Tonight’s episode of community was simply titled Advanced Gay.  If that either offends you, or fails to amuse you, this episode is not for you.  If, however, the prospect of Chevy Chase, after a series of unintentionally gay innuendos, telling the rest of the study group to “stop putting gay stuff in his mouth” makes you giggle like a five-year-old, this may just be the funniest television episode shown on any network this year.

The jokes were by no means high-brow.  They focused mainly on inserting an old, racist politically incorrect man, into situations that allowed him to flirt with increasingly blurred lines of homophobia and father issues, or, as the groups pseudo-psych student calls it, his edible complex.  Basically Pierce wants to kill his father, and… I don’t know, something about his mother, as Britta says.

That’s the thing about Community though.  Sure you can have an old man be perpetually offensive, telling jokes that due to their irony, are either offensive or extremely supportive of the gay community (I’m not quite sure which), but then you will have a reference, albeit an intentionally incorrect reference, to a 5^th century B.C. Athenian play.

The show amazingly works these two very different types of humour seamlessly.  On top of that, and don’t ask me how this was done, this episode was also able to work in a side plot in which Troy reprises his Matt Damon Good Will Hunting character, this time though, his tradesmen skills were put to use by the school’s Dick Cheneyesque Vice-Dean Laybourne, played by John Goodman.

After unclogging a toilet Troy is scouted to take part in the school’s very prestigious HVAC program.  With this degree, Laybourne promises a life filled with all the comforts the world can offer, even going so far as to introduce him to the room that room temperature is based on.

But after all the gay-jokes, Good Will Hunting references, and failed psycho-analytics, this episode was able to connect the group’s two most abrasive characters through an experience that all men understand: the need to remove themselves from their father’s shadows, and the need to earn their father’s respect.  And while the latter may be too late for these two characters to accomplish, the former is obtained, yet neither character is better for it.  They are simply them.