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fandomhigh_ooc2007-08-19 07:33 pm
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Spotlight on Fandoms: Coupling
Under the cut may be mildly, mildly NWS due to Coupling's subject matter. Also, spoilers for all of Coupling. It's been out long enough.
I could, conceivably, put some innuendo here and finish it up with 'Not Dirty', but it'd be a lie, because this is Coupling and Dirty is its middle name. If it had more than one. Obviously. I can count.
Aanyway, Coupling is the story of six thirty-somethings who spend considerably less time freaking out about shoes and considerably more time talking about sex than, say, your friendly neighbourhood Friends. The show, lasting four seasons (UK series, that's just a couple of episodes a pop) details the life of Susan Walker and Steve Taylor, an accountant and a writer who embark upon that joyful thing we call 'a relationship', and their respective exes and best friends, Patrick Maitland, Sally Harper, Jane Christie and Jeff Murdock.
Thusly, they face First Dates, Going To Funerals, Going To Weddings, Picking Fabrics, Getting Engaged and Having Children, all the while discussing the ins and outs of, well, coupling.
At the end of the ride you start to wonder how the hell men and women ever even manage to get along.
CHARACTERS
The Women:
Susan Walker:
I'm Susan, the happy trotting elf! I trot and trot and bounce and bounce and smile a lot and that's what counts! I'm Susan, the happy trotting smile a lotting elf! I'm polite so just for clarity, when I'm cross I say "Apparently!" -- Sally
Oft-described as the only sane member of the Coupling cast, Susan is sensible, organised, and overly fond of Australians.
Then there's the bit where she's bossy, frank, and sexually voracious to the point where it occasionally disturbs men.
She works at Jeff's office, thus assumedly making her an accountant. She used to date Patrick (and Jeff, which ended when he faked a panic attack to get out of having sex with her) and honestly, there's not really a lot else to say about Susan. She's the intelligent normal one who seems to be the only person on the show who's in full control of her life, and often stands in the eye of the crazy, crazy storm. Part of this may hail from the fact that she has sane and generally open parents, which measures up quite nicely against what little we know about the parents of the rest of the cast (mostly it's about Jeff's, really).
Amongst her little clique of three, Sally's her best friend, who uses her as a measuring stick for her own insecurity, and Jane's her boyfriend's ex, who she can't get rid of and who she absolutely can't stand (the feeling is mutual). The both of them usually leave her out of the joke (or, in some cases, make her the butt of it).
Her relationship with Steve is what stands at the center of the show. It lasts the course of the entire four series, making it by far the most stable one in it. That doesn't, however, keep the show from using their many, many disagreements (and Susan's general exasperation with Steve) as the basis of a good chunk of the comedy.
Also, she has a bouncy walk and her bottom is full of puppies and rainbows. Or so we're told.
Sally Harper:
As Susan's best friend I am to you a bit like Australia: very distant, largely uninhabitable and with areas of great danger. -- Sally
The show's writer, Stephen Moffat, notes that besides Susan and Steve, all Coupling characters represent different ends of the male-female and anxious-confident scale. Sally is a female paragon of anxiety, worrying about everything from her neck to who her boyfriend's proposing to (uh, Sally?). She is, however, a succesful beautician who runs her own business and seems to have no trouble getting men - it's the fact she treats them as construction projects that makes it almost impossible for her to keep one.
Age is Sally's greatest enemy, and she's devoted herself to fighting it with industrial quantities of moisturizer. She wields this insecurity as a deadly weapon, albeit usually one that ends up hurting her more than anyone else. Throughout the first three series, she pursues a variety of men that she never dates for more than three weeks, until finally admitting her love for Patrick at the end of the third season. Her attempts to keep him with her as they hurdle the first clumsy hurdles of a friendship gone romantic is one of the main storylines of the fourth season.
Jane Christie:
I really thought I’d gone to his house, you know, to heal our spiritual divide. But it turns out I was just gagging for a shag. Those two are so similar! -- Jane
Proudly representing the female half of the show's Crazy Couplet, Jane once pretended to be her own insane twin while on a cruise and liked the attention so much that it stuck. Ever since, she's taken great care to profile herself as crazy, wacky Jane, an overconfident, extremely oblivious woman who won't take no for an answer. In fact, she is Steve's ex only after dumping him when he went out with someone else -- after the eighth time he had attempted to dump her (she simply refused to accept it). In the fourth series, we see that she still has a double-sided picture of Steve (Happy Steve and Angry Steve) by the side of her bed.
