The following is an essay I wrote a few years ago about how
much I relate to a character on a TV show. That TV show is called Community.
The character is named Abed. I love that TV show.
Bring Me the Head of Abed Nadir...
Just make sure it’s still
attached to the rest of him because I think we could totally hang out.
My buddy Luke is my best friend in the world. I met him when
I was a junior in high school and he was a freshman. Over the last couple
decades we've been classmates, housemates, and co-workers at three different
jobs. We co-created a short-lived micro-press comic book series (three issues
of Captain 9-Ball, circulation: 30). He has tolerated
my pedantry on all subjects nerdy and academic, even those about which I know
less than he does. He sadly shook his head and kept his mouth shut when I got
back together with my first girlfriend (the girlfriend I couldn’t quite break
up with because I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to convince anyone else I was
boyfriend material). He put up with a few full-blown tantrums over his
tendencies to leave the living room looking as though guys in their early twenties
lived in our house (we were, in fact, in our early twenties). He got internet ordained to perform the ceremony for my first marriage, nursed me through the divorce, encouraged me when it was time to try dating again, and gave me the best damn Best Man's toast when it counted.
He’s
also the guy who introduced me to Abed.
I was about a month or two into my first serious binge into
research on Asperger’s and autism. What brought the research on was a panic attack
relating to the facts that, 1) I was having a lot of trouble communicating with
the instructor of an online class I was taking, and, 2) I didn’t have a clue
what I was supposed to be doing as I was meeting with potential cooperating
teachers for my student teaching internship. In the throes of confusion, I
happened to catch a radio interview of writer Tim Page, who was diagnosed with
Asperger’s in adulthood. What I heard Page describing was just too similar to
what I had been going through my entire life. I took a break from my classes
and plunged into the available reading material.
I started soft with Wikipedia and a Facebook meme of a
widely used autism diagnostic tool. Then I moved on to a couple titles I picked
up at a local used bookstore, titles I had known about for years, but was
afraid to look into. With good reason, it turned out.
My reading binge confirmed that Asperger’s was me. No doubt
about it. I am a person who has these issues: a tendency to monologue without
regard for my audience’s lost interest; a fascination with minutiae; motor
clumsiness; difficulty reading the intentions of others; and, yeah, a lousy
track record for romantic relationships.
Luke was my best friend from forever. My best friend even
though sometimes months would pass without us actually speaking. He’s the first
person I talked to outside of my family about my Asperger’s suspicions. He knew
a bit about the topic, and enough about me, to accept what I was saying as
truth. He also knew that I was still the same person I always was, just with a
handy new set of nouns adjectives at my disposal. Nouns and adjectives that
described the stuff I’d been doing for as long as he’d known me.
A couple weeks after I’d shared with him my self-diagnosis,
he said to me “You should watch Community.
There’s this character, who, well, they only say the word once, but, yeah, he’s
got Asperger’s. You’d like him.”
He was talking about Abed Nadir. Now, at this point, I could
monologue at length about the NBC sitcom Community,
giving you airdates, character and actor bios, and my own take about why former
show-runner Dan Harmon was fired and what that means for the show. But, I know
enough about myself now to know that this isn’t necessary. If you’re reading
these words, you have internet access. You can open your own tabs for
Wikipedia, YouTube, and IMDB. Go ahead and do some background research if you
want. I’ll be right here, silently scrolling my monologue through my head, till
you get back.
(Time passes… or not)
Right, so now we all know that Abed is a quirky member of a
quirky community college study group who makes meaning out of the world by
filtering real life experiences through his encyclopedic film and television
knowledge. One of his main motivations for joining the group, besides a
universal desire for friendship, is that the setup reminds him of the John
Hughes movie Breakfast Club. It’s quickly revealed, however, that study
group instigator Jeff Winger is neither a certified Spanish tutor, nor actually
interested in being part of a study group. He just wants to get into the blonde
girl’s (Britta Perry’s) pants.
Abed expresses his disappointment at this revelation by
telling Winger, “I thought you were like Bill Murray in any of his films, but
you’re more like Michael Douglas in any of his films.”
