The Community Iceberg Explained

[Music] happy hello dean so despite me regularly talking about three of the big four of nbc's in my opinion greatest shows i haven't really gotten around to talking about one of my favorite shows community this show was honestly streets ahead of just about anything else that was on at the time aside from the other members of the big four the writing continuity acting in pure raw comedic talent behind the show is something that's given it a huge following even to this day so what better way to dip my toes into the community pool so to speak than with another iceberg video sorry if it feels like i've been posting a lot of these it kind of helps me keep a more consistent upload schedule while i'm working on some more in-depth longer videos in the background also just a heads up this iceberg is actually one i found off of reddit i'll link it down in the description if you want to check it out and of course if you haven't watched community before you absolutely should but for now be warned of possible spoilers ahead i'm not going to shy away from talking about something that could spoil your first experience with the show which is quite honestly a magical time just a heads up sorry if i sound a little sick i had no surgery like a week and a half ago from when i'm recording this and i'm also just getting over a cold but i wanted to get this video out before halloween so yeah so very similar to the always sunny iceberg we're kind of going to be glossing over the top of this iceberg and delving more into the lower bits mainly because some of these are expanded on a lot more a little further down like running gags we'll see more specific examples that we'll get into so let's jump ahead to the next area of the iceberg the darkest timeline podcast is or was a podcast that consisted of joel mchale and ken jong face timing each other during the early days of the demonetization disease they were answering a bunch of fan questions about community and giving everyone a general peek behind the curtains of the show but from this starting point the podcast kind of evolved into something more they started having some pretty high profile guests like dave bautista pedro pascal and andrew yang they even did a live or like a live stream q a with fans where they answered their questions during the podcast the podcast's name the darkest timeline podcast is a reference to two pretty obvious things the first being the multiverse shenanigans that stem from the season 3 episode remedial chaos theory an episode in which we see several different timelines all play out the darkest of these involve a fire a heart attack some pizza and a puppet you've seen the meme the other thing it's referencing is obviously 2020 as a whole kind of a crap year the podcast ran pretty consistently for 25 episodes but then it just kind of stopped being a thing there hasn't really been any confirmation one way or the other if the show's canceled but there hasn't been a new episode since july of 2020. they had a pretty cool they had a pretty crazy release schedule for a while and it really wouldn't surprise me if it ended because both hosts are extremely busy ken jong in particular isn't like everything anymore so it makes sense that once things started to open back up a bit that the podcast would take a bit of a back seat so a big part of what makes dan harmon's writing so unique is the level of self-awareness around many of the jokes the stories and even the characters in community the most self-aware character is very obviously abed a big part of abed's character is that there's times where he seemingly has trouble telling apart the difference between reality and what he sees on television he refers to his friends as characters sometimes he calls out tropes that he sees happening and sometimes he's even able to predict what's going to happen in the future by analyzing other tv shows we've even seen abed change the format in medium of the show when he becomes distressed all of aubed's friends go along with what he says but the rest of them are aware that they're not actually in a tv show except for the fact that they are obviously community is a tv show in which abed jeff and the rest are all just characters abed is right but to take things even a little further community might be a tv show within a tv show at the end of the season 5 episode emotional consequences of broadcast television we see a fake commercial for a board game based around the show during the super meta commercial they even refer to community as a show that's been canceled and moved to the internet basically what actually happened with community again abed is right so this is kind of a weird one to talk about there really aren't any theories or anything around this rap as far as i can tell it's just kind of a really funny moment in the show so the dean is preparing to tell the study group that their paychecks are being delayed and decides to do so in a rap because of course he does the rap starts off pretty light but of course the dean goes off and spits some pretty sick bars i've read online before that some people think that this was done all in one take and that the cast weren't expecting it but according to jillian jacobs it took a bunch of takes because she couldn't get through the scene in fact if you watch the episode you can pretty clearly see that she's still smiling even in the takes that made it to air so that seems pretty likely and during the 2020 reunion donald glover says that that was the best wrap that anyone dressed like that has ever done which seems even more likely it's weird when you see two people who are supposed to be really good friends on tv or when they're in a lot of scenes together and then they end up hating each other in real life but sometimes it doesn't work out that way sometimes co-stars can become really good friends like donald faison and zac braf from scrubs and in this case alice and brie and danny poody or annie in abed the two become super good friends over the course of the series and thankfully they're actually really good friends behind the scenes as well there's actually a lot of videos of them just kind of being cool with each other and solid