Sukkot is the Jewish harvest festival, something of a spiritual precursor to Thanksgiving, where family and friends come together in the sukkah, the ritual makeshift hut (“So it’s like Bonnaroo?” asks Taco “Yes, but without the patchouli and underlying sadness.” ).
And how does The League celebrate a festival associated with joy and fall bounty and fertility? The only way it knows how: with anti-Semitic graffiti, period jokes and lots and lots of weed.
One piece of criticism that kept popping up about The League when it first aired was that it was trying to do the jerks-doing-cringe-worthy-things formula It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia had helped popularize but the execution just wasn’t there. In this week’s episode, the gang, instead of building up to those golden moments a la Always Sunny and the best episodes of The League, just went straight for the cringe factor and ripped all the anticipation and subtlety out like a Mortal Kombat character rips out his opponent’s entrails.
All three major plotlines have an element of this. There’s the league-related arc, where the guys and Jenny try to fix their terrible, Auto-Drafted league with a massive series of trades. They arrive at Andre’s flat, where the adult film had been shot not too long before, and are, of course, totally grossed out by everything Andre comes into contact with (he makes poor Ruxin kiss the ring, and if you saw last week’s episode, you know that this is the apex of gross-out). Andre gets suspicious, after he mysteriously contracts a disease also in the arsenal of gross-out, which Jenny calls “The Immaculate Infection” and we all have a laugh, and Pete and Kevin are quickly put on damage control to avoid the opening of the chamber of secrets. They call for more honesty in the league (despite still denying that anything sketchy went on in Andre’s flat or that they tinkered with the draft order to screw over Ruxin) and Pete engineers a Good Will Hunting-style formula eight-way trade, which is perhaps this episode’s most impressive moment and one the fantasy football nerds will appreciate.
The subplot from where the episode gets its name (and perhaps its most cringe-tastic moment) is the “Sukkot” arc: Ruxin wants to get Baby Jeffrey into an exclusive Jewish private school, and so he decides to have the principal of the school over to celebrate the harvest. Only problem? Google Earth shows an image of Ruxin painting a swastika over a pothole in front of his house. The pothole’s been fixed, but the image still comes up on Google Maps. The other characters are appalled, which is funny because no one ever gets appalled about actual, real, reprehensible things on The League. Therefore, with the assistance of Taco, the party and the sukkah itself are moved to Kevin and Jenny’s.
Then there’s the “C” plot, which is the Kevin and Jenny plot. Jenny has taken an advertisement on a bench (the opening scene of the episode is a discussion of how realistic her breasts look on the bench, natch), and a homeless gentleman has chosen her bench as his bench of choice, which means the advertisement is always obscured. Kevin and Jenny, then, are faced with the rather uncomfortable, almost hard-to-watch task of asking the homeless guy to switch benches. To be honest, I’m just surprised that hasn’t been a subplot on an episode of Always Sunny yet. Seems like more of their territory.
The gang finds out it’s Jenny’s time of the month, and oh, how the floodgates open with terrible jokes. Kevin even uses his wife’s monthly cycle as a crutch to get the homeless guy off her bench, and amazingly enough, the guy, clearly mystified by woman-powers or whatever, leaves. It appears in this scene as though The League is actually turning that trope on its head and making a comment about the way dudes are clueless about PMS and therefore inherently fear it and use it as a blanket scapegoat, which is commendable, especially considering how many of the same stale period jokes are used in this episode (including one about Bloody Marys). The worst offender is Ruxin, which is ultimately fine because awful menstruation/PMS jokes are definitely in character for him, but honestly, how many are we expected to take?
For the second week in a row, the majority of the best absurd, semi-throwaway lines have gone to Taco, among them, “There’s nothing racially insensitive about a dragon with a chainsaw penis.” Pretty sure I’ve seen that exact design on an abandoned train car in downtown Chicago. He also is charged with decorating the sukkah (employing Ellie, who, naturally, calls the holiday “Suck it.”), does it up in the kind of manner only Taco would find sexy (throws with prints from all over the animal kingdom).
It turns out, rather unsurprisingly, that he has invented his own holiday in response to the Jewish holiday: Takkot. Takkot, as he explains, “is an ideal plane of existence where the 12 tribes of Israel get together with people who are high on mushrooms and groove to Aphex Twin.” There’s something awesomely self-aware about the line itself and the delivery, and the fact that Taco is describing every terrible psy-trance festival that your Trustafarian college roommate ever tried to drag you to. Andre gets his fair share, most notably with the amazing and totally bizarre cowboy-mafioso-gunslinger monologue in which he threatens the rest of the gang, and then reveals his hat is a pork-pie from Juicy Couture. Nice juxtaposition there.
The end of the episode is predictably cringe-worthy in that manner which FX’s comedy shows seem to do so well: Ellie, of course, finds the Sacko DVD and inadvertently broadcasts the Andre porno to all, right at the same moment that—now here’s the twist—Kevin is revealed as a swastika painter (he tagged the bench in an effort to get rid of the other markings on Jenny’s bench), and he in turn rats out Ruxin, and in the end, it’s safe to say that baby Jeffrey is going to public school. Can’t say he deserves any sympathy, but hey, there were still a couple good laughs. Especially with that line about Bonnaroo, but it might just be this writer being bitter about having never gone.