I'm curious about why meta stuff gets me so excited. Let's dig into a scene from Community which might be my favorite scene of the whole show.

There's a lot going on here. The core of the scene is a series of short clips of Jeff and Annie interacting: looks, glances, touches. But the wider scene expertly threads a tricky needle. Just before the short clips, Annie frames the moments as evidence of a romantic spark between her and Jeff, while Jeff is skeptical. These two perspectives line up with groups within the show's fan base: those who ship Jeff and Annie, and those who don't (or don't care).

The genius of the scene is that it satisfies both groups! The humor inherent in the clips - a lovey-dovey song playing over moments ranging from innocuous to ridiculous - validates the non-shippers' view. Simultaneously, the clips themselves, pairing Jeff and Annie together in hilarious moments, along with the show itself giving its full attention to the idea of Jeff and Annie's romance, validate the shippers' view. This makes the scene a sort of Rorschach test. Each viewer sees what they want to see.

The scene immediately pokes fun at its own argument by following up the Jeff/Annie clips with clips of Pierce and Abed, the pair of characters with the least romantic potential. These clips have the same context - the same love song playing over silly moments of them interacting. It's another point in the non-shippers' favor: squint hard enough and one can argue that any two characters belong together.

The scene is couched within an episode that subverts the concept of the clip show by showing clips that hadn't appeared in any previous episode.

What puts this scene over the top for me personally is the fact that it's paying tribute to a Jeff/Annie shipping video that uses just about every clip with Jeff and Annie that had aired as of its upload date early in Community's first season. And the show's creator paid out of pocket for the rights to use the exact same song [citation needed]. Fanon was immortalized in canon. Amazing.

To recap, the layers of meta in this 3-minute clip are that it:
- Simultaneously pleases shippers and non-shippers
- While making fun of the entire category of shipping videos
- And paying tribute to a specific fan-made Community shipping video
- All within an episode that is a subversion of clip shows

So why does that get me so excited? I think it's the fact that the scene does those things simultaneously. It spins four plates and doesn't drop any of them. It's more interesting to me than other sorts of humor in the same way that a triple entendre is more interesting than a double entendre. There are more nodes, so there are more connections.

This has me thinking that a generalist is more interesting than a specialist. To me at least.