To which Winger replies, “Yeah? Well you have Asperger’s.”
Rather than leading into a stilted and forced explanation of
a trendy new movie of the week subject, the study group descends into the
lowest form of comedy: underwear area jokes. (And thank god for that, because
we already have Parenthood being
preachy on the subject, and that’s enough.)
The pilot episode of Community is the only time the syndrome is mentioned in
the series. And it’s the only time it needs to be mentioned. This is not a
television show about how everyone copes with their friend who’s kind of
autistic. It’s a television show about seven disparate individuals, each with
their own strengths and flaws. And everybody’s flaws get equal time. Kind of
like Mtv’s the Real World, only better.
Abed shows early on, that he knows his own strengths and
flaws all too well. We see this in the first season episode, "Physical Education," when the group tries to
help Abed get a girlfriend. It’s help he hasn’t asked for. It’s intrusive,
disrespectful, and, as Winger reminds the group, doomed because any plan to
superficially change someone to fit your own idealized version of what a person
should be is doomed.
But Abed is game He goes to his strength and accepts this
complicated social ploy by framing it as a movie set-up. “You’re going to Can’t Buy Me Love me,” he says, referencing the one 1980s high
school movie not set in McHenry, Illinois. (In fact, it was set in Tucson,
Arizona at the same high school I attended. Not when I was there, but when one
of my older cousins was. However, my enrollment did overlap with that of Joe
Torres, a cast-member of the very first Nickelodeon produced sit-com, Hey Dude. But,
that’s all beside the point. Note the parentheses.)
The point is Abed knows who he is. When the group tells him
the best way to approach a girl is to just ‘be yourself,’ Abed does so without
missing a beat. He stares off into the middle distance and remains in his seat
at the group’s table. Group member Troy Barnes, who will go on to become Abed’s
best friend, roommate, and blanket fort rival, realizes a clarifying prompt is
necessary.
“Go be yourself by Jenny,” Troy says.
“But I wouldn’t go over there.”
“How do you know that?”
“A lifetime of observation,
mostly.”
Abed knows who he is and he knows that approaching girls is
not something that he does. The group feels like they need to push him to help
him grow socially. They ask if he can imagine a version of himself that would
be near Jenny. Very quickly he decides that the version of himself that would
do this would also be a vampire. He apes the posture and facial expressions,
not of dreamy Edward Cullen, but of the pestilential titular character from Nosferatu.
(This entire exchange echoes scenes from my own life when
friends would learn that I was still a virgin at 24. They kind of marveled that
it wasn’t for religious reasons, gave me some tips, and took me out to clubs
with them. Mostly, I learned how to drink gin and tonics. I might have been
able to make the vampire thing work, though. This was the late 90s and Buffy the Vampire Slayer was picking up steam.)
Abed plays along with the group’s efforts to get him a
girlfriend, even though he knows it’s more important to them than it is to him.
He’s following the arc of what he recognizes as a typical sit-com plot
development and is happy to do so. It’s comfortable for him (just how, in the
late 90s it was comfortable for me to soothe my own uncertainty in social
situations by repeating the mantra ‘It’s just a TV show’). The inevitable
sit-com plot reversal comes, revealing the dramatic irony that Jenny already
has a boyfriend who happens to look like a white version of Abed.
Abed takes it
in stride. The rest of the group, however, is worried they may have destroyed
Abed’s self-esteem.
Abed reassures them that he has “self-esteem falling out of
(his)butt.” He also reveals some things he knows about himself and how other
people relate to him.
“Everybody wants to help me,” he says. “But, usually, when
they find out they can’t, they get frustrated and stop talking to me.”
Although Abed knows he is socially impaired, he is, like all
humans, a social creature. He wants to be part of the study group. He does not
want this group to get fed up with him and shove him in a metaphorical locker
(as seen in season three episode “Virtual Systems Analysis”). He tells them
directly, and unashamedly, “when you know who you are and what you like about
yourself, changing for other people isn’t such a big deal.” This causes the
group to reevaluate their own motives and gain a new admiration for who Abed is.
