The
Big Bang Theory Season One: Sheldon Speak
The Big Bang Theory has the simplified plotline
of an attractive girl-of-the-world living next door to two highly intelligent,
yet socially awkward, male geeks. While the comic fodder is self-evident
and ripe for parody, the series has the added benefit in the character
of Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons), who takes the phrases “highly
intelligent,” “socially awkward” and “geek”
to new heights. With an ego that matches his IQ, Sheldon often drives
much of the show’s humor, not only through his actions but through
his words as well. Call it “Sheldon-Speak,” a combination
of personal opinion and scientific observation, coupled with wit and
geekness.
“If
influenza was only contagious after symptoