Community: “Contemporary American Poultry” (1.21)

There’s no denying that Community is a show suffused with pop culture. Almost every episode’s plot has been done by a sit-com or movie previously, and Community does little to hide this—to the point where it sometimes revels in its referentiality. Other than Family Guy and occasionally South Park, it’s a show that’s most reliant on its audience knowing its pop culture references for enjoyment. This is going to be especially true of an episode centered around Abed.

Last night I watched “Contemporary American Poultry” with a friend who had never seen Goodfellas. It was an odd experience. The entire episode is both parody and homage to Scorsese’s mob classic, with a couple additional references to other mafia movies along the way—everything from parodies of specific characters to shot and voice over references. Goodfellas is a lengthy movie, but many of its memorable scenes are brought in here, under the guise of a sort of chicken fingers mafia.

Unlike most modern sitcom episodes, “Contemporary American Poultry” focuses on just one plotline: Abed takes over Greendale’s chicken finger business and runs a mafia-esque distribution system. With this, he becomes a godfather figure, granting chicken in exchange for favors. Jeff is jealous of Abed’s newfound power while everyone else ends up taking it for granted, and that’s all there really is to the episode. Many individual gags step outside of this framework—my favorite being the parrot Troy’s obtained now that he’s connected to the “mob”—but rather than fragmenting things, the entire show is mostly about showing how each of the show’s main characters deal with changes in their power structure.

I’m a huge fan of Goodfellas and Scorsese in general (when it came down to voting for Paste‘s best living director I voted for him as an unequivocal #1). That being said, watching my friend take in the episode I was surprised by how little lacking this reference point affected his enjoyment. For one thing, the references Community draws from are by now so much a part of our pop culture landscape that recognizing them doesn’t requires seeing the movie. This is true of a lot of the show’s references—I’ve never seen Ghost but didn’t need an explanation as to what “Ghosting” meant when that came up before. This is also evidence that the show is doing something more than just taking laughs off of references, that the jokes stand on themselves and are only enhanced by knowledge of their sources.