In further proof that 30 Rock contains almost infinite meanings, Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon has taken my debate with Josh over race and and the show, and taken it in a new, and typically perceptive, direction, discussing the show's portrayal of mental illness. I wanted to discuss something Amanda mentions in passing:
“30 Rock” also leans heavily on neurosis, since nearly everyone on the show is neurotic, at least amongst the main characters. (Probably the only ones who aren’t are Kenneth, Grizz, and Dot Com.)Almost immediately after I finished my original post responding to Josh, I regretted not writing about Grizz and Dot Com because they're such terrific characters. I think the actors who play the characters have benefitted from having small roles: they almost never have to utter a line that isn't very precise and funny, and Grizz Chapman (Grizz) and Kevin Brown(Dot Com) have carefully built up their characters to take full advantage of their bit-part status. As Tracy's wingmen in life, Grizz and Dot Com are more aware than any other characters on the show about how celebrity works and how absurd it is, whether they're secretly losing to Tracy at Halo, helping him dunk a basketball, rescuing him from a crazed crowd, finding a way to make a Nigerian email scheme work out to Tracy's advantage, acting in his trailer for a Thomas Jefferson movie, BlueTooth firmly in ear, attempting to convince Tracy that the Republican Party has lost its way, or pretending to be Little Leaguers with patently fake Dominican birth certificates to salvage Jack and Tracy's dreadful baseball team. Like Liz, they understand that the maintenance of celebrity is an industry, but they're essentially unruffled by that fact. They're pragmatists. Rather than resenting Tracy's absurd behavior, like Liz frequently does they understand that without it, they wouldn't have salaries that let them buy iPhones.
And while it's certainly not the most revolutionary bit of humor on the show, 30 Rock consistently suggests that these huge African-American guys are total sweeties. Liz makes them both cry at Kenneth's party. They're both hugely fond of Kenneth, who has tickets to Spamalot and goes to speed dating with them. Dot Com is fairly unsuccessful romantically. They're in therapy to deal with Tracy's total lack of boundaries, something we find out when we see them getting ready to go ice skating. They're gossips who want to be popular with the more minor cast members on TGS. Some of the completeness of Chapman and Brown's performances probably comes from the fact that they're real people:
But they're also the closest thing to average, sane people that exist anywhere in the slightly surreal 30 Rock universe, the closest thing the audience has to a proxy on the show. In the dark, sharp humor of the show, Grizz and Dot Com are a consistent force of niceness.