I dunno, an awful lot of the tail I got as a young man was nerd-related. (BBS meet-ups, cons, renaissance faire, and wicca.)
If I weren’t happily married, I’d regret being too old to cruise cosplaying sci-fi and comic-con girls in good conscience anymore. That beat the hell out of going to clubs. 
Yeah but you weren’t a nerd, you were preying on the nerds. You can’t tell me you weren’t one of the cool kids.
Nerd to the bone, baby.
Leonard’s my favourite of the male cast, and it is because he’s relate-able (yet still fucked-up in a way Philip Larkin explains best) I certainly prefer watching him over Raj (boring now) or Howard (well, creepy single Howard, haven’t seen latest season yet). Howard wouldn’t last 1 day in my NerdHerd - just because we’re geeks doesn’t mean we tolerate the kind of behaviour he gets away with in the pre-Bernadette days - which might be why the geek girls stick around.
Leonard is the straight man most of the time; the show needs one.
(Edit - ooops, noticed that’s already been said).
leonard may be sheldon’s straight man but that doesn’t mean he plays the part well. nerd crosses into wuss a little too many times and the mannerisms border on the feminine. you can really tell that galecki doesn’t really “get” the role as well as Parsons. Plus it’s weird and distracting that a fellow nerd would find sheldon’s ramblings intolerable and pedantic. i’m not nearly the geek that leonard is portrayed to be and i think sheldon’s musings on the mundane to be hilarious, engaging, interesting, and often times right.
maybe i’m not actually mad at leonard. maybe it’s just the incredible talent disparity between parsons and galecki that’s getting to me. you can tell that parsons has a healthy dose of acting chops as opposed to galecki. all the long-winded diatribes, the geek explanations, the acting (when sheldon was sick, echolocating in the movie theater, etc.) that requires active comedic timing, etc. all falls on parsons while leonard just sits there, squinting with his nose in the air.
i’m just saying if leonard is the straight man, he needs to be a full out straight man - pennyesque in his ignorance and disdain for sheldon’s antics. if he’s going to be a nerd, he needs to be a more convincing nerd. the middle ground is confusing, distracting, and a bit repulsive.
it can definitely be reworked to be just nerds + penny. they interact as neighbors. does a romantic interest really bring more to the table?
Wow, the conversations on those dates must have been seriously one sided (or drunken). 
“So you say you can’t pay the rent…”
For 30 minutes a week maybe, but Leonard deals with him at home and work every day. I can certainly see Leonard finding Sheldon intolerable and pedantic sometimes.
Actually, Leonard is the only one I could stand being with, IRL. Sure, he’s neurotic, but he’s the model of sanity compared to the others.
Yes, Galecki is the straight man and Parsons is the comic or clown. It is widely recognized in showbiz that straight man is a much more difficult role to fill than comic, and that really good straight men are extremely rare. I think perhaps I agree with you that Galecki does not do quite as good a job here as straight man as Parsons does as (this rather unusual and specialized type of) clown, but the show would not work without a Leonard-type character. It is a difficult role because he has to walk a tight rope between extreme nerdiness (to fit plausibly into the group) and ‘normality’ (because he is the character with whom average-joe viewer, or even fairly nerdy viewer - who would want to think that they are Sheldon or Howard or Raj? - gets to identify).
Really? I think that Raj comes over as by far the nicest of them, and reasonably “sane” apart from his hysterical mutism around women. I think I would hang with Raj than with Leonard. (The one I really couldn’t stand to be around for too long is Wolowitz.)
But he does embarrass other members of the cast - it isn’t just about his own lack of personal embarrassment. And whatever he does just makes me cringe and feel embarrassed for him.
Gosh, no. He’s not the nicest - witness when he was in People magazine, all the assholishness came out there.
Actually, I must say, from interviews and the like, Parsons seems like the one cast member who least “gets” geekdom. He’s just (and I mean these as air-quotes: )“acting”, he doesn’t have a real love for the Sheldon character itself or what he represents. Whereas Galecki seems to be largely playing himself, only with a PhD.
But he was drunk. Drunk Raj is like the Mr. Hyde to Raj’s Dr. Jekyll.
Although Drunk Raj is occasionally a smooth stud who can convince women to sleep with him (such as the world’s second hottest math nerd, Danica McKellar). So perhaps he’s more Nutty Professor than Mr. Hyde.
Parsons actually seems downright insulted when interviewers ask him if he’s a geek. But I’m not buying it. I think you have to be at least a little geeky to take a job like BBT. The nerdisms alone would drive him mad if he didn’t care about it a little.
See, that’s the problem - in the show, in order to be able to speak to women, Raj doesn’t need to get drunk. Apparently, once a couple of molecules of alcohol make it past his lips, there goes his mutism. I mean yes, you gotta suspend disbelief, but at least make some effort at imitating reality.
I think he doesn’t want to be typecast. But that train has sailed (to coin a phrase).
They actually played with this once. Raj’s mutism is actually all in his head. When the guys were on a train with Summer Glau, Raj bought a beer and it gave him the courage to speak to her. Naturally, he turned into Smooth Player Raj and was about to score a date with everyone’s favorite woman who can kill you with her mind. Then Howard tells him its non-alcoholic beer and Raj totally clams up. He knows he was just talking to a beautiful woman three seconds ago, but he can’t get any more words out.
It was hilarious (and kinda heartbreaking).
But that doesn’t jibe with the first or second episode where they accidentally discover that Raj’s mutism goes away after imbibing alcohol. At that point, alcohol’s effect couldn’t be psychological.
I tend to disagree. He’s an actor. He’s doing a job.
Does someone playing a psychotic serial killer need to be at least a little psychotic and stabby? Because otherwise the violence and irrational behaviour would drive him mad.