Jane may have some trouble letting go.
She works as a traffic reporter, spending her days in a helicopter above London. The numbers are still out on how many traffic accidents she's caused, but they must be quite sizable: she's known to tell rush hour traffic to close their eyes and meditate in order to calm down. She also still kind of hates Susan for taking her boyfriend away, spent several weeks shagging Patrick and in a fit of desperation nearly jumped Jeff, who was saved only by the fact that Steve had just phoned him to bring lesbian porn and Steve's favourite pillow to a sperm bank. By the end of the show, she is dating Oliver, who she describes as being 'the sweetest, nicest, kindest man she's ever met'. She's still striving desperately to learn how to get rid of someone like that when the show ends.
The Men:
Steve Taylor:
We are men. We are different. We have only one word for soap. We do not own candles. We have never seen anything of any value in a craft shop. We do not own magazines full of photographs of celebrities with their clothes ON. --Steve
Despite my total love of Jeff, Steve is probably my favourite character on the entire show. He is the 'normal guy' for the boys like Susan's the 'normal girl' for the women, except for the bit where he's a man, a writer, and a bit of a weasel. He knows the right thing to do or say, but rarely does, as he's incredibly unreliable in the middle of a crisis. This is possibly something left over from years of knowing Jeff, as he skirts closer and closer to insane the more nervous he gets. Indeed, Steve's Rants (born of too much pressure put on his poor head) are a staple of the series; he launches into a babbling stream of rhetoric about What It Is Like Being a Man at least once a season.
Inevitably, Steve ends up in situations that force him to backpedal in a major way, which occasionally works but often doesn't. The experience of dating him was described by Susan as 'throwing open the door and bracing yourself for man overload, only to find a small toddler who wants his dinner.', a perfect metaphor for Steve's hapless nature if we've ever heard one.
He functions as a go-between for Jeff and Patrick's particular brands of madness, often letting Jeff drag him off into insanity he can then be righteously annoyed about. He plays the indignant straight man very well.
Also, his entire fantasy life revolves around Mariella Frostrup. Just putting that out there.
Patrick Maitland:
"Does your dick do all the talking?"
"I don't know. I'll ask it." -- Sally & Patrick
Patrick is what happens when you strip Friends' Joey of all semblance of a mitigating 'awww' factor. He has, to quote Steve, 'the sexual politics of a viking attack': he can't imagine women not wanting to sleep with him, up to and including lesbians - who he likes because 'it's nice to know there's still attractive women out there who can't get a boyfriend.' Clueless, suave and charming, Patrick does in fact manage to get all the women and leave the next morning without too many horrible reprecussions. He keeps videos of all of his conquests in a walk-in closet that is universally referred to as the Cupboard of Patrick's Love, and he'll take just about anything as a come-on.
And then in comes Sally. Over the course of the series, Sally becomes his best friend, and eventually, his girlfriend. Suddenly, Patrick finds himself in a relationship and he has no idea how to deal with that. Sally being Sally, this becomes somewhat of a problem, especially considering that Susan is Patrick's ex-girlfriend (at least from his side; she never considered it a relationship).
One of the longest-running jokes involves the fact that Patrick is a 'tripod' and a 'pole-vaulter donkey man'. I'll leave what that means to your imagination.
Jeff Murdock:
"So? She's gorgeous and you're definitely in. What's the problem this time?"
"This is the worst one ever! I… It's… I can't even talk about it!"
"Jeff! Jeff! I know about the giggle loop, the sock gap, the nudity buffer and what you said to Audrey Watkins. Believe me, there is nothing you can possibly say that can surprise me. What's gone wrong this time?"
