The funniest episode of the season
My apologies. I haven't Strip-Rocked in a while because I've been recovering from the debilitating laugh-attack brought on by last week's "30 Rock." Oh man, the "Jack-tor" episode was funny stuff. I haven't cackled like that since watching season one of "The Office" (the British version). You know, I thought Tracy Morgan/Jordan was the comedy powderkeg of that show. He still is, but last week, he was joined by Alec Baldwin's Jack Donaghy and Jane Krakowski's Jenna Maroney, who totally blew things up.
The highlights:
Tracy's chronic tardiness, lack of commitment and refusal to study his lines leads Liz to fear that he can't read. Her suspicion is bolstered by a hilarious "clip" from one of Tracy's hit movies, in which he delivers several lines of pure gibberish (which sounded as meangingless on the fourth listen as they did on the first) with hilarious earnestness. But after days of Tracy using his newly-discovered "learning disability" to leave work early, Liz tricks him into revealing that he's not illiterate -- he's just lazy. Take that, you silly white lady!
Speaking of silly white ladies...Jenna, feeling overshadowed by Tracy, is whipped into career paranoia by the other writers. She becomes convinced that Jack is about to fire her. In an effort to save her skin, she resorts to her tried-and-true-weapon, her "sexuality." She tries to seduce a man she believes to be Jack's boss with sultry come-ons and a heaping teaspoon of... non-dairy creamer! It's priceless.
Back in the writer's room, Jack has asked Liz and the rest of the crew to start incorporating product placement into their skits through positive mentions, or "pos-mens." After winking their way through the obvious yet still funny follow-up (gratuitous Snapple name-dropping), they come up with an idea to write a semi-satirical sketch about product placement, starring Jack Donaghy as himself. Here's where things go off the rails. Despite his cool-as-a-cucumber demeanor and his seemingly successful debut in a company film, Donaghy is hopeless. In an effort to save his boss's ego, Donaghy's assistant shows Liz the secret outtakes from the company film. Stiff and suited, utterly serious, Donaghy trips, he stumbles (literally as well as figuratively), he mangles his lines (I think at one point he actually called for "racial segregation"), he even has trouble walking naturally on camera. It takes over 100 takes to get a few minutes of usable film, and I tell you, I could have watched every last one of them. Baldwin's Donaghy is cringe-worthy and hilarious. He's his own straight man, and he appears to be as surprised as we are at how bad of an actor he is. But he persists in trying again and again. And again. And...
Like "Studio 60," this week's "30 Rock" took on big social issues like bigotry, white/leftist guilt, the power of female sexuality, and the uneasy symbiosis of art and commerce, but it did it with a light touch. Instead of hitting us over the head with a lesson in political correctness (like "Studio 60" did that Monday), it knocked us out of chairs with great skits, brilliant comedic acting and sly puns. And isn't that exactly what both of these shows are about: using television to hilariously spoof contemporary American culture?