I can’t stand BBT, though as a longtime BNL fan - I do enjoy the theme song.
I agree with those saying that it’s geared towards the lowest common denominator of viewers to make them feel smart for laughing at the jokes.
The thing to remember is that those ‘other people’ only want you to share the enjoyment they get from viewing it.
I saw a good example today of some of the problem I have with the show. Today (Wed 11/23)'s Pearls Before Swine comic. In case you didn’t see it, briefly :
Rat asks Goat what he’s reading about. Goat says, “I’m learning about valence electrons.” Then he gives a very short description of how they determine “how elements will mix together”.
In Panel 2, they discuss not wanting to go to Pig’s upcoming party. They aren’t sure how to let him down about it.
In Panel 3, Rat is writing a letter to Pig. It says, “My valence electrons are not compatible with your valence electrons”.
To me, this is exactly the sort of joke that’s very common on The Big Bang Theory. It’s not unfunny, really. I suppose part of the humor might be Rat’s vague understanding of the concept, but I think it’s mildly amusing even without that. I don’t mind if a non-technical person makes a sort of joke like that. We can see how it’s kind of funny, based on Rat’s knowledge, to make such a statement even if it’s technically fuzzy.
The problem I have with TBBT* is that these aren’t supposed to be the sort of people making those kinds of jokes based on little knowledge. These are presented as “the sort of jokes nerds make” when they are anything but. Yes, you find an occasional nerd type who makes a crack like that and yes, TBBT can go above (or below) that level. But it’s annoying to have it presented as typical, and doubly so when the ample evidence here shows many people who watch it get that impression. These are really the sort of jokes that non-technical people make on the subject. It’s not that it can’t be funny; it’s that it rings hollow to put it in the mouths of people who are the least likely to make such jokes, let alone find them amusing.
The Schrödinger’s Friendship joke is a good example of this. If the line had stopped at “our friendship is in a state of superposition” (or whatever his actual line was), it would be fine. Adding the “Schrödinger” part makes it sound like nothing so much as coming from someone who’s only vaguely familiar with the idea, and uses the Cat because that’s about all they understand. And when it’s the sort of thing getting repeated over and over and passed off as nerd humor, that’s what becomes aggravating.
*To be fair, I’ve only seen 4 or 5 episodes. Mostly on the advice of another well-meaning friend who thought I’d just love it. And I don’t hate it; I just think it gets misrepresented too often.
Call that a nerdrage? When Patrick Stewart hosted Saturday Night Live, one of the sketches was a mishmash of Star Trek:TNG and Love Boat, with Bernie Kopell (who’d played the ship’s doctor on Love Boat) in a cameo, complaining to a Issac/Geordi bartender that he’d had a blind date with a Cardassian, only to find out later it was male!
That’s not right! Every Cardassian that has ever appeared has been distinctly and obviously either male or female, with no ambiguity whatsoever. Stop fucking with canon!
Word.
Sheldon, is that you?
As an incidental note, the joke got (at most) a mild chuckle - which is not at all surprising in an SNL sketch in the mid-1990s - and it occurred to me that:
-most of the audience won’t know what a Cardassian is, and the joke won’t be funny
-the fraction of the audience that knows what a Cardassian is, knows the joke doesn’t make sense, and it won’t be funny
Stewart himself was surprisingly good in the sketches, despite weak writing (I had not previously seen him do comedy) with my personal favourite being the “Phil McCracken - Scottish Therapist” sketch, that dovetailed nicely with Mike Myers’ then-recurring “All Things Scottish” premise.
That’s actually pretty funny. It’s the laugh-track that would make it not funny, for me. I’ve watched quite a few episodes from different seasons and found them somewhat funny - I liked the will-they-won’t-they between Leonard and Penny in the earlier seasons - but the laugh track was just painful.
It actually interrupted my own laughter and made the flow completely wooden. The actors were mostly just delivering lines, waiting for the laugh, then delivering more lines.
In shows like Frasier I barely noticed there was a laughter track.
One thing I don’t get is people complaining about a sitcom with characters of a certain type/profession/whatever that makes fun of that group.
Well, duh! It’s a sitcom!
All sitcoms make fun of the people within them.
Take the old MTM show. It makes fun of new anchors, homemaker show hosts, TV news writers, producers, neighbors, mothers, etc.
I can’t conceive of how a sitcom would work where they don’t make fun of the group(s) that the cast belongs to.
Should TBBT make fun of Geeks? Should the Pope be Catholic?
Now, certain attempts at humor at some groups cross the line. E.g., Polish jokes and worse. So unfair/discriminatory/etc. humor is not so good. A good show tries to balance things out and not go too far. TBBT is usually not that harsh towards geeks. (But it can be, the last episode, for example.)