"I'VE GOT TOO MANY LEGS!" -- Steve & Jeff
Insane Welshman Jeff represents the anxious male quarter of the spectrum, and he does so with grace and freaking. He finds it impossible to talk to women as he inevitably blurts out whatever's on his mind, and what's on his mind is rarely particularly sane (producing such memorable opening lines as "You look so beautiful you should be embalmed," "You can read!" and "You look just like the back of your head!"). When he tries to crawl out of the holes he makes, he just ends up digging deeper by adding more and more ridiculous lies to the pile. In order to deal with his crippling problems with human interaction, he devotes a lot of brainpower to coming up with theories to describe the problems at hand, which often make sense in a crazy kind of way and tend to lead to him blurting more ridiculous nonsense.
Normal things terrify Jeff: talking to people, having a job interview, the idea of getting trapped in dental floss, bathroom doors with no locks... all of these things end up on the list of terrors he keeps in his head. He approaches them all with an almost animal sense of wariness, panic and confusion and gets the weirdest ideas about things. A lot of the blame can be heaped upon his mother, who if Jeff's stories are anything to go by was an eccentric, domineering woman who spent a great deal of her time traumatizing her son regarding all things sexual. He is hence fascinated with sex while at the same time being so utterly terrified with it that he has been known to pretend to pass out or run away in the middle of it.
When Jeff does finally manage to get a relationship (with Susan's boss, the lovely Julia) he becomes akin to an extremely happy, excitable child. This is adorable. In the past, he's tried to date Susan, but ended up faking a panic attack to get out of having sex with her. After being dumped by his girlfriend, he very nearly almost slept with Jane, but then an apple made him tense and he left when Steve phoned him for support over in a sperm bank.
Steve and Jeff have a very special friendship.
Jeff's an accountant. Considering his communication skills in interviews, we can only assume he's just very good at math or he'd have been fired by now.
Oliver Morris
He's like a cross between a puppy and an idiot. -- Jane
Alas! Jeff leaves for Lesbos at the end of the third season (although he remains in contact with Steve over the phone and his dreams throughout the season) and thus, they replace him with Oliver. Oliver was heavily criticized for basically being a watered-down version of Jeff; he's an anxious geek who runs a comic book store. He becomes Jane's love interest in series four, something he manages to do both better and worse at than his predecessors in all sorts of new and interesting ways.
Underneath all of the anxiety, desperation and geekiness lies a man who is perhaps the only person on Earth capable of calling Jane on her bullshit, which he does with great verve. On the other hand, he still has great trouble dealing with the fact that he's been dumped by his now-pregnant (not by him) ex, Tamsin. We don't really learn much else about Oliver.
A Quick Break For Some Coupling Relationship Quotes (for I love them so):
Susan & Steve:
"Steve, did you just compare our relationship to the Cold War?"
"...On the plus side, it did last a very long time."
"So what you're saying is that the bond between us is in fact the threat of mutually assured destruction?!"
"Where were you, zone-wise, with Jane when you asked Susan out?"
"Pretty much... in there."
"Yes, but I mean, where exactly? Middle, edge--"
"During."
"...During?"
"It's not as bad as it sounds! I was in a toilet cubicle with Jane, when I was nipping out to get a condom, I asked out Susan."
Jeff & Steve:
"Close? We're porn buddies."
"Porn buddies? Are you sure this isn't some kind of code?"
"Yeah. You see, in the event of Steve's death, upset though I will be, the first thing I'll do is go straight to his place and remove all the pornography before his parents can find it. And he's promised to do the same thing for me. That's how close we are."
"You guys have seriously made arrangements to destroy each other's dirty videos?"
"Who said 'destroy?' I said 'remove'."
"Yeah, well you wouldn't keep them... would you?"
"It's a perk."
"Jeff!"
"But that's the beauty of it, you see? Your best friend's dead, but there's a bright side!"
JEFF CONCEPTS:
Jeff is nothing if not innovative in his crazy. Hence, the Jeff Concepts - the ideas Jeff has formulated about Life, the Universe and Everything - have become a fundamental part of the show. To the point where they're listed seperately on Wiki, and I am nothing if not pro-aping Wiki. In condensed fashion, here's just a grasp. (FH Jeff has not quite formulated most of these yet, but he's working on it)
The Sock Gap:
"I mean, where exactly do you take your socks off? My advice is to take them off right after your shoes, and before your trousers. That’s the sock gap. Miss it, and suddenly you’re a naked man in socks. No self-respecting woman will ever let a naked man in socks do the squelchy with her."
