Season 4, Episode 3, “The I.Q. Man”

Pre-Credits Gag:  Michelle reads Comet a bedtime story, then she tries to hide him in her bed but Danny finds him when he tucks her in.

Stephanie comes down with a cold so Michelle tries to help her out by putting some of the fried chicken that’s always in the refrigerator into the dog’s water bowl.  I just realized how ironic it is that the whitest family on planet Earth would have an endless supply of fried chicken in their refrigerator, but I’ll take it as one of the many hidden clues that this show is actually anti-white propaganda (if you look real close, you can see that Louis Farrakhan has an executive producer credit at the end).  I also like that we finally get to see the bucket that the chicken comes in, so if any of you were wondering where all that delicious fried chicken comes from, they get it at this great place in San Francisco called, “Chicken.”

Let’s hear it for production design!

The uncles get ready to go do a big pitch to a client but then they realize that they have to stay home because Stephanie is sick and THE FUCKING WATERS PART FOR ALL OF THE GIRLS IN THE FULL HOUSE!!!  Kimmie Gibbler comes over to meet DJ for school and the two of them invite the uncles to come in and present at career day next week.  The uncles  accept and then Danny tries to horn in on career day but the kids tell him that one kid got his aunt, Connie Chung, to come in and so by contrast Danny would be totally lame.  That’s what you get for sucking so hard at your job, Danny Tanner.  I never saw Connie Chung stammering and flailing around on her show.  Not once.

The uncles hold their presentation in Joey’s gross basement bedroom because Stephanie’s sick and also they probably tore down the set of their office from last season.  After the client tries to put the moves on Jesse, Joey begins their cologne presentation but it is immediately interrupted by Stephanie.

I know that she always interrupts everyone every time she enters a room, but this time she actually walks out right into the middle of the uncles presentation and declares that, “the sneeze juice is backing up into my ears!”  God Damn, wouldn’t this be the one time that someone reacted appropriately to her endless interrupting?  Can’t Joey just this once explain that he only needs like 5 fucking minutes to do his job before he’ll go back to doing whatever she wants all the time, so can she please not walk out right into the middle of his presentation and make a big announcement about what a disgusting pain in the ass she is?  But, no, of course not, he just stops what he’s doing and gives her some nose drops while the client sits there like, “what the fuck?”

So anyway, the uncles finally get to their presentation, which puts Jesse in the role of “the I.Q. man,” who’s like a fancy guy that wears the cologne that they’re trying to sell.  They go through a long routine and we find the uncles in one of their most homoerotic moments ever when Joey plays the love interest.  There’s a long take where John Stamos genuinely starts laughing and they left it in, I guess to show us just once that someone on this show had actual blood in their veins.

After the pitch is done, the client looks at them with disapproval and says,  “that made absolutely no sense…” and then, wait for it… wait for it… “it’s perfect…”  Oh!  I did not see that coming!  And I always react to stuff by emoting the opposite evaluation and saying something misleading before I unveil that my actual reaction is in stark contrast to my initial response, too.

Once the client agrees to buy the ad, they slip in real quick that Joey will be the director and then the client insists that Jesse play the I.Q. man in the actual commercial.  Jesse says he doesn’t want to do it so Joey tries to talk him into it before their boss, Mr. Malatesta, tells them they he’d better do it or he’ll fuck their shit up, at which point Jesse agrees.

DJ and Kimmie Gibbler tell Danny that it turned out that the kid who said his aunt was Connie Chung was a big fuckin’ liar and then Danny gets all smug and antagonistic about them crawling back to him.  Rebecca Donaldson quickly interjects by saying that she’ll be their career day guest so then the girls tell Danny to go fuck himself and for a second it seems like something actually kind of funny will happen on Full House, but then the girls ask Danny to come after all.  See, right there’s a big problem with Full House that I don’t think I’ve gotten to before:  no one ever gets their comeuppance.  Everything’s always so fuckin’ hunky dory at the end of every storyline, so we never get to see anyone eat shit.  Can’t we just once experience the cathartic joy of seeing Danny get dissed by his kid without there being some emotionally accommodating resolution at the end?  Why can’t this show ever just let me laugh at anyone’s pain?  This was just one lame, incidental subplot… most people wouldn’t even have noticed.  Well, shit.

So, just to be clear here:  Joey is the director of the I.Q. Man ad.  For reals?  I thought that these guys wrote radio ads.  I had no idea that Joey was also directing commercials.  Anyway, Jesse shows up to the set and gets all pissed because there have been a bunch of weird changes made to the commercial.  The client has decided to compound her sexual harassment campaign on Jesse by turning the commercial into her own personal whacking material, and so Jesse is being forced to perform his lines in a little towel.

As the shoot proceeds, Jesse gets more and more uncomfortable and talks to Joey about how he feels exploited.  Joey, being unable to comprehend normal human emotions, continues with the shoot unaffected.  The shoot proceeds to go as cartoonishly poorly as all the other film recordings we’ve ever seen on this show (which got me wondering why this show has such a blatant disrespect for television production until i realized that the answer was self-evident), complete with the client chasing Jesse around with scissors while she tries to cut his towel shorter.

Jesse eventually tell Mr. Malatesta that he’s not going to do the commercial and then when Mr. Malatesta gives him an ultimatum, Jesse quits.  He then says a bunch of stuff about partnership and stuff to Joey, who decides that he was being a butthole and quits, too.  And that’s it, the uncles have quit their jobs as jingle writers/directors/whatever for Mr. Malatesta.  It seemed pretty abrupt and unnecessary, especially since Mr. Malatesta always let them work from home and put up with them fucking everything up all the time, but considering that I had assumed that the uncles would just start new jobs without any mention of this career at all, I’m actually kind of impressed with the content of this episode.  I’m always talking about how this shows creators don’t give a shit about continuity and character arcs, but in this case I have to admit that they gave a little shit.

For some reason DJ is the MC of career day, so she excuses the previous presenter and then introduces Danny and Rebecca Donaldson.  Wouldn’t it be an adult’s job to do that stuff?  I’m not even sure if there’s a teacher in this classroom…  Anyway, Danny and Rebecca Donaldson’s presentation is totally fucking shitty so Kathy Santoni and the other kid’s just start asking them a bunch of questions about Connie Chung.  The total dud of a presentation is cut graciously short by the arrival of the uncles, but since they’ve just quit their careers, they don’t give much of a presentation, either.  Kimmie Gibbler deduces that they’ve lost their jobs and then the bell rings, leaving only the members of the full house alone in the classroom to talk about what happened.  Seriously, where’s the teacher?

The family all talk about the uncles quitting their jobs and Danny suggests that they go into business for themselves.  DJ passes on her freshly-learned knowledge about small business loans and the uncles decide to give it a shot.

Jesse and Joey are rejected for their small-business loan on the grounds that they are retarded.  Why do these guys even need a loan, anyway?  They just quit their lucrative advertising careers and they don’t even pay rent or anything.  What did they spend all their money on, balloon animals?  As if two well-off white men applying for a loan so they can continue to make way too much money doing something they’re terrible at wasn’t offensive enough, the whitest, corniest man of all resolves their trivial financial worries by handing them a big gigantic check that they didn’t earn.

Kill the white man.