Oh christ. The things I do for research.

When particular actors pique my interest, I often wind up tracking down and watching things I would normally not touch with a stolen set of eyeballs. Sometimes this is fantastic -- Sam Waterston once starred as Benedick in one of my favorite quirky little production of Much Ado About Nothing. Mostly this turns out like the time some friends and I decided to find all of the movies in which Ewan McGregor is naked (there are a large number of these) and we ended up watching something produced and directed by Peter Greenaway, which I will someday be telling my therapist all about.

A lot of completely random stuff turns up on YouTube if you go looking for Lou Ferrigno. I just sat through twenty-two minutes and four seconds of King of Queens to see what happens when he guest stars. I hate that show. This viewing reminded me exactly why I hate that show.It's not just written badly. It's also acted badly. And it was conceived worse. King of Queens is idiotic, formulaic, deeply sexist dreck, which attempts to depict 'normality' as a dysfunctional whirlwind of people unsuccessfully trying to manipulate other people into doing addlepated things for wholly self-centered reasons that none of them understand. I think it is attempting to be The Honeymooners, except that Jackie Gleason was a comedian, rather than a ranting twit, and also feminism has happened and threatening to hit your wife isn't considered light family humor anymore, even if she winds up and hits you back.

It is with a mix of pleasure, horror, and broken resignation that I report that, at any given point in the episode, Ferrigno is literally the only fucking funny person on the screen. I find myself wondering, rather uncharitably, if this is because he has the unfair advantage of being able to just take out his hearing aids and turn his ears off rather than listen to the things being spouted on the rest of the set. God knows I would.

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