I laughed out loud at Michael’s first torture question - “Unless you’d rather sit out here?”

I’m only consoling myself with thoughts of Keeping It, and Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman once again coupled up and making crafting puns.  It’s not The Good Place, but it’ll work in a pinch. 

I did laugh, but agree with absolutely everything else you wrote.

I find multiple moments to be genuinely hilarious each episode. It may be slightly less “funny” than it was in, say, the first season, but not by much, and each episode still qualifies as funny nonetheless.

Spoiler: It’s some Islamophobic bullshit.

Yeah.  Mostly people just pick on him to make themselves feel better.  It’s the classic “easier to tear down the other guy than build yourself up” situation.

I’d make up some sort of joke about getting on the George Soros payroll, but I’m afraid that mocking idiots who believe in those sorts of conspiracy theories would somehow only make them stronger, as it seems to do with the flat earthers, so I’ll save my sarcasm for targets with the intelligence to actually comprehend…

I think one is proportionally bigger than the other

Exactly! I had to make my brain understand that as soon as I’m cognitive of what I’ve done, to STOP. NOW. WALK AWAY.

Relapse. 

I can’t deny his popularity with the all-caps crowd.

*Edgy* comedy ages worse than anything. Because the whole point is to be right on the line, and that lines moves over time. So a decade later, your super edgy set is either an accepted mainstream view or wildly offensive and tasteless.

Also, a lot of good things genuinely can’t be made today, and they’ll say the same thing in 40 years about stuff that’s being made today. That doesn’t make older work better or worse than newer work, it’s just the nature of time and change. Nobody wants a stagnant culture, which means accepting that certain works…

I would indeed appreciate it if racist bumblefucks were just open about their racist bumblefuckery rather than try to hide behind sham apologies. They would be far from my heroes though.

The sitcom had Nasim Pedrad as well. Strange they couldn’t make it work. 

^ This. 

This is one of the most personal things I’ve read on the A.V. Club. As a person who often times has feared cars coming up the driveway, I feel this. Now I want to read that book!

If you’re going to include a “chosen one” prophecy at least have it be comprehensible or provide some narrative payoff. How did learning that Anakin was Space Jesus in the pequels add anything to our understanding of the character's motivations or actions later on?

It is weird that in my lifetime nerds have gone though this whole tragic arc in the cultural zeitgeist, from picked-on underdogs, to powerful tech gurus and tastemakers, to amoral, sniveling Nazis, incels, and proud boys.