But, despite what Abed says, changing for other people is a
big deal.
In between my first girlfriend and my second, there was
someone who almost was. I was using my mantra hourly, and sometimes every
minute.
(
It’s just a TV show, I’d tell myself. Keep following the
arc until the commercial break. Collect yourself, and get back in there for the
big reversal and the resolution. Thirty minutes. It’s just a TV show. You can
do it.)
I told this almost-girlfriend about my mantra, because I didn’t
really have any kind of filter on my thoughts then. No real conscious grasp on
which of my thoughts would be good to share and which would just be
off-putting. She thought my mantra, my social crutch, was absolutely
ridiculous. “But life isn’t a TV show,” she said.
And no, it isn’t. It’s this terrifying thing where you never
really know what’s going to happen next and people don’t make asides or
soliloquies and you can’t hear their pre-recorded inner monologues, so you
never know what they’re thinking. TV shows are much more comfortable. Reliable.
You know that, no matter what happens, at the end of thirty minutes things will
return to a sort of stasis in which the characters and their relationships come
to the same equilibrium that existed before the beginning of the episode.
Unless it’s a two-parter. Then you have to wait a week.
With the almost-girlfriend things started to get romantic
one night until the point where I asked, “what do we do next?” and she started
laughing. It wasn’t a mean-spirited laugh, but it was pretty much the end of
it. Reversal. Equilibrium. Role end credits. And that ending was actually very
comfortable. That evening’s episode had arrived at a proper sit-com ending. It
was good. It worked. The at-home audience was satisfied with their
entertainment (and, in those days, I often truly did determine an interpersonal
exchange’s success by what I judged would be its entertainment value for the
invisible at-home audience). I was left feeling that, just maybe, I could
handle something more. Maybe a mid-season cliffhanger or a three episode story
arc with a new recurring character. I was growing, just oddly.
Soon after this, through improbable circumstances, I met the
official second girlfriend, the one I ended up marrying. This time I dared not
tip my hand or share my mantra with her. I did my best to follow the role of awkward,
quirky boyfriend according to the rules of sit-com plot development. And then,
one thing led to another, and a child was conceived.
Life really wasn’t just a TV show.
At this point, my mantra had run its course. I couldn’t take
it seriously anymore, and I had to look for strength elsewhere. Luckily, I
found strength in my stubborn determination to be a version of me that would
also be a really great dad. And, it turns out, that version's really not a
version at all. I can do that. Other things I'm not so good at. Like shopping
for groceries without looping through every aisle several times before
remembering three of the five things I absolutely need to get while I'm there.
Or making a good impression at job interviews.
Years passed, I learned some stuff, figured out some
interesting and sometimes absolutely terrifying things about myself (facing
that you have Asperger's can be absolutely terrifying), and, in 2009 my best
friend, Luke, insisted I meet Abed. I’m glad he did.
I like to follow the exploits of Abed Nadir, because, of all
television characters, he’s the one I know I could hang out with. He loves TV
and movies with a depth and passion I can appreciate. He says the kind of
things that I might say. He reacts to the people around him in ways I might
react. He does things that I would do, if only I had self-esteem falling out my
butt (and sometimes I do).
I also have a new appreciation of my buddy Luke. He’s known
who I am for years. He’s seen all my autistic quirks and all the different
versions of me I’ve attempted to be. And he knows that all of them do have a
genuine piece of me in them. He’s even seen the worst of the wannabe bar trash
asshole version that neither one of us really liked. But he’s been my friend
through all of it, long past the point where he should have gotten fed up and
shoved me in a locker. I watch how Abed’s friends both value him, and are
frustrated by him. How, even after he’s been his most obnoxious, they still
love him. I get a better idea of how Luke sees me, and why he’s always been my
friend.
I guess that makes Luke kind of like my Troy, only better,
because we can hang out in real life and not just on a TV show. Also, he helps
me remember that this is not the darkest timeline, which is something
we all need to be reminded of from time to time.
