The Ted Lasso "Rick Roll" Scene Is Some Of The Best Comedic Writing I've Ever Seen On TV

First, a quick point about spoilers surrounding a tv show that releases weekly: they're not real. You straight up cannot spoil something that is released on a known schedule. I waited until Wednesday - five days after release - to write about this scene. If you haven't watched it yet you don't care enough about this show to complain in the first place. Plus, you clicked this blog. I didn't show up to your home or place of business and force these words into your eyeballs "Clockwork Orange" style. Take some g-d responsibility for once, friendly internet user. 

Since season two of Ted Lasso kicked off I've started seeing some pushback online towards the most wholesome, beloved show currently running. Things like, "It's a comedy that isn't actually that funny." Any time something gets popular you're always going to have people on the other side shitting on it, that's just the world we live in. However, I do think we've entered an era of situational comedy that almost requires a much darker, borderline depressing tone. Looking back, it almost felt inevitable. Comedians and comedy writers have always pointed to depression as one of the key cogs of their inspiration, the melding of the two on screen should have been more obvious. I don't know who to give credit to for really getting the ball rolling in this direction in recent times but my mind keeps going back to BoJack Horseman. A show that was likely sold to you under the guise of, "yeah it's this funny little show about a horse that can talk and Aaron Paul is also in it." Then two seasons later you find yourself contemplating the meaning of life and what we're even doing on this spinning blue rock floating through the abyss for all of eternity. 

Ted Lasso was sold to me, and likely you, as this funny little show about an American football coach trying his hand Premier League soccer. A premise so absurd on its surface that it could only be a comedy. And the first handful of episodes are this mixture of Parks & Rec's wholesomeness blended with Family Guy's machine gun firing of one-liner references. It didn't reinvent the wheel by any measure, but it was delightful. Certainly worse ways to spend a half an hour. By the time you meet Ted's wife and son you see a turn coming on the horizon, but nothing quite like the series of gut-punches they deliver over the final episodes and begin season two with. The opening scene of season two kicks off with a dog being executed in front of a large crowd, they let you know bright and early that shit was not going to be sweet this time around. Death and a therapist have been the two main characters of season two, which is where you start to get complaints of, "Hey man, what the fuck? I was told this was a light-hearted jokey joke show. Make me laugh, tv box." 

And that is precisely why I'm writing this today. The back-and-forth scene of Rebecca venting to her mother bouncing between Ted's therapy breakthrough about his father's suicide turned me into a goddamn puddle. A lump in my throat like I swallowed my own fist. The writers put you through that BEFORE Rebecca is set to eulogize her father. Real sick, twisted shit from the writers of Ted Lasso. And therein lies the brilliance of the eulogy scene.

There's nothing - NOTHING - less funny in 2021 than a Rick Roll. That's perhaps the oldest joke on the internet. Like when the US Army were the only ones with the internet 50 years ago, they were Rick Rolling each other and the song hadn't even come out yet, that's how old this joke is. So the writers were already working with a dud of a joke they knew had been done hundreds of thousands of times before. The level of difficulty to pull off a successful Rick Roll in 2021 is a 10 out of 10. To pull it off at a funeral after, arguably, the most emotional scene in the show's history, breaks the difficulty scale like Batman's back over Bane's knee. I was crying and laughing, not laughing so hard it caused me to cry, I was simultaneously crying and laughing separately and together at once to the point where my body didn't even know how to properly react. This was the comedy writing equivalent of a high-wire act. Because, again, a Rick Roll is so painfully unfunny at this point in our collective society that to even introduce it in a writer's room is enough to get your fired and banned from ever attempting a joke again for as long as you live. To have it be a sing-a-long at a funeral after an intense retelling of infidelity and suicide is so outrageous that I still cannot believe they pulled it off.

The awards and the fanfare are as deserved as they have been and this scene is proof positive of that.