Nathan for You - "Dumb Starbucks"

For anyone who has never watched the show Nathan For You on Comedy Central, you are missing out on one of TV's strangest, smartest, and all-around funniest shows right now. It's a show that's so unique that it's kind of hard to even explain what it is. It can be explained as a sort of reality/comedy hybrid - a reality show that's making fun of all of the other reality shows. Combined with shows like Review and Broad City, Nathan For You is a show that's helping Comedy Central shed its image of "that channel that plays South Park and airs too much Tosh.0" into one of the most reliably consistent cable networks, offering a slew of strong-voiced comedies that are toying with television formula and creating something that feels wholly unique. (The more I write this paragraph, the more I realize how much fucking greatness there really is on Comedy Central right now and how I need to write a post about this topic sometime soon).

But anyway, let's talk about "Dumb Starbucks", and about how it means this entire blog post is pointless.

Nathan for You is a rather silly show and on the surface it might appear that it's simply a shallow skewering of the artificiality of reality television. But it's a show that, through its hijinks, manages to make some surprisingly poignant statements about natural human reactions. By creating an environment that seems real to everyone involved but that the audience knows is all fabricated, it allows the show to sort of twist the usual reality formula and produce material that is not only hilarious but also kind of...psychologically interesting? Or maybe it doesn't! Maybe it's just a television show, created to make money and maybe to generate some laughs along the way. Maybe the meaning I'm subscribing to it is entirely based on my own perceptions of media and has nothing to do with what Nathan Fielder was attempting to do. Maybe all of this is just total bullshit! Maybe I'm just ranting right now because I feel like I have to because I need to maintain this blog to have some online writing presence so I have the chance of getting a paying job after I graduate college! Maybe none of this is real at all!

This is sort of the point that "Dumb Starbucks" makes. Nathan's Dumb Starbucks restaurant was genuinely not an artistic statement. It was a parody only because the law said it had to be. And yet, so many people saw it and tacked their own meanings on to it, assuming it was an expression against corporate America or a Banksy-esque piece of modern art, and through those tacked on meanings, it became that, at least for those people. "Dumb Starbucks" is not exactly a nihilistic "nothing means anything" lesson. Instead, it's a lesson that anything can have meaning, and that meaning is defined by what other people interpret it as. That's some pretty amazing depth for a show that included a parody of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" called "(I Can't Get No) Erection". 

Or maybe nothing means anything.