Discounted Group Therapy

[devilbk]

Which really just circles back to the show's basic perception of women.

Comedy is often cruel, the laugh reflex more out of fear. But it is also insidious, if you can make somebody laugh at something, they won't take it seriously, it lessens the threat. Funny isn't scary. (Generally. We won't go near the subject of clowns. They are definitely a 'laugh out of fear' thing.) And when something is 'funny', it gets accepted.

This show is particularly cruel, because despite the laugh-track, the characters are all very damaged indeed. And, crucially, they all make each other worse. It wouldn't even take someone with professional credentials, just someone sane and emotionally healthy, to provide some level of intervention. But a 'normal' person would stick out so far in the show setting, now, it would jar. I initially thought that Penny was going to be the 'normal' one, who would bring the guys out into the real world and show them how to cope with it, as they introduced her to geeky things and showed her that it wasn't just for kids. But genuine growth and tolerance of difference are absolutely alien concepts to TBBT.

One of the problems with therapy is that you learn a little too much about what makes people tick. For Leonard, therapy has been useless because he hasn't applied what he's learned to himself. However, he has no problem applying it to others. We saw that this season when he used Penny reading Beverly's book as a way to make her pity fuck him to remedy his horrible childhood. I would assume that is not the only time he's done that and that Penny has been his experiment, especially since the Beta Test began.