Video: ‘The Big Bang Theory’ tries basketball
If you're a comedy nerd, you probably spend your Thursday night's watching shows like NBC's "Parks and Recreation" and Adult Swim's "Delocated." If you like jokes, and more casual brand of laughs, then you're probably more into "The Big Bang Theory," the CBS ratings juggernaut about a group of big-time science nerds and the pretty blonde woman who lives in their apartment building. I'm not a regular viewer, but I've come to learn that most of the series' jokes involve the nerds not understanding basic human interactions, or trying to date the pretty blonde woman and failing. Basically, it's a goofy show about a bunch of stereotypes.
None of those assumptions, though, could prepare me for the clip above. On this week's episode, titled "The Rothman Disintegration," Sheldon (two-time Emmy winner Jim Parsons) and his antagonist Barry Kripke (usually funny person John Ross Bowie) face off in a basketball game to five points to decide who will get a really sweet office in their totally nerdy science lab. They are terrible, but terrible in a way that suggests they have massive physical limitations rather than just a misunderstanding of the game of basketball. I thought we got past these kinds of jokes in 1984, when "Revenge of the Nerds" proved that nerds can be just as cool as jocks in their own special way. Apparently I was wrong.
Plus, in the Jeremy Lin era, the whole ordeal comes across as remarkably tone-deaf. Don't they know that Harvard kids are good at basketball now?