friends that you can find in fact the entirety of the cast aside from chevy chase are really good friends and stay in contact with each other again during the 2020 table read donald glover suggested having a group chat to keep everyone in touch and then they revealed that they do have one just without donald glover because they assumed he was too busy but don't worry they promised to add him in so while many of the characters throughout the entirety of community kind of come and go the first loss of a major character is pierce hawthorne and a big part of why revolves around the fact that chevy chase and dan harmon the show's creator absolutely hated each other so let's kind of go through the whole beef pretty quick chevy chase has been notoriously hard to work with since well forever that's why his career kinda fell off until that is his casting in community as for dan harmon well he's also been notoriously hard to work with so having both of these figures in prominent roles on the show was kind of like the unstoppable force meets the immovable object having these two together is honestly just kind of asking for some kind of infighting to start and boy did infighting start so the two were already kind of fighting harmon wasn't writing fast enough to keep up with the show's production according to the cast there were days where they were just kind of sitting around and waiting and on top of that how the show was filmed one camera one angle at a time they'd do a scene move the camera and redo it several times it was a super tedious process so tensions were already rising eventually chevy has had enough he walks out several times during the wrap party for season 3 harmon gave a speech basically calling out chevy chase in front of chevy's wife and daughter chevy would then later that night leave a super angry voicemail on dan harmon's phone harmon would eventually be fired from community for a season and chevy would quit as well before harmon got hired back it was honestly pretty petty in both harman and chevy are at fault you can absolutely find the voicemail just kind of out there online harman wasn't exactly shy about playing it from what you can hear in it chevy wanted more range to his character and thought the show wasn't super funny i think he probably just didn't fully get his character completely and as for dan harmon well he was kind of a nightmare to work with during his time on the show there's been some allegations that he's apologized for and has seemingly moved past with his current workload on his new show rick and morty the beetlejuice easter egg in community is a masterclass in patience in comedy especially when you stop to consider the fact that the vast majority of people probably won't catch it for anyone who might not know beetlejuice is a character in the movie beetlejuice in which to summon said beetlejuice his name must be said three times and something like that or i guess exactly that happens throughout several seasons of the show that's right several seasons it's a quick off-handed reference that takes three entire seasons to set up and pull off the first time beetlejuice is mentioned is in the season 1 episode communication studies in this episode michelle slater pretends to forget brita's name and says a bunch of b words one of them being beetlejuice the next time the name beetlejuice is said is in the season 2 episode cooperative calligraphy in this episode brita refers to jeff's typical underwear as stripy turquoise beetlejuice numbers finally in the season 3 episode horror fiction in 7 spooky steps while trying to figure out who the secret psychopath in their group is annie mentions that brita only owns the beetlejuice soundtrack and as soon as the word beetlejuice has said for the third time on the show someone walks by in a beetlejuice costume it's a very quick reference that took several years to set up it's also kind of weird that all of the times beetlejuice is said it involves brita in some fashion communitycon or as i've seen it written communicant is a convention that's organized and put on entirely by fans of the show the original was organized mainly by jillian morgetti and was held february 9th and 10th of 2013. a few conventions followed for the subsequent years but as far as i've been able to tell there were only three of them that ever took place which is still an incredibly huge accomplishment they've even gotten some of the cast and crew of the show to attend and even dan harmon was there the communicon tumblr hasn't been active in several years but the twitter which is at communicon news still tweets at least semi-regularly which is probably about as much as i tweet at 10k bill despite there only being seven members of the group at any time aside from the very occasional group edition like jack black for one episode there are actually eight seats set up around the table there's always that one seat that's empty right there between jeff and annie this theory says that the eighth seat is actually for us for the fans that's where we see and that's our place in the study group we've been there the entire time so why shouldn't we feel like we're fully in the group and it turns out that while the show was still on the air and communicons were still happening yvette nicole brown said at communicon that fans were always the eighth member of the study group and also that's where guests would sit [Music] so something we already mentioned much earlier in this video because of the difficulty that came with working with him dan harmon was fired from the show following season three the show up to that point had mainly been his vision no he wasn't the sole writer for the show but he truly was the show's visionary and without him and a new season on the way the show's new runners really had their work cut out for them they did their best to continue the show at the same quality that it had been at but despite their best efforts the show just feels kind of i'm not sure soulless i guess it feels like it generally hits the same beats as the previous seasons but it just feels off so when dan harmon returned in season five they felt like they needed to kind of explain why everything was so weird in season four and the