Supercut: When Just a Celebrity’s Name Is a Punchline
Dec 16, 2011 at 04:30 am by Jenn

In three of the best (YMMV) sitcoms on television—Happy Endings, How I Met Your Mother, and Up All Night—the character ensemble is supposed to be very “young” and “hip” and “with-it” when it comes to pop culture.

But sometimes lazy scriptwriting takes over, and the mere mention of a celebrity’s name is supposed to inspire raucous laughter.

Which celebrities are punchlines? Gwyneth Paltrow. Edward James Olmos. Ian Ziering. Basically, anyone you feel kind of weird about liking.

Oh, no, it isn’t all bad. In a way, the little namedrops do double-duty: they make the episodes feel very topical, but they also establish the characters as being credibly “real,” slightly snarky people.

The namedrops are great simile-shorthand, too: “They’re like Vaughn and Favreau in there”? I actually know exactly what that means.

And by the way? If the Stop Online Piracy Act passes, I will never be able to post a great video—like the one of Sean Bean dying repeatedly—ever again. I can’t live like that. Call your congressperson.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2011 at 4:30 am and is filed under Happy Endings, How I Met Your Mother, Up All Night. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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