Review: Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, "Spoiler: Bert Gets Married" | Season 1, Episode 5

Perhaps you are aware, dear reader, that I like my television speedy. All other things being equal—and of course there are good reasons to take it slow sometimes—I love it when a show really moves. I frequently returned to this theme while writing about Breaking Bad; although sometimes that show planted a seed that would come back episodes later, just as often it introduced an idea and carried it out immediately, and that’s what gave me the most delight

“Spoiler: Bert Gets Married” showcases the virtues of this sort of speed. Establish the premise, send the party off in different directions, show the consequences of their action, and most importantly, skip as many intervening steps as possible. We want to go straight from cause to effect, handwaving the cogs and gears that connect them. A twenty-minute runtime pushes this episode to economize, and in the process, highlights a key structural choice: When you build a framework of premise-based comedy and add gags and jokes as ornamentation, both types of humor hit harder. Viewers see (and foresee) the consequences of actions through their pattern-recognition brain systems, eliciting laughs of recognition. Gags and jokes, meanwhile, activate pattern-breaking brain systems, the ones that register surprise, and we laugh because we didn’t see it coming.

Our premise this week, which I worried might slide into some cringey colonialist tropes, mostly avoids those traps (to my relief). The creative team accomplishes this feat by positioning the premise as an overt parody of a different set of tropes: romantic notions of what Marx and Engels called “primitive communism,” stereotypically held by naive counterculture types. Our heroes’ contempt of the bronzed, saffron-clad forest dwellers suddenly melts away when it turns out they have free love, and Kripke in particular takes full advantage. One of the best gags is the succession of villagers emerging from Kripke’s hut after their first night; he bids farewell to girl after girl, and then congratulates one strapping man: “Nice work in there.” Bert in particular is in paradise, as lovely Chana calls him beautiful, which no one but his mom ever has before (“she said it was an inner beauty”).