Community - Carpe Diem!

Maybe we’re biased because we love Joel McHale, but we’re still loving Community. Anyone else? This week John Michael Higgins (most recognizable from his many appearances in Christopher Guest’s movies) guest starred as Professor Whitman, who told his students to throw away their books (didn’t they have to pay for those? – do you think the bookstore will take them back?) and their shoes (would you really walk around a Community College Campus barefoot) and carpe diem! The only objective in the class is to seize the day – no papers, no tests, just day seizing. I’m pretty sure the class was supposed to be about accounting, by the way. Jeff tells everyone in the study group that they should join for the easy A because the professor thinks he’s Robin Williams in the Deap Poet’s Society. Sure enough, moments later we see him order everyone to stand on their desks:

“All your lives you were told, ‘Don’t stand on your desk.’ Well, why not?”

One girl’s desk collapses beneath her.

“She’s okay. Go to the nurse. Seize the day!”

Whitman realizes that Jeff is only there for the easy A and tells him he needs to genuinely seize the day by the end of the week, or he would fail. He tries running around the quad with a kite, jumping rope with some young girls, and dressing in rainbow suspenders (ala Robin Williams in Mork and Mindy) and a flashing tie. Whitman tells him that it isn’t good enough (“Shazbot!”).

This was immediately followed by what I think was my favorite moment of the whole episode. After Jeff ordered a black coffee, which Whitman called “an ordinary coffee for an ordinary life”, he stepped up to the counter, ripped the menu in half, and joyously declared “I’ll have . . . a birthday cake!”

Meanwhile Abed was filming a creepy documentary on Britta’s dime, and Principal Figgins from Glee showed up as his father who insisted that Abed needed to join the falafel business (“9/11 was pretty much the 9/11 of the falafel business” – Abed). So stuff happened there. At the end of the episode Britta kissed Jeff in front of Whitman, thus fulfilling his requirement of seizing the day by the end of the week. Then Whitman ran off to climb a tree and further cement my love for him.

Clearly Whitman missed last weeks episode, because if this wasn't seizing the day then I don't know what is: