New Girl

I have been hugely enjoying New Girl, a Zooey Deschanel vehicle about 20-somethings flatting together and trying to mature.  One of the funny devices that they use is revealing lists, lists that tell you a lot about a person.  These lists are usually hysterical in context, because they are so revealing and so incongruous.

Chris Reeder has done the internet a service by collecting some of them here.  I quote this one example, but there are a few more there:

Anyway, the gang found his [Schmidt's] 2007 New Year's resolutions, and read them aloud to much delight:

Everything is easy when you are a battleship invading the bay of success
Stop pursuing Caroline. She's Nick's girl. Deal with it.
Begin the search for the cocoon that will one day release your butterfly.
Find out where Winston gets his sparkle, and then steal it.
Only think about hot new CFO every OTHER time I masturbate.
Start floating the idea that people call me Mr. Finish/Game Time Jones/The Hook-Up-Erator
Just pick a color of Crocs and buy them already.

This week, Schmidt broke up with model girlfriend CC and tried a date with her room-mate Nadia, a model in the 6'2" estonian-waif-descended-from-partisan-femme-fatales mould.  Making conversation, Schmidt asks how does she like America. Nadia replies in halting English and somewhat uncertain tones:

'I like salad bar.  I like Despicable Me. Tash 2.0. I like 'Connect Four'.  Freedom of Speech.  David Fincher.  Sidewalk.  I like 1-800-SLIM.  "Yo' mama" jokes. Strawberry.  Wilma Valma Valma(?). Leon J Panetta. Ice-skating for fun, not to save life.'

It's funny when its trivial, and by starting at trivia, then going to what delights her inner child, then politics, then a specific director bespeaking a certain literacy in film...  As the list progresses you get a sense of her personality, and like any personality revealed there is real pathos in it, and a series of surprises that are the stuff of hilarity. 

It's a very warm show, on the whole, and it makes me laugh like a drain, but somehow the comic edge of immaturity it rides makes me think of liking it as immaturity in myself.

(What's weird is that you can get a PG rating on a show where Nadia announces that she's going to sex Schmidt in the face, and puts him in hospital with a broken penis. I guess its all talk. Still, I am often surprised.)