The Giggle Loop:
If faced by a minute's silence, you risk becoming part of the giggle loop. 'It's a minute's silence!' you may think, 'The worst thing I could do is laugh now!'. The idea will be imprinted upon your head, and you will almost laugh. Then you will think about how awful it would've been if you had laughed - and you will almost laugh again, except this time it would be a bigger laugh. Then you think about how horrible that bigger laugh would've been--
Well, you get the point.
The Nudity Buffer:
The five minutes in which it is possible for a man to start a conversation with a woman. Should they miss the buffer, they have already imagined the woman naked and can thus no longer communicate without endangering their own life in the process.
Porn Efficiency:
The ratio of women to men in porn. Lesbian porn is incredibly porn efficient.
Lower Whiplash:
What happens if your eyes slip from the girl to the guy while watching porn with a low porn efficiency ratio. You don't want this to happen when your mom is having a coffee morning.
The Zone:
The tailing-off period when a relationship is almost over but you still get the sexual benefits. In this period, a man is entitled to a woman's stockings.
VIDEO LINKS:
These may be NWS due to subject matter.
Jeff and Julia attempt to ask each other out. Unfortunately they both suffer from the same problem.
Jane has a sock puppet who speaks the truth. Yeah, that's not going to end badly at all.
Steve lists the four pillars of the heterosexual male psyche. The very first Steve Rant of the series.
Jane and Jeff together in one room. We're lucky it only happens once in the entire series, or the world would explode of insane.
Steve has trouble dealing with Susan's shoes. And other things. ...Yeah.
Jeff tries to let a girl who's hitting on him know he's in a relationship and being faithful. Steve's a weasel about it.
Sally sings the elf song. Warning: may catch.
Steve comments on couch pillows. Quite possibly my favourite Steve Rant of the series.
Steve and Jeff have a very special friendship. Even Susan's worried.
Because it's just not Coupling without the Spider-Man dance.
And that's all I've got, kids.
I could, conceivably, put some innuendo here and finish it up with 'Not Dirty', but it'd be a lie, because this is Coupling and Dirty is its middle name. If it had more than one. Obviously. I can count.
Aanyway, Coupling is the story of six thirty-somethings who spend considerably less time freaking out about shoes and considerably more time talking about sex than, say, your friendly neighbourhood Friends. The show, lasting four seasons (UK series, that's just a couple of episodes a pop) details the life of Susan Walker and Steve Taylor, an accountant and a writer who embark upon that joyful thing we call 'a relationship', and their respective exes and best friends, Patrick Maitland, Sally Harper, Jane Christie and Jeff Murdock.
Thusly, they face First Dates, Going To Funerals, Going To Weddings, Picking Fabrics, Getting Engaged and Having Children, all the while discussing the ins and outs of, well, coupling.
At the end of the ride you start to wonder how the hell men and women ever even manage to get along.
CHARACTERS
The Women:
Susan Walker:
I'm Susan, the happy trotting elf! I trot and trot and bounce and bounce and smile a lot and that's what counts! I'm Susan, the happy trotting smile a lotting elf! I'm polite so just for clarity, when I'm cross I say "Apparently!" -- Sally
Oft-described as the only sane member of the Coupling cast, Susan is sensible, organised, and overly fond of Australians.
Then there's the bit where she's bossy, frank, and sexually voracious to the point where it occasionally disturbs men.
She works at Jeff's office, thus assumedly making her an accountant. She used to date Patrick (and Jeff, which ended when he faked a panic attack to get out of having sex with her) and honestly, there's not really a lot else to say about Susan. She's the intelligent normal one who seems to be the only person on the show who's in full control of her life, and often stands in the eye of the crazy, crazy storm. Part of this may hail from the fact that she has sane and generally open parents, which measures up quite nicely against what little we know about the parents of the rest of the cast (mostly it's about Jeff's, really).
