Monkeyshines

30 Rock

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Lady Lola: A- | Grade It Now!

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Monkeyshines

By Lady Lola | Season 3 | Episode 20 | Aired on 04.30.2009

In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description!

When he finds out everyone's been changing his clocks to get him to work on time, Tracy plays the race card, both literally and by sending a gibbon monkey to take his place. Lemon and the whole TGS crew are fed up with Tracy's antics, so she demands he start acting equal to everyone else. Dot-Com and Grizz fear his retaliation, but Tracy actually shows up on time and performs like a total pro. And then! He exploits this newfangled office-wide equality to make a fool of Lemon, putting her up to such humiliating tasks as changing water coolers, smelling writer farts, and hitting up the titty clubs. She sticks it right back to him by making him slave (no pun intended -- equality!) over rewrites while she takes the fellas out to "see some naked daughters and moms!" Both of them have a horrible time of it and decide things should back to the way they were.

Jenna finds much anthropomorphic pleasure with the aforementioned gibbon. She names him "Little Jenna" and dresses him up in a Mariachi costume. Kenneth repeatedly warns Jenna that treating animals like humans is unnatural, but it doesn't really sink in until she dresses him up as a little sailor, and he reaches a breaking point... as you would. Long story short, he tries to mate with her face... as you would.

Jack intends to console her mother on the 35th anniversary of the day his father left her. He shows up for dinner, only to find that she's taken up with a younger man -- four years younger, to be exact. Immediately suspicious, Jack hires a private dick (Buscemi!!!) and finds out that Colleen's cub is married. Jack decides to retroactively stand up for his mother the way he couldn't when his father abandoned her. This does not go over well with Colleen, who knew that her new fella was married -- apparently, Florida is a swinger's paradise, and a man who can drive at night is a real catch. (It's an old person thing.) They have a shouting match that turns into a heart-to-heart, and all seems well... until the next day when Jack watches Some Like It Hot in honor of his parents, who went to see it at the theater during one of their many on-again moments. Only when Lemon mentions that the film was released in 1959 does Jack realize that he was conceived in 1958, smack in the middle of a two-year period when his father was out of the picture. Jack's a bastard, y'all.

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Want more? The full recap starts right below!

TGS rehearsal. Lemon and Pete are irritated that Tracy is nearly three hours late. No one is angrier than Jenna, though, who wasn't even allowed dispensation to leave set for her anger management class. Cue set destruction. Lemon, Pete and Kenneth go over all the ways they tried to ensure Tracy would be on time to rehearsal, including printing up a fake call sheet, telling Grizz to lie to him about the time, and changing all of his clocks from AM to PM. Just as Lemon realizes they may have gone overboard, Tracy storms in demanding to know what time it is. Tracy quite succinctly jumps to his stock conclusion that the crew must be racist because they treat him like a child. A toddler in a tiara, specifically. Lemon tries to talk sense into him, repeating the sage words that "you teach people how to treat you." Tracy, for example, is teaching people to jam a flipper into his mouth. At this, Tracy pulls out the race card -- yes, an actual index card with the words "Race Card" on it. White people sufficiently stunned, he walks away.

Jack's office. Lemon heads in to let him know that Operation: Reset Tracy's Clock has failed. Jonathan interrupts to tell Jack that he has 4:30 dinner and next-morning brunch reservations with his mother Colleen. Lemon offers to take Colleen off Jack's hands so she can torture some restaurant hostesses, but it's no dice. Jack feels like he should be by his mother's side, because today is the 35th anniversary of the day his father walked out on them. Jacks runs down the list of his father's grievous sins and confesses that he deeply regrets not standing up to him. Lemon sympathizes.

Lemon heads downstairs for rehearsal. They've already started the second run-through. "Why the efficiency?" you ask? Tracy has sent a gibbon with a T-shirt that says "Tracy" to take his place. And the monkey is a real pro! Tracy trudges down the stairs, slow-clapping to show that they have just proven his point. Lemon again, futilely, tries to talk sense into him, saying that his antics cost the show money, but he is dogged about the fact that this is a race issue. He says he wants to be treated like everyone else. And so Lemon does. She takes away his insane Tracy perks one at a time and demands he arrive on set tomorrow, on time and with his lines learned. Everyone's all, "Ohhhhh shit!" Tracy says he can do it and that he will have the last laugh. Then they both laugh maniacally for about three hours while they back away from their race-off. Credits.

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