Yes, the thesis of the episode was that Sheldon gets so obsessive that he ignores everything around him, such as locked doors and people’s feelings, but the show could have stuck with crazy as opposed to leaning towards a learning disability. In the former category, the stuff at the ball pit ended in some nice physical comedy, and I was pleased to see Leonard actually ask if Sheldon was okay on the phone as opposed to something akin to “what has he done now,” but the security officer presuming he was “special” seemed off to me. Overall, the episode featured some great moments from Parsons, although a few times the show stepped over the line in terms of depicting Sheldon as either mentally handicapped or a small child (which are not funny characterizations in the least) and in terms of depicting Sheldon as inconsistently self-aware.
#Sheldon in ball pit saying bazinga tv#
TV catchphrases are always driven into the ground, I understand that, but Parsons is doing the type of work that should defy traditional sitcom logic on catchphrases, and they’re just not letting the man do his job.
However, you can’t simply throw it into a scene with would otherwise be funny and pretend that Bazinga, in itself, is humorous, or else you risk getting scenes where Sheldon isn’t actually that funy, but Bazinga gets a laugh despite that.
This doesn’t mean that there is never a place for Bazinga, or that Bazinga can never be funny. I imagine a version of the Ball pit sequence where, instead of saying Bazinga every time he popped up, Sheldon simply gave a strange look, and frankly it’s the exact same scene, with the exact same laughs so long as we trust Parsons to find the right facial expressions. It’s just a word that Sheldon says which the audience is supposed to laugh at, which is lazy and entirely unnecessary. However, now the show (and Sheldon) are using it as a legitimate punchline, and any of its meta-potential is long gone. If the show had kept it as a catchphrase that Sheldon attempted to have catch on, that he believed to be funny, then perhaps the meta-joke would work. I have never seen what, precisely, makes Bazinga so funny. It’s not like with the whole “Knock Knock” thing, where I once had joy but that joy has since left me due to it being ludicrously overused as of late (frankly, once Penny immediately knocked back, the joke should have died). And, like I said to her, I find joy in Sheldon, I find joy in Jim Parsons, but I just can’t find the joy in Bazinga. I was discussing it with Kath during the episode, and she called me on being particularly joyless tonight (not an unfair observation, to be honest). However, by occasionally falling back on his “catchphrases,” it ended up rubbing me the wrong way even if some of the content involved was hitting the mark.īazinga. The episode teetered on the edge of taking Sheldon into some potentially compromising places in terms of how the show treats the character, but it also showed a lot of great qualities of Sheldon when at his most obsessively one-minded.
Over three seasons, Jim Parsons has consistently demonstrated comic timing and abilities that define this character in ways beyond “gags,” and which have made the character endearing when some of his actions could be seen as insufferable.Īnd so I don’t entirely understand why the writers seem to believe that Sheldon can best be defined by such shallow humour, as it makes what might have otherwise been a great episode (in that it focused entirely on Sheldon) into a frustrating one. Jim Parsons does not need catchphrases, nor does he need running jokes.
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