Amongst her little clique of three, Sally's her best friend, who uses her as a measuring stick for her own insecurity, and Jane's her boyfriend's ex, who she can't get rid of and who she absolutely can't stand (the feeling is mutual). The both of them usually leave her out of the joke (or, in some cases, make her the butt of it).
Her relationship with Steve is what stands at the center of the show. It lasts the course of the entire four series, making it by far the most stable one in it. That doesn't, however, keep the show from using their many, many disagreements (and Susan's general exasperation with Steve) as the basis of a good chunk of the comedy.
Also, she has a bouncy walk and her bottom is full of puppies and rainbows. Or so we're told.
Sally Harper:
As Susan's best friend I am to you a bit like Australia: very distant, largely uninhabitable and with areas of great danger. -- Sally
The show's writer, Stephen Moffat, notes that besides Susan and Steve, all Coupling characters represent different ends of the male-female and anxious-confident scale. Sally is a female paragon of anxiety, worrying about everything from her neck to who her boyfriend's proposing to (uh, Sally?). She is, however, a succesful beautician who runs her own business and seems to have no trouble getting men - it's the fact she treats them as construction projects that makes it almost impossible for her to keep one.
Age is Sally's greatest enemy, and she's devoted herself to fighting it with industrial quantities of moisturizer. She wields this insecurity as a deadly weapon, albeit usually one that ends up hurting her more than anyone else. Throughout the first three series, she pursues a variety of men that she never dates for more than three weeks, until finally admitting her love for Patrick at the end of the third season. Her attempts to keep him with her as they hurdle the first clumsy hurdles of a friendship gone romantic is one of the main storylines of the fourth season.
Jane Christie:
I really thought I’d gone to his house, you know, to heal our spiritual divide. But it turns out I was just gagging for a shag. Those two are so similar! -- Jane
Proudly representing the female half of the show's Crazy Couplet, Jane once pretended to be her own insane twin while on a cruise and liked the attention so much that it stuck. Ever since, she's taken great care to profile herself as crazy, wacky Jane, an overconfident, extremely oblivious woman who won't take no for an answer. In fact, she is Steve's ex only after dumping him when he went out with someone else -- after the eighth time he had attempted to dump her (she simply refused to accept it). In the fourth series, we see that she still has a double-sided picture of Steve (Happy Steve and Angry Steve) by the side of her bed.
Jane may have some trouble letting go.
She works as a traffic reporter, spending her days in a helicopter above London. The numbers are still out on how many traffic accidents she's caused, but they must be quite sizable: she's known to tell rush hour traffic to close their eyes and meditate in order to calm down. She also still kind of hates Susan for taking her boyfriend away, spent several weeks shagging Patrick and in a fit of desperation nearly jumped Jeff, who was saved only by the fact that Steve had just phoned him to bring lesbian porn and Steve's favourite pillow to a sperm bank. By the end of the show, she is dating Oliver, who she describes as being 'the sweetest, nicest, kindest man she's ever met'. She's still striving desperately to learn how to get rid of someone like that when the show ends.
The Men:
Steve Taylor:
We are men. We are different. We have only one word for soap. We do not own candles. We have never seen anything of any value in a craft shop. We do not own magazines full of photographs of celebrities with their clothes ON. --Steve
Despite my total love of Jeff, Steve is probably my favourite character on the entire show. He is the 'normal guy' for the boys like Susan's the 'normal girl' for the women, except for the bit where he's a man, a writer, and a bit of a weasel. He knows the right thing to do or say, but rarely does, as he's incredibly unreliable in the middle of a crisis. This is possibly something left over from years of knowing Jeff, as he skirts closer and closer to insane the more nervous he gets. Indeed, Steve's Rants (born of too much pressure put on his poor head) are a staple of the series; he launches into a babbling stream of rhetoric about What It Is Like Being a Man at least once a season.
Inevitably, Steve ends up in situations that force him to backpedal in a major way, which occasionally works but often doesn't. The experience of dating him was described by Susan as 'throwing open the door and bracing yourself for man overload, only to find a small toddler who wants his dinner.', a perfect metaphor for Steve's hapless nature if we've ever heard one.
He functions as a go-between for Jeff and Patrick's particular brands of madness, often letting Jeff drag him off into insanity he can then be righteously annoyed about. He plays the indignant straight man very well.
