So everybody in a focus group always looks the same, like Price Is Right contestants from a time machine, and that's what's going on here, because it's not an actual Learning Annex class, it's a stunt, and what you get for things like this is the unemployed, the crazy, and the deeply unappealing. They all talk about stuff they want, and it's mostly run-of-the-mill, and Randal explains to us how you "stand out when you're passionate," whether it's in "a reserved way," like Randal, or "sincere," like Adam, or "boisterous," like...all the boisterous people are gone. Clay's kind of boisterous, sometimes, but that's more in service of something else entirely. Point being, "everybody stood out in their own way" during the seminar, and then afterwards Randal walks the group through the follow-up, and us through the rest of the episode: "I'd rather speak confidently about something safe than risk the opportunity to look ignorant about something with zest or zip." Like...sex? Racial tensions? Asses, asses, asses?
To underscore this salient and almost prescient point, we cut to a weird montage of -- is it things that Trump thinks are sexy? That must be it, because all the women have no heads and it's all juvenile, little-boy, waist-level Freudian shit: somebody's legs and ass, somebody's taut tummy, some more ass, kissing, the Essex Street sign with the first two letters obscured. I had a roommate in college -- worst roommate ever -- and he kept a drawer full of nudist magazines from the '70s, and the point is not how I know that, but that the guy was a total Markus, and I remember when we saw the magazines I was enraged because -- this suffices as porn? Fat families with tiny genitalia sitting around on '70s furniture? Even your porn is sad? I'm not sure what made me think of that, and it was kind of a Josh thing to do at the time, and to bring up now, but God it still makes me mad. Sorry. Legs, tummies, asses, mommy, Sex Street.









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