reason that they came up with was that it was just a gas leak it's referred to both in and out of the show as the gas leak year and that's not the only time the show's fourth season is made fun of it happens quite frequently honestly my favorite being cool cool [Music] so i'm not really sure how to say this exactly but the line on this iceberg that says that most acting on the set was improvised is simply not true there were some improvised lines that were littered throughout the series but for the most part the show was very meticulously scripted we know this because of what some of the cast members confirmed that there were times where the production of the show kind of grinded to a halt because they didn't have their scripts if the show was mainly improv they could have done something a little more substantial while sitting around and waiting not to mention the fact that the show features an absolute ton of very specific callbacks and references that would be incredibly difficult to sprinkle in if they weren't already written more multiverse fun remedial chaos theory really is the basis for a lot of content on this iceberg this is also another theory that does its best to explain the weirdness in season 4 that we've already talked about a bit the way that this theory tries to explain it is that the version of things that we watched isn't actually the universe that we usually watch it's the universe where the number three was rolled in this timeline pierce is gone which explains his very long absences this season and troy and britta begin to date which is something that we really see fleshed out for the first time in this universe where a three was ruled back when community was first getting its foothold on nbc they had a pretty fun idea that would help give the show a bit more interactivity they made an entire fake website for greendale community college the community college that the show is based around while today the website is no longer up the url currently leads to a community based tumblr page through the wayback machine we can see what the website actually looked like and what kind of stuff was on there the website had some character profiles for both students and professors and an entire newspaper that would routinely cover events that were happening in the show the website was updated pretty frequently throughout the first two seasons of the show but website maintenance took a back seat more and more until the website was kind of forgotten about sometime around season four the last major update revolving around the season three episode basic lupine urology so abed being a father actually could refer to like three different things from the series run let's go through them the first and maybe my favorite of the three comes from the season 3 episode digital estate planning this episode which is honestly one of my favorites sees the study group going into a video game in order to help pierce win his inheritance from his father while in the video game abid falls in love with an npc girl and even decides to stay behind with hilda the nbc after the rest of the group accidentally kills her parents the rest of the group is gone for a considerable amount of time and when they eventually return to the village where abed and hilda have been abed has had some children like a lot of children like way too many children each of them running custom script and doing some really ethically questionable things at the end of the episode after they're done playing the video game and have given up the inheritance to gilbert pierce's stepbrother abid goes back and copies hilda and quite possibly some of their children onto a flash drive the next thing that it could be referencing is another one of those really fun background details like the betelgeuse bit in the season 2 episode the psychology of letting go abit is seen in the background taking part in an entire storyline that has no dialogue and isn't even brought up for like 20 more episodes abed befriends a pregnant woman and eventually helps her give birth while the woman does already have a partner this part of the iceberg could be referencing this background detail but i mean delivering a baby in and of itself in no way makes you a father finally this last one goes out on a bit more of a theory tangent once again in the season 3 episode digital estate planning which we've already talked about troy and abed find themselves seemingly alone in a room with a baby the two of them briefly talk about abed getting a job and supporting them when the baby's mother comes out from under the table in front of them but as the baby and mother are leaving we hear the baby say something abed's catchphrase cuckoo cool could this baby actually be abeds yeah maybe that's really all that we have backing it up though elroy is one of the characters that ended up trying to replace pierce he was in the sixth season of the show and was honestly a pretty fun character for the most part but if you paid attention to some of the show's earlier episodes while you may not have seen elroy before you've definitely heard him that's because keith david who plays elroy in the show did the narrator voice for the season 3 episode pillows and blankets he was cast in this episode as the narrator because of his extensive work with ken burns on documentaries that this episode of community was parodying it's not really expanded on in the show if the documentary is real or not and if that was actually elroy doing voiceover work but knowing elroy's past with virtual reality and his kind of lack of knowledge with greendale it seems unlikely so this is one that i'm not exactly sure what it means i know that's similar to elroy kind of appearing in an earlier episode the it lady was later recast and ended up becoming a main character you probably remember her better as frankie from the final season of the show if you know what this point is referencing please let me know down in the comments and jeff are characters that at least on the surface level you really wouldn't think had much in common but when you really look at their characters chang looks like he could be a weird reflection of jeff that chang is what jeff could have become had he not