Bowels Vs. Bowls

It never really occurred to me, until this week, how hard it must be to write comedy for today's increasingly fragmented audience. How can you be sure the pop-cultural reference or historical allusion that underpins your joke is going to land with viewers who have such a wide range of backgrounds or experiences? If all you had to go by was the past week in TV comedy, you might come away thinking the one and only 100% sure thing, jokewise, is poop. Actually, not just poop, but the crisis that's created when poop doesn't behave as it should, and reminds us that poop is, truly, the great equalizer.

Our week in poo began last Wednesday, with the premiere of Broad City. In an episode that takes us through the challenges of New York living as experienced by a couple of barely employed weed enthusiasts, the indignities visited upon Abbi by her roommate's boyfriend, Bevers, fall somewhere between getting tips for her bucket-drumming "act" snaked by an impromptu breakdancing performance and having the weirdo who hires her and her best friend Ilana to clean his apartment in their underwear welsh on paying them. Bevers doesn't pay rent or, apparently, have a job. What he does have is a very active bowel — active enough to stop up the toilet in the apartment. When he tells Abbi the bad news, she points out that the plunger is right beside the toilet, to which he helplessly replies that he knows she doesn't like him to touch her stuff...just moments after she's discovered that he ate all her clearly labeled cheese. While I certainly don't want to get into the whole hornet's nest of how women's comedy differs from men's, the moment when Ilana hangs up on a call she's gone into the bathroom to take and then sighs and picks up the plunger to unplug another person's clog is eloquent in its economy.

The episode — and the series, I would venture to guess — does not make its female characters seem precious or classy; I mean, it opens with Ilana videochatting Abbi while balancing her computer on the chest of the guy she's having sex with. But even a woman who is grosser than most won't just walk away from a clogged toilet, even if she wasn't the culprit.

Next up: SNL. In one of the most stupidly funny sketches of a pretty great episode, the host of Couples Quiz delays the start of the game to deal with the question of who clogged up the toilet backstage. It may seem strange that this comes up at all, never mind on camera, but the studio is a historic building!

"Why do they win?" "Dan, you know why."

Finally, we come to the latest Bob's Burgers. While the rest of the block/nation is consumed with excitement for the Super Bowl, Gene has his own plans: "I'm holding all of my BMs until halftime, when I will make a Super Bowel!" No one else is really on board with this revolting plan, particularly when the game starts and Gene's "contractions" are already nine minutes apart, but Gene's timing ends up being accidentally fortuitous. The treachery of Bob's nemesis Jimmy Pesto brings the whole family across the street to confront him, so Gene is on site when his "butt water" breaks. A week's worth of poo is more than Jimmy's toilet can take, and the flood that ensues sends Jimmy's customers racing out of the restaurant.

Sure, only three actually relocate to Bob's, but it's still a symbolic victory, and drives home the point that even when we humans think we've planned the perfect event, there's no amount of planning that can't be undone by an errant #2.