Also, his entire fantasy life revolves around Mariella Frostrup. Just putting that out there.
Patrick Maitland:
"Does your dick do all the talking?"
"I don't know. I'll ask it." -- Sally & Patrick
Patrick is what happens when you strip Friends' Joey of all semblance of a mitigating 'awww' factor. He has, to quote Steve, 'the sexual politics of a viking attack': he can't imagine women not wanting to sleep with him, up to and including lesbians - who he likes because 'it's nice to know there's still attractive women out there who can't get a boyfriend.' Clueless, suave and charming, Patrick does in fact manage to get all the women and leave the next morning without too many horrible reprecussions. He keeps videos of all of his conquests in a walk-in closet that is universally referred to as the Cupboard of Patrick's Love, and he'll take just about anything as a come-on.
And then in comes Sally. Over the course of the series, Sally becomes his best friend, and eventually, his girlfriend. Suddenly, Patrick finds himself in a relationship and he has no idea how to deal with that. Sally being Sally, this becomes somewhat of a problem, especially considering that Susan is Patrick's ex-girlfriend (at least from his side; she never considered it a relationship).
One of the longest-running jokes involves the fact that Patrick is a 'tripod' and a 'pole-vaulter donkey man'. I'll leave what that means to your imagination.
Jeff Murdock:
"So? She's gorgeous and you're definitely in. What's the problem this time?"
"This is the worst one ever! I… It's… I can't even talk about it!"
"Jeff! Jeff! I know about the giggle loop, the sock gap, the nudity buffer and what you said to Audrey Watkins. Believe me, there is nothing you can possibly say that can surprise me. What's gone wrong this time?"
"I'VE GOT TOO MANY LEGS!" -- Steve & Jeff
Insane Welshman Jeff represents the anxious male quarter of the spectrum, and he does so with grace and freaking. He finds it impossible to talk to women as he inevitably blurts out whatever's on his mind, and what's on his mind is rarely particularly sane (producing such memorable opening lines as "You look so beautiful you should be embalmed," "You can read!" and "You look just like the back of your head!"). When he tries to crawl out of the holes he makes, he just ends up digging deeper by adding more and more ridiculous lies to the pile. In order to deal with his crippling problems with human interaction, he devotes a lot of brainpower to coming up with theories to describe the problems at hand, which often make sense in a crazy kind of way and tend to lead to him blurting more ridiculous nonsense.
Normal things terrify Jeff: talking to people, having a job interview, the idea of getting trapped in dental floss, bathroom doors with no locks... all of these things end up on the list of terrors he keeps in his head. He approaches them all with an almost animal sense of wariness, panic and confusion and gets the weirdest ideas about things. A lot of the blame can be heaped upon his mother, who if Jeff's stories are anything to go by was an eccentric, domineering woman who spent a great deal of her time traumatizing her son regarding all things sexual. He is hence fascinated with sex while at the same time being so utterly terrified with it that he has been known to pretend to pass out or run away in the middle of it.
When Jeff does finally manage to get a relationship (with Susan's boss, the lovely Julia) he becomes akin to an extremely happy, excitable child. This is adorable. In the past, he's tried to date Susan, but ended up faking a panic attack to get out of having sex with her. After being dumped by his girlfriend, he very nearly almost slept with Jane, but then an apple made him tense and he left when Steve phoned him for support over in a sperm bank.
Steve and Jeff have a very special friendship.
Jeff's an accountant. Considering his communication skills in interviews, we can only assume he's just very good at math or he'd have been fired by now.
Oliver Morris
He's like a cross between a puppy and an idiot. -- Jane
Alas! Jeff leaves for Lesbos at the end of the third season (although he remains in contact with Steve over the phone and his dreams throughout the season) and thus, they replace him with Oliver. Oliver was heavily criticized for basically being a watered-down version of Jeff; he's an anxious geek who runs a comic book store. He becomes Jane's love interest in series four, something he manages to do both better and worse at than his predecessors in all sorts of new and interesting ways.
