Christmas is nigh, which means that The League season is drawing to a close. This week was another double-header. “12.12.12” and “Our Dinner With Andre” had a more consistent narrative arc than the two episodes from last week. Neither one of them was as rollickingly funny as “Anchor Baby,” but both were very good. If you had to explain what makes The League funny to a gaggle of strangers, you could do worse than showing the cold open of “12.12.12,” where Andre’s ridiculous version of MTV’s Cribs ended with Taco already occupying the master bedroom.
The strongest moments of tonight were little morsels like that. My favorite scene of both episodes had to be the return of Dirty Randy, who hit upon the genius idea of a Mayan execution-as-porno that is either titled “The Mayan A-cock-aclypse” or “The Mayan A-cock-and-lips,” depending on who you ask. Rafi hits upon the idea of the boom as his “sound dick” rather than a recording device. “I don’t know who you are,” Rafi says to a bewildered Deion Sanders, who happens upon them filming in his newly acquired loft. “But you’re about to get chlamydia.”
The shopping trip that the guys take to appease Andre is also stellar. The sight of the gang in fedoras and infinity scarves, torn apart by Andre for not bringing enough “swag,” to their gear, left me in tears. They looked, as Jenny pointed out, like the oldest and most sullen boy band imaginable. There were so many scenes like that one—Andre’s terrible apartment decorating, Gina Gibiatti’s mean-spirited insults, Jenny mistaking the police for strippers—that the messiness of the plot didn’t matter so much.
This season, The League has mostly abandoned the tightly-knit Curb Your Enthusiasm-like plot devices for looser, sillier plotting. And though it’s occasionally irksome not to have the follow-through that the show has in the past few seasons—what happened to Jenny once the police took her away? How on earth did Charlie do at the principal’s office? What’s happening to poor Ellie?—the momentum that the cast gains from this slack is worth it. There’s more energy in this mini-arc than in most of season three combined.
One of the major turns in the two episodes isn’t the end of the world, or the Apocalypse porn. It’s Andre’s romance with a woman who seems equally as tasteless as himself—Trixie Von Stein, an interior designer played nicely by Glee’s Jayma Mays. At the end of the second episode, Pete finds himself cruelly dumped by Gina Gibiatti (“She just upper-decked your heart, bro,” Kevin sagely advises) and Andre is engaged, after what has to be the worst proposal in the history of man. Will season four end with a gaudy hipster wedding? We’ll have to wait until next week to find out.
Stray observations:
- Rafi explains the post-apocalyptic economy to Andre: “We’re also going to sell your dick for gasoline.”
- Jayma Mays’ description of a certain interior designer aesthetic is spot on: Taxidermied nests on glass cakes stands, a bucket of used children’s shoes in the corner.
- “Tijuana street meat superhero” is the long-form of Chalupa Batman, we now know.
- “You can lead a horse to the horse cock but you can’t make you eat it.” Why doesn’t Taco have an inspiration-a-day calendar already?