Cheers & Jeers: Community --- My Dinner with Abed

Cheers to Community for its brilliant mash-up spoof of — excuse me, homage to — Pulp Fiction and My Dinner with Andre.

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NBC's ratings underachiever is never going to be as big as Abed's beloved Cougar Townby parodying30-year-old Louis Malle films — or 17-year-old Quentin Tarantino ones, for that matter. Good thing the network already picked it up for a third season. (If only FX had been as patient with Lights Out, but that's another story.) Not to worry: This episode was that rare combination of nod-your-head cleverness — the dizzyingly numerous pop-culture references ranged from Frasier to Snoopy — and bust-a-gut hilarity (exhibit A: Chevy Chase's head-to-toe black-leather Gimp costume).

And in the Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn roles, Danny Pudi and Joel McHale were simply delicious. Pudi's performance was reminiscent of Andy Kaufman's tour de force in the classic Taxi episode when Latka Gravas learned how to act "normal" for a week. And McHale continued to make the once-smug Jeff Winger sympathetic with a heartbreaking monologue about being mistaken for a girl in a Native American Halloween costume. But let's keep that one under a Tight, Heavy Lid — THL. Got it?

Did you think this week's Community was "cool, cool, cool, cool, cool"?

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