Underneath all of the anxiety, desperation and geekiness lies a man who is perhaps the only person on Earth capable of calling Jane on her bullshit, which he does with great verve. On the other hand, he still has great trouble dealing with the fact that he's been dumped by his now-pregnant (not by him) ex, Tamsin. We don't really learn much else about Oliver.
A Quick Break For Some Coupling Relationship Quotes (for I love them so):
Susan & Steve:
"Steve, did you just compare our relationship to the Cold War?"
"...On the plus side, it did last a very long time."
"So what you're saying is that the bond between us is in fact the threat of mutually assured destruction?!"
"Where were you, zone-wise, with Jane when you asked Susan out?"
"Pretty much... in there."
"Yes, but I mean, where exactly? Middle, edge--"
"During."
"...During?"
"It's not as bad as it sounds! I was in a toilet cubicle with Jane, when I was nipping out to get a condom, I asked out Susan."
Jeff & Steve:
"Close? We're porn buddies."
"Porn buddies? Are you sure this isn't some kind of code?"
"Yeah. You see, in the event of Steve's death, upset though I will be, the first thing I'll do is go straight to his place and remove all the pornography before his parents can find it. And he's promised to do the same thing for me. That's how close we are."
"You guys have seriously made arrangements to destroy each other's dirty videos?"
"Who said 'destroy?' I said 'remove'."
"Yeah, well you wouldn't keep them... would you?"
"It's a perk."
"Jeff!"
"But that's the beauty of it, you see? Your best friend's dead, but there's a bright side!"
JEFF CONCEPTS:
Jeff is nothing if not innovative in his crazy. Hence, the Jeff Concepts - the ideas Jeff has formulated about Life, the Universe and Everything - have become a fundamental part of the show. To the point where they're listed seperately on Wiki, and I am nothing if not pro-aping Wiki. In condensed fashion, here's just a grasp. (FH Jeff has not quite formulated most of these yet, but he's working on it)
The Sock Gap:
"I mean, where exactly do you take your socks off? My advice is to take them off right after your shoes, and before your trousers. That’s the sock gap. Miss it, and suddenly you’re a naked man in socks. No self-respecting woman will ever let a naked man in socks do the squelchy with her."
The Giggle Loop:
If faced by a minute's silence, you risk becoming part of the giggle loop. 'It's a minute's silence!' you may think, 'The worst thing I could do is laugh now!'. The idea will be imprinted upon your head, and you will almost laugh. Then you will think about how awful it would've been if you had laughed - and you will almost laugh again, except this time it would be a bigger laugh. Then you think about how horrible that bigger laugh would've been--
Well, you get the point.
The Nudity Buffer:
The five minutes in which it is possible for a man to start a conversation with a woman. Should they miss the buffer, they have already imagined the woman naked and can thus no longer communicate without endangering their own life in the process.
Porn Efficiency:
The ratio of women to men in porn. Lesbian porn is incredibly porn efficient.
Lower Whiplash:
What happens if your eyes slip from the girl to the guy while watching porn with a low porn efficiency ratio. You don't want this to happen when your mom is having a coffee morning.
The Zone:
The tailing-off period when a relationship is almost over but you still get the sexual benefits. In this period, a man is entitled to a woman's stockings.
VIDEO LINKS:
These may be NWS due to subject matter.
Jeff and Julia attempt to ask each other out. Unfortunately they both suffer from the same problem.
Jane has a sock puppet who speaks the truth. Yeah, that's not going to end badly at all.
Steve lists the four pillars of the heterosexual male psyche. The very first Steve Rant of the series.
Jane and Jeff together in one room. We're lucky it only happens once in the entire series, or the world would explode of insane.
Steve has trouble dealing with Susan's shoes. And other things. ...Yeah.
Jeff tries to let a girl who's hitting on him know he's in a relationship and being faithful. Steve's a weasel about it.
Sally sings the elf song. Warning: may catch.
Steve comments on couch pillows. Quite possibly my favourite Steve Rant of the series.
Steve and Jeff have a very special friendship. Even Susan's worried.
Because it's just not Coupling without the Spider-Man dance.
And that's all I've got, kids.
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no subject
...
I wonder if Barney's related to Patrick somehow.
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Seriously, the sock puppet thing is my favorite bit EVER on this show.
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It was really, really bad.