Yesterday was Friday, which means the day before was Thursday, which means another evening of Fox’s dreary Thursday comedy line-up has aired. Animal Control had an A-plot about Joel McHale being kindly asked not to bone a rich lady but doing it anyway, and a B-plot about Ravi Patel getting asked to throw the first pitch at a baseball game but getting upstaged by his lady coworker.
And then, this week’s Going Dutch. Joe Morton visits the base to insult Denis Leary by tasking him with guiding traffic during a tank exercise. To prove he can still get his dick hard he’s still in his prime, Denis Leary decides to steal one of the tanks. In the B-plot, to prove she’s better than him, so does the base’s other commander, his daughter.
Dutch Notes
- The tank exercise is in “rural Germany,” to see which tanks need to be replaced. Which means this episode is almost entirely set in unspecific fields, because it’s only episode two and I guess we’ve already run out of material on half the premise.
- And yet.
- “I met this Dutch weirdo named Baas smoking hookah at a art gallery showing.” I’m gonna blame the subtitles for this one, but “Baas” means “Boss,” it’s not a normal Dutch name, you’re thinking of “Bas,” which is usually short for “Sebastiaan.” Not everyone smokes weed, which is what I assume she means when she says “hookah,” not an actual hookah pipe, because that would be ridiculous, and we’re actually pretty strict about not fucking smoking indoors. Yes, even weed. Later, there are “Baas Baby” jokes.
- In exchange for helping The Daughter with her own tank heist, “Baas” wants “an immersive experience of American excess.” This, to The Daughter, means throwing a party Danny Pudi describes as “an eighth-grade graduation party at Mar-a-Lago.” Solid joke about how corny the American aesthetic defaults to. This includes the following things:
- Many American flags and stars, red, white, and blue balloons.
- A popcorn stand.
- A statue of a cowboy wearing American flag shades.
- A statue of an astronaut wearing an American flag top hat. Behind him, a Warhol-style print of four Statues of Liberty.
- An arcade-style basketball hoop game.
- Towers of hot dogs and hamburgers.
- A statue of the Statue of Liberty.
- A mid Hulk Hogan impersonator.
- The celebrity impersonator, a classic symbol of the American disease. They crave proximity to fame and fortune, but finding themselves unable to access these things, surround themselves with cheap, bad, frequently tasteless copies of them.
- Jan doing “improv comedy,” a mean-spirited mime-adjacent act.
- “Baas” is played by American actor Lolu Ajayi, who is actually based in the Netherlands, shows up in actual Dutch things sometimes, and does, apparently, actually speak Dutch. He never does here, though. His accent speaking English is more Anglo.
- There’s Catherine Tate again, dressed in a more sensible velvet purple jacket this time. An exchange with Leary. Him: “You’re more blunt than I remember.” Her: “Not blunt. Just Dutch. We believe politeness is deceit.” This idea that we’re… direct to the point of coming across as rude is… Hm. A few layers to this.
- One, Americans, a lot of Dutch people are just being rude to you. A lot of us are dicks.
- Two, we are totally capable of being direct and no-nonsense without being or sounding rude.
- Three, many American cultures are so much about being polite, because you care so much more about how you’re perceived than you do about being useful. This makes some of you fucking impossible to communicate with. Compared to some of your Nice cultures, your Polite cultures, just saying something straight up sounds direct and rude to you only because your culture has driven you incapable of being fucking normal about anything.
- I had an American teacher once, and this man, you could have shit on your face for the entire class and at the end he might politely tell the whole room we should all consider washing our faces some more going forward, but not in a million years would this man tell you you had shit on your face.
- Tate: “When I was studying for my PhD, I took a job as a long hauler.” She’d say “trucker,” I think. “I’d listen to the required reading on audiobook.” I feel like Dutch textbooks are not as easily accessible as audiobooks as American ones might be, but maybe I’m just looking for nits to pick.
- Tate: “Most of the soldiers in Stroopsdorf are flapdrols.” She will never pronounce a Dutch word correctly. “It best translates as useless turds.” I guess.
- More jokes about sex work. See last week’s post.
- You can tell this Irish street is a Dutch street because of the inaccurate parking sign, the illegally covered sign below it, the bakfiets, and the building that says… something “PRESS” on it.
- The house depicted there is what Leary thinks is Tate’s brothel, but is actually, quote, “a charity office offering social and immigration services to sex workers.” Does that exist? I confess I’m out of my depth on that one.
- Inside: We hear the first actual spoken Dutch, fragments of “even een afspraak met je maken,” en “fijne avond.”
- Some signage: Most of it hard to make out, but what I can read tracks fine. Machine translation is pretty okay now. “031 099 989 7200” is not a Dutch phone number at all, though.
Sigh. Okay. (Begging this show to hire me as its Dutch consultant.)
Bonus section:
- One thing I didn’t mention last time: The grounds of the base feature a prominent windmill. Not a real one, a decorative one, not unlike something you’d see at a miniature golf course. I sigh every time I see it.