugh track. It's not just the disproportionate reaction to jokes, it's the laughter at things that aren't jokes at all. See for example this egregious example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN3qn92R0SE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN3qn92R0SE , in which the audience starts cracking up after "My new computer came with Windows 7."
nikatwork 13y ago
> Multi-camera sitcoms with live audiences are very, very different in writing, tone, and end product to single camera comedies. They both serve different purposes. Or, y'know, you could have single camera comedies with no laugh track. The British seem to manage that just fine. I personally find laugh tracks equal parts desperate and condescending. "Hey dummy! There's a joke here! Laugh damn you... LAUGH!!"
- cdcarter 13y ago

SeanLuke 13y ago

> Edit 2: Can we at least agree that laugh tracks are awful, even on otherwise-phenomenal shows (Seinfeld)? BBT does not use a laugh track.

BrianEatWorld 13y ago
You are right that its not canned laughter, but a laugh track can more generally refer to a separate track for the audience's laughter. This can be edited to compensate for jokes that require repeated takes or have its level's adjusted just like the rest of the sound in the show. I don't watch the show, so I can't say for sure, but its possible that the way the laugh track is mixed makes it more obvious than other shows, such as 90s sitcoms.
- SeanLuke 13y ago
  > I don't watch the show, so I can't say for sure, but its possible that the way the laugh track is mixed makes it more obvious than other shows, such as 90s sitcoms. Chuck Lorre, the producer for the show, is really ticked off at people who say that BBT has a laugh track, and has been very adamant that it does not.
  - forgottenpass 13y ago
    Chuck Lorre, the producer for the show, is really ticked off at people who say that BBT has a laugh track, and has been very adamant that it does not. Good for him. The television producer can split hairs about terms that have different industry and layman uses all he wants. Either way, there is still studio audience laughter embedded in the show's audio. Dude should be well aware that home viewers can disagree with the recorded audience on whether or not punchlines are powerful enough for audible laughs, and that when they disagree often enough the audience laughter becomes very grating to the viewer. And ultimately, that's what he is ticked off about. The way the laughs bother people is a indictment of the comedy in the show. When viewers agree with the recorded audience about what is funny, they don't notice the recorded laughs as much, so they don't complain as much.

dnautics 13y ago

I think a second core problem with BBT is that it really plays into the "trappings of being intelligent" - which is not how most intelligent people actually are. There are a TON of "signalling" devices, for example liking comic books, or having thick-rimmed glasses. Now, I'm not a physicist (chemist/biologist) and we may be more "down to earth" but I don't have a single scientist friend who HAS THE TIME to do a lot of those things that maybe in high school geeks/nerds did a lot of. I don't know anyone who plays D&D anymore, I don't know anyone who goes to Comic-Con (I'm in San Diego). We do stuff like - go hiking; I'm obsessed with social dance (where there are, incidentally, tons of engineers and scientists); I had a lot of math majors friends from college and of the ones that did math PhD programs, they wound up: climbing rediculous spires in red rock country, supermarathon running for fun... And one, after getting his PhD, joined the Navy and entered its pilot training program (he would have become a fighter pilot but there were no fighter billets available). So, what bugs me about BBT in addition to having really awful people (watch "BBT without the laugh track" on youtube if you doubt it), is not only that it perpetuates stereotypes, it perpetuates really dumb stereotypes... And the life of a scientist, I think, swings from incredibly boring times in the lab, to super-exciting times in the lab, to "relatively normal social life" outside of the lab, except that that last one gets a lot less time, since, we're in the lab all the damn time.

lelandbatey 13y ago
Indeed, I've heard the style of the humor on Big Bang Theory as "Stupid comedy about smart things." And I'd agree with that. The humor itself is really shallow, often mean spirited and uncomfortable. They can only pass themselves off as "smart" because they have peripheral details that relate to traditionally smart things.
vacri 13y ago
BBT bugs me for the same reasons. I've yet to find someone actually in the life that enjoys the show. It seems to be an outsider's view of 'what nerds and geeks do', rather than written by nerds and geeks. This is given away in the article when they say they had to be shown students' apartments to see what they looked like. It's interesting that the people I know who like it are the ones who like to be close to STEM or academia, but not actually in it. A sort of living-the-fantasy. Admiring the trappings you talk about, all wrapped around a fairly bog-standard sitcom.

contingencies 13y ago

It bothered me too, I thought about it and came to the same conclusion. Moreover, while watching the show (always at the behest of someone else, by now perhaps in four different countries) I am primarily left wondering how twisted the producers of such a show must be, and how sick the entire entertainment industry really is. If you ask me, Buddhism got it right: communicating trivialities, distractions and divisive speech are things fundamentally unhealthy to ourselves and our environments that we should seek to avoid. Hollywood, on the other hand, celebrates the same. Of course, people will interpret this as fundamentalism, and of course I'm not advocating zero entertainment (I believe we should all be free to make our own decisions about which company to keep and media to consume and produce). I am, however, advocating calling a spade a spade, and I do think novum's comments are right on the mark with this show.