formed his community let's look at some stuff that we see in the series from them the most obvious thing is that both chang and jeff faked their credentials and ultimately lost their careers they both also go to duncan when their plan is to just kind of coast through their time at greendale and try to leverage their friendship with him but the key difference between chang and jeff is that when chang's life falls apart he doesn't find his community right away like jeff does it's when jeff is with the study group that we see him begin to open up he grows as a person and learns to overcome a lot of his personal problems that have been affecting him even if he didn't know that they were but while jeff was welcomed into the group chang was rejected by this very group and that's where we see him really start to go from kind of just mean and maybe a little sociopathic to the downright insanity that we see from chang for the next several seasons and in fact when jeff is briefly not in the study group in season 3 we seek kind of similar things from him chang seems to get his bearings back a bit in the show's final season when he's finally in the group there really are a lot of parallels between these two characters wait no monetization come back annie's boobs at least in this case is referring to the monkey that lives primarily in the vents at greendale coincidentally annie's boobs wasn't the only thing living in the vents chang was living in the vents around this time as well and when we get the convenient origin stories in season 4 we get a little more insight into annie's boobs as well you see brita freed annie's boobs back during her activism days bretta even says that just one bite from the monkey could make someone a tiny bit psychotic and if chang and annie's boobs were both living in the vents they probably crossed paths many times so it's certainly possible that annie's boobs drove chang over the deep end so to speak and he became a dictator it was annie's boobs and his boobs were behind everything it was always annie's boobs the monkey's name is annie's boobs so um despite this saying in very explicit text beside it not to research it it's really just a video with danny pooty and allison brie singing a song about feet in between takes and thank god that's all it was i was really worried i'd have to talk about some weird foot stuff here it's a fun song and again it's just nice seeing them be friends between takes the ass crack bandit is a scourge that's plagued many a crack in many an unsuspecting victim at greendale and strangely enough who exactly the ass crack bandit is is left unanswered it's the biggest underlying mystery in all love community to compare to the office this is their version of who is the scranton strangler but there's a reddit post that might have actually figured it out that the asscrack bandit was actually ass crack bandits that there was more than one and that the culprits were none other than troy and abed with abed being the main culprit here's the evidence so abid enjoys injecting not just himself but also tv and films into real life he did this in season 2 episode 18 critical film studies when out for dinner with jeff and later in season 4 episode 8 herstory of dance where he purposely takes two dates to the same dance shenanigans of course ensue but when the asscrack bandit is in full swing we don't really see anything from abed this could have and would have been his chance to do a real crime documentary but instead we see nothing maybe he's too busy doing something else or feels he's too close to the case to stay neutral as a good documentarian should annie also mentions that during the asscrack bandit's biggest and most daring spree three people were cracked in 10 minutes while doing some investigating annie attempts to sprint through all three of the sites but can only muster a 20 minute time this leads to her theory that the acb had to have cut through the faculty lounge thus meaning they're actually a part of the faculty but there's two other possible solutions that annie isn't seeing the first and probably most likely is that the acb is simply much much faster than any and as we saw earlier in the series abid is the fastest person on campus but if we work under the assumption that there's more than one acb then the running time becomes even less important so what exactly is troy's role in all of this and if he's one of the acbs why did he himself get cracked it's possible that after the acb's return later in the series abed started to get paranoid that he was going to eventually get caught there was a lot of attention coming to the acb case and it was likely just a matter of time that's where troy comes in what better way to throw everyone off his trail than to have his best friend get cracked but why why would troy agree to all of this well my dear watson it's quite simple really troy likes butt stuff so this is a theory that doesn't really have a lot backing it up it thinks that leonard is actually jeff who has been sent back in time by abed assuming that time travel exists at some point and abid has gotten his hands on the technology that is but what exactly makes people think this well similar to jeff and chang's parallels there are a few things that the two do actually have in common they're both the charismatic laid-back leaders of their individual groups jeff obviously has the study group but leonard has the hipsters a different group of troublemakers with a habit of disregarding campus roles and kind of doing whatever they felt like but there's also the fact that jeff seems almost stuck at greendale similar to how leonard has been at the community college for decades even after he's graduated jeff is pulled back by the siren call of greendale and the school eventually becomes a crucial part of who jeff fundamentally is with him and brita being the only two of the original study group who are still at the school by the end of the series would it be terribly surprising to find out that even when he's very old jeff still found a way to stay greendale and of course i left the most ironclad piece of evidence for last how else would leonard know that jeff ate all the macaroni [Music] i'm not really sure