It makes me laugh out loud.
True, joyous, unencumbered laughter.
“The Big Bang Theory” is a television program. It’s ground-breaking, with superb writing that transcends excellent (though sometimes spotty) acting, fitting the pattern of previous shows that capture my undivided attention for 30 to 60 minutes at a time: M*A*S*H, Hill Street Blues, Star Trek: The Next Generation, My World and Welcome to It, West Wing and The Dick Van Dyke Show, to name a few.
Writing. The magical element of McLuhan’s cool, passive medium (tailor-made for the post-intellectual American couch potato). I suspect Big Bang’s creators never anticipated the skyrocket arc of Sheldon’s appeal, but out-of-this-world writing made that ascendancy possible.
But let us focus, not on words, but on lyrics. Near the start of each episode, a quasi-intellectual diatribe explodes for 20 short seconds, then dissolves into five ordinary 20-somethings eating pizza in a nerdishly furnished living room:
Our whole universe was in a hot, dense state.
Then nearly 14 billion years ago, expansion started …
Wait!
The Earth began to cool,
The autotrophs began to drool;
Neanderthals developed tools:
We built the Wall!
We built the Wall!
We built the Pyramids!
Math, science, history – unraveling the mystery
that all started with a Big Bang.
Genius. Pure poetry for the 21st century. Taken as a whole, the prototypical TV viewer salivates over the 29 remaining minutes (less commercials and station breaks) of diversion to come. But embrace the genius; venerate the selection of precisely the perfect words, the ideal turns of phrasing:
Not 13.5 to 14 billion, but “nearly” 14 billion; not 6,500, as many Fundamentalist Christians believe, nor the 4.6 billionth birthday of our Earth.
What IS and autotroph, anyway, and what’s the relevance of their drool, except to rhyme with “cool” (a state not share by Leonard and Friends)?
Selective points in history – the Wall (presumably the big one over in China, not the ex-one over in Germany), the Pyramids …
And then a quick resolution to a pizza-crunching brat packet.
Veritably, ya gotta get a Big Bang outta that show, doncha?
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