Community is known for playing with dark and absurd themes in its episodes, such as when two characters find themselves in a hidden paradise.
Essentially, Jeff and Troy set their worries aside as they jumped into this hidden trampoline. They are told by the owner, Joshua, that this trampoline must remain secret, only to discover that the trampoline must remain secret because Joshua is racist:
As Freud discussed in his essay on Humour, people need a comical liberation to bear life’s hardships. The trampoline is a liberation—a utopian escape from reality.
The humour in this scene is as much liberating in that there is a resolution to this B-plot set-up of the trampoline storyline, but also that Joshua was fired. Freud discusses the “triumph of narcissism” (162), wherein the ego asserts its invulnerability, providing an emotional detachment to give humour a sense of grandeur. Instead of suffering from being blatantly hatecrimed, Freud would argue that Troy’s subsequent bliss is part of the ego’s refusal to be weighed down.
Were this episode to be framed through a different comic lens, the viewer would find the inclusion of a Nazi groundskeeper entirely disturbing. However, the playful detachment allows this behavior to be enjoyed because of its absurdity. Thomas Nagel’s concept of The Absurd furthers this when he explains that the absurd arises from a conflict between our ability to take life seriously and our simultaneous capacity to view those same concerns as arbitrary from a detached perspective.
An interesting idea I’ve been considering is when Nagel discusses the meaninglessness of life as part of human understandings of the absurd (716). One could ascribe the same to both the sitcom genre as much as this moment in Community. The sitcom genre, as it has developed, relies on a dependability. After a while of repeating gags and clichés wearing out characters, writers must rely on increasingly weirder situations. However, the sitcom also depends on its cyclical aspect: there must be a return to a certain status quo. After this episode, Jeff and Troy never speak of the trampoline again, nor do they really take anything from this experience. Regardless, this does not take away from the audience’s enjoyment of the episode and the comedy within it. I believe the same would apply to other sitcom shows. Nagel, as such, predicates the sitcom genre and how situational comedies play with his concept of the absurd.
Sigmund Freud, “On Humor,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, 1955), 160-166.
Thomas Nagel, “The Absurd,” The Journal of Philosophy 68:20 (1971), 716-727.