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Community and Cougar TownOne of these shows is funny in a good way.

By Troy PattersonPosted Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2009, at 5:04 PM ET

Joel McHale in Community Community (NBC, Thursday at 9:30 p.m. ET) arrives blessed (and burdened) by advance publicity declaring it the most promising new comedy of the fall season, rightly so. Though uneven, the show is fast and frisky and notably better than not bad. Also, an overwhelming majority of its competition promises only to induce ennui.

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The star is Joel McHale, best known as host of The Soup, a superfluously clever weekly summary of reality-show happenings and celebrity-culture debasements. There—dashing in his cynicism, cheerful in his schadenfreude, respectful of the audience's intelligence—he lifts his sarcasm above mere snark and emerges as a heroic wit. Here, he brings much the same energy to his role as Jeff Winger, a handsomely unrepentant smartass. Jeff has earned a law degree and launched a distinguished career as an amoral shyster by BS-ing that he had earned a B.A. Found out, he is condemned to begin working toward a degree at the lowest tier of higher education, a community college where students pay tuition in an express aisle and where a Spanish professor concludes an unhinged monologue by fondly stroking the cheek of a random student. The offhand hilarity of this infinitely gentle back-of-hand caress is indicative of a comedy most hilarious in its details.

Acrobatically, the show manages to mock to the low status of Jeff's classmates without sneering. They are enrolled, after all, at a "college of last resort," to use a phrase from "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower," a sad Atlantic article written by an anonymous English instructor. "I don't have cause to use much educational jargon," professor X wrote, "but deficits has often come in handy." The students here are appealing as underdogs—especially, as the pun of the title suggests, because of the bond among them. Each of the first two episodes offers something like a moral lesson, one made all the more palatable for the counterpoint of Jeff's great glib weaseling.

Jeff displays a conspicuous interest in approaches to theology that justify cheating on tests, exploiting alleged friends, and wooing a cutie-pie with exuberant lies. One hopes that future episodes will find him enrolled in a philosophy course where he adheres to principles of moral skepticism and further rocks ontology like a Bertrand Russell with gelled hair. At one point, he scoffs, "I discovered at a very early age that if I talk long enough, I could make anything right or wrong. So either I'm God or truth is relative." Elsewhere, he rounds out a pickup line by asking, "Is God dead?" The mind struggles to recall any other sitcom pilot riffing on the existence of a Supreme Being, only those so dreadful as to disprove his benevolence.

Courteney Cox in Cougar Town One such refutation of divine goodness, Cougar Town (ABC, debuts Wednesday, Sept. 23, at 9:30 p.m. ET), stars Courteney Cox as Jules Cobb, a 40-year-old verging on a nervous breakdown. That Jules runs a real estate agency in contemporary Florida is the least of the indignities heaped upon her.

In the first scene, Jules assesses her figure in the bathroom mirror and frowns disconsolately. The millimeters of saggy skin around her elbows are Cox's own, but it is unclear to whom the (very minor) flab witnessed in extreme close-ups belongs. Perhaps she has a gut double. Divorced from (and paying alimony to) a chowderhead who lives across the street, convinced that her shortage of suitors verifies her unlovability, psychotically gauche in social situations, she embodies every familiar trope of an unmarried woman approaching menopause. The situation demands that she seek out a lover half her age. She clumsily wrangles herself a fellow who has only his pecs to recommend him. She lays him rather in the manner of a succubus leeching a victim's energy.

Cougar Town's stabs at edgy verbal humor rely on subjuvenile lines about reproductive anatomy. A passenger in an abruptly braked car complains, "My uterus almost shot out." More creepily, when Jules' teenage son heads out to meet a friend, she warns, "If I ever catch you two drinking and driving, I'ma show everyone that baby picture of you two holding each other's penises. So small!" What? Why? Must they? This column knows cougars, and Cox's is among the dreariest prowling their habitat.

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Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.

COMMENTS

I had heard of "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower" a few months ago, but this was the first time I'd read it. Fascinating but also depressing. I was wondering what others thought of it?

I meet these sorts of people every day, mostly at work but also in social situations. The difference is that many of them have degrees, bachelors and associates... a few even masters degrees. A woman in my office has a degree (I assume associates) in medical record keeping and is in charge of thousands of engineering related files. She can barely compose a coherent sentence when emailing the entire company about new file room rules or to remind people that they must sign out materials. The great books and movies of the past century are not even a blip on her radar. 1984 is just a year, and Animal Farm is a nice title for Pixar's next movie.

If she was the only one I knew like this I wouldn't feel so hopeless but I regularly bump into a woman with a masters degree in Accounting who could not get through The Sisters of The Travelling Pants because it was at too advanced a reading level. And my favorite, a woman who has a creative writing degree from Carnegie Mellon University, who on seeing that Pride and Prejudice was playing stated that "she thinks that was based on a book". A masters degree from a top school should at least give someone enough education to not make statements such as this or at least require competence in basic reading skills. THis woman too could not finish a book, she spoke of reading (and it was the only book in her apartment) the Red Tent for over 2 years.

The sort of illiteracy described and ascribed to adult education and/or community college students shouldn't stop there. It should address those of us who have degrees from private and public institutions of higher learning. How can one graduate with bachelors and masters degrees and no know how to read? How writing emails be beyond their ability?

I am not a person of more than average intelligence, my grades were average and I have an average job. I have lived life thinking that most people are smarter than I am, but as I get older and see more of the world I think that perhaps I'm wrong. Was reading Anna Karenina at 14 and then at 30 a real accomplishment??? Is memorizing the Lady of Shalott something heroic? Enjoying the Worldly Philosophers and reading Marx, are those things I should put on resumes?

What is our future as a country and a democracy if we cannot raise our kids to be literate? What will happen when we are too ignorant to understand what is going on in politics or economics? Are our current issues with recession and home foreclosure the results of this ignorance? If people read novels would they have understood the fine print on their loan forms?

-- Callie1978
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