Wholesale complaints, though, are just … inexplicable.
For me it’s the, ‘shove something down my throat’, view I find baffling.
Tastes vary, it takes all kinds to make a world, etc, but when people are telling you that “Hey, you should watch X”, or, “You should try Y food”, surely it’s self evident that they are not trying to annoy. They think you’ll enjoy it. They imagine it will bring you pleasure. That it will appeal to you, for some reason.
How can anyone be miffed because those around them are constantly offering them things they think they’ll enjoy? Because that’s really wha,t ‘shoving it down my throat’, amounts to, in my mind.
Unless there’s some actual shoving and really a throat involved!
“How dare they think I’d enjoy chocolate ice cream! What are they thinking? Don’t they know me at all?”
Whether you’d like chocolate or not is essentially arbitrary. I guess you could say “my friend really likes chocolate, so he should like ice cream”, but generally taste in food is sort of random. Taste in entertainment is much more tied to the sort of person you are, though. Like if someone told me “you should watch Jersey Shore, you’d really love it” and they meant I’d enjoy it in a non-ironic way, I’d be insulted.
So I would suggest that if the Great Antibob’s friends are telling him “you should watch this show, you’re just like those nerds!”, there’s some reason to be irritated by it.
I’m not actually annoyed by it, perhaps partly because I’m not that easily annoyed, but I have had pretty much everyone assume that I am a fan of the L-Word - repeated references to in-jokes I’m supposed to get, recommendations to watch it, and numerous times an outright statement along the lines of ‘I presume you watch the L-Word?’ This is mostly from straight people, btw.
I find it more amusing that annoying, but it can be a fine line.
Ha !
That’s why this will be my only post in the thread. I was curious as to why some people don’t like it and enjoy reading it. I understood from the start this was a if you hate BBT post here thread. Like anything else meant to entertain in life it’s a matter of taste, what floats my boat may not float yours.
Runs off…
I enjoy TBBT, and find that I laugh at most of the jokes and I’ve never noticed the laugh track before. I actually find that I can relate to the characters, or some of the puns/jokes are exactly the kind of jokes my friends and I will make. It’s silly and it amuses me.
I read this thread to see what the criticisms were (because I was bored and it’s a nice long thread). I can kind of see where a lot of people are coming from and why they don’t like the show, though I obviously don’t agree. This comment made me laugh, though:
Heh… this criticism completely overanalyzes the joke, which is very much what the characters on TBBT tend to do, oddly enough! 
The joke wasn’t that Jar Jar Binks was less successful than his siblings, the joke was that the character of Jar Jar Binks was less successful than the other characters of the Star Wars universe.
My biggest annoyance with BBT is how all the guys make a big show of being awkward around women, and yet we’ve seen both Leonard and Howard score with no fewer than five attractive women each. I mean, seriously, they had an episode where Howard wasn’t sure about getting into a relationship with Bernadette? IRL, a Howard wouldn’t even get a second glance from a woman that hot, but on BBT he’s scoring all over the place.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t jog out the same old jokes about how little game these guys have over and over as if we don’t remember that they’re getting girls like Penny and Bernadette. It’s tiring.
Bazinga
Yeah… basically. I feel that, as a math grad, I should like the show. . . but it just seems so patronizing, and for that very reason. Caricatures. I’ve tried to like the show but I can’t. It just pisses me off.
Ever think it might be because the thread title is intentionally accusatory and the number of comments that boil down to “If you like this show, you must be stupid”?
And, no, it’s not the same thing as popping up in an episode discussion thread and dissing the show. It’s the same as popping up in a thread titled “BBT is the best show ever” and saying you don’t like it. They’re directly discussing the topic by disagreeing with you.
Oh, and I’m actually one of those people who just thinks the show is boring. There’s nothing offensive about it–there’s just nothing in it to compel me to watch it week after week. And this is odd, because I loved the pilot when I screened it (and told the survey people so). And I loved it as someone who has always been a nerd and a little socially awkward.
This thread is all about agree with me or don’t post.
You’d think that the BBT haters would welcome the opportunity to grind the BBT lovers unsustainable arguments into the dust .
But for some reason, on a mb comitted to debate, they don’t .
And anyway the only reason that people pretend to like BBT is because it makes them feel big and clever, not because they genuinlly enjoy the show, and it makes them laugh.
So it MUST be part of some sort of plot to make the intellectually challenged feel bad about themselves.
Honest !
you need to dig deeper for the humor in shirts, belt buckles, items on shelves and things in the background. also there has been math shown in sequential episodes that were sequential steps in solving a problem, dig for that.
fortunately my station that carries TBBT syndication was wise enough to not mess with The Simpsons syndication which has humor in shirts, belt buckles, items on shelves and things in the background.