Dean Pelton lies about his sexuality and Annie lies about her acting talents on Community season 6, episode 4. Check out our recap and share your thoughts on “Queer Studies and Advanced Waxing.”
When it was first announced that Community was coming to Yahoo Screen, Dan Harmon claimed that episodes would still be around 20-22 minutes in length, despite the lack of time restrictions the internet affords. Of course, it’s one thing to say that and another thing to realize that you no longer have to cut out your favorite joke due to time. And that’s how “Queer Studies and Advanced Waxing” is Community‘s longest-ever episode at 31 minutes. It’s no wonder, due to what it needs to cram in.
Dean Pelton is approached by Rich and Carl from the school board (maybe we’re in the minority on this, but we find Rich to be one of the funniest characters on the entire show) with an offer to join said school board. The board’s been getting some bad press ever since they canceled the gay pride parade in favor of a school board pride parade, and they need an openly gay person on the board as a PR move.
The only problem with this is that Pelton isn’t necessarily gay, open or otherwise. Sure, homosexuality comprises a certain percentage of his interests but his sexuality is far too complex to put in one box. After meeting with Jeff and Frankie, Pelton decides to take the job, since at his core he’s really a politician. He’ll just have to lie a little about his sexuality. Or as he puts it: ““All I have to do is pare down my sexuality to simple homosexuality, which is heavily in the mix.”
Things go swimmingly for Dean Pelton at first. He gets a stand-in Latin boyfriend, Domingo. He has a successful press conference and is featured in many newspapers. Naturally all of this is in a montage scored by “Gay Dean,” a song to the tune of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” He’s so content that he intersects with Elroy and Abed’s plotline and agrees with them that they cannot remove a bird’s nest from the Wi-Fi routers. Then Rich and Carl from the school board come to realize that having an openly gay person on the board is causing them as big a headache with conservatives as not having one did with liberals.
Dean Pelton is also no longer enjoying living a lie, so he holds another press conference where he comes out of the closet as something else: a politician. This one doesn’t go as well and he is kicked off the school board. This is okay, as he now gets to go see Chang as Mr. Miyagi in the stage adaption of Karate Kid.
Chang originally auditioned for the role of Daniel, but the theater director (played with typically loud volume by Jason Mantzoukas) forced him into the Miyagi part and Annie into the Daniel role. At first Annie thought the director loved her and hated Chang because he would only yell at Chang, but it turns out that he just didn’t see any acting potential in Annie at all and was abusing Chang to release his talent.
It apparently works, as The Karate Kid has everyone in the audience in tears and in awe of Chang’s performance. The performance leads to the following exchange, which sums up the episode perfectly.
Annie: “I’m at a loss for what lesson I learned.”
Abed: “I lost a button.”
Elroy: “We all lost buttons.”