If you haven’t been watching Season Five of The Big Bang
Theory (it’s one of the few shows that is fast tracked to Australian commercial
television, think it’s only a couple of weeks behind) then do start, because
every episode so far has been marvellous.
This week’s ep, the sixth of the season titled ‘The Rhinitis
Revelation’ was centred around the visit of Sheldon’s bible-bashing,
ultra-conservative, politically incorrect, stereotypically Texas mother. She’s
the type of woman who goes on Christian cruises to shoot clay pigeons with sins
written on them, calls Asians ‘ching chongs’ and spends her sightseeing time in
Hollywood dragging her son’s friends, including a Jew and a Hindu, into various
churches. The fact that her character is based on people who really are that
closed minded and just don’t realise it’s ass-backwards makes her both deeply
cringe-worthy and completely hilarious, especially when you add her
super-awkward interactions with the gang and her relationship with Sheldon, who
still wants and needs to be coddled by his mommy despite being an arrogant
genius.
All the episodes that have featured one of the gang’s
parents (see Keith Carradine as Penny’s Midwestern man’s man dad in Season Four
and any appearance by Leonard’s amazingly blunt psychiatrist mother) have been
great, mostly for the same reason. The parent, usually wildly different in
opinions and lifestyle to the child, visits Pasadena and spends the whole time
humiliating their poor baby with harsh truths about everything from their love
life to their infantile obsession with their own genitalia (I’m looking at you,
Leonard’s mom) while also making their friends hideously uncomfortable.
The art of sitcoms is taking situations that in the real
world would be very unpleasant or even tragic, and somehow making them funny,
and Big Bang excels at this. We shouldn’t be laughing at this stuff, but we
are. This week Raj has yet another bout of self-pity and borderline alcoholism
brought on by chronic loneliness, Sheldon’s mom is so un-PC it hurts, she
basically calls Penny a slut, and Sheldon is forced to compete with his friends
for his mother’s attention, is robbed of his fried chicken and is forced to
endure the absolute of horror of, wait for it: getting around like a common
man. A common man! And it’s all comedy gold. Even if the laughing is sometimes
a bit painful because it’s done through a cringe at Sheldon’s mom.