why this one is so low but here we are anyway so throughout the vast majority of the season annie is seen almost exclusively as being interested in guys there's troy jeff abbott a couple times but only for like very brief moments and even vaughn but there are a few moments that it seems like she's definitely into or at least open to the idea of women as well and both examples that i can think of revolve around brita first is when jeff suggests to the group that since they're not actually family they should think of each other as viable sexual prospects and the entire group kind of takes turns looking at one another and figuring out what it'd be like this scene is absolutely hilarious but when annie and brita make eye contact that's really one of the few looks that seems to say yeah we could probably do that then there's the valentine's day episode where after apologizing to annie britta and annie end up hugging but just then someone off screen yells out kiss her and the two women get mad but just then annie goes in for the kiss but britta ends up stopping her and is never brought up again funnily enough this was actually one of the improv moments that i was talking about earlier so yeah annie is probably bisexual or at least a little curious again not really sure why it's this far down the iceberg it's easy to kind of dismiss duncan when it comes to the entire field of psychology i mean he's a professor at arguably the worst college period their slogan is welcome to greendale you're already accepted but is it possible that duncan's actually a pretty solid psychologist let's take a look at some evidence the first episode we're going to be looking at is actually one of the very first episodes in the entire series season 1 episode 4 social psychology in this episode we see something we rarely see duncan do throughout well most of the series work annie is helping duncan try to prove what he calls the duncan principle which essentially states that if people are left waiting for too long they will eventually break down into a temper tantrum duncan ends up looking like a fool because abed after being left waiting for 26 hours refuses to break this of course leads to duncan actually breaking down it kind of looks like the duncan principle is nonsense right well not really every other person in the experiment broke even the observers i.e annie duncan and a few other students end up throwing tantrums this shows that duncan is actually right abed is just an outlier duncan just can't see this because he himself has fallen victim to the duncan principle next we're going to jump ahead to season 1 episode 25 pascal's triangle revisited in this episode duncan is giving brita some counseling because she was caught cheating in spanish he encourages brita to get up and run for queen of the dance that's going on believing it will help her self-confidence we never hear anything about duncan's advice again but brita does end up trying to win and it does end up helping her feel better kind of showing once again that duncan was right now let's jump ahead to season 2 episode 15 early 21st century romanticism this episode takes place during a valentine's day dance jeff decides that he doesn't want to attend and spends the night watching soccer with duncan duncan keeps insisting throughout the night that jeff is much more dependent on the study group than he actually lets on jeff of course vehemently denies this but ultimately proves duncan wright later when he sends a pretty heartfelt text again duncan was right it's sad that we don't get to see more of duncan throughout the series because i do really like his character and i think they could have fleshed out how and why he's actually at greendale a bit more [Music] so rich is a character who shows up in a couple of episodes across a few different seasons and every time we see him he seems just a bit off like he's hiding something this theory suggests that he actually killed his brother but i want to take that a little further i think he's possibly a serial killer we know that rich is very capable and willing to lie we've seen him lie directly to jeff before about being a novice when it comes to pottery and then we see him doing some more advanced pottery techniques he also tells jeff in a later episode that he makes kettle corn in his garage but when jesse's his home he lives in an apartment he's definitely hiding something we've also seen or i guess heard his inner monologue or memories of his mother and uh what we heard doesn't exactly lead us to thinking that he had a super stable and happy childhood with his mother actively blaming him for his brother's death and saying that it should have been him who died so a troubled home life filled with death is something that you see in a lot of serial killers but obviously not everyone who comes from something similar is a killer let alone a serial killer but rich along with his tendency to lie in order to get people more relaxed around him has also demonstrated some delusions of grandeur in season 2 episode 6 there's a zombie-like outbreak and after he's bitten rich thinks that for some reason that he might be immune to the disease that almost gets everyone else killed rich being a serial killer could also explain why he's taking random classes at greendale despite being a doctor he could be looking for victims not terribly dissimilar to ed kemper even though he just mainly picked up hitchhikers so this is another false thing on the list because obviously fire can't go through doors it's not a ghost and that's where we'll end this video for now if you like this video comment down below what you'd like to see me talk about in the future follow me on twitter at 10k bill to stay up to date on everything i'm working on support us on our patreon if you like this content and want to see more like it and of course make sure you subscribe for all your entertainment related content

Channel: 10K Productions

Views: 318,635

Keywords: community, iceberg, community bloopers, dan harmon, rick morty, troy, abed, jeff, annie, britta, pierce, theories, theory, 10k, 10k productions

Id: 7gbsA8NlfyU

Length: 31min 0sec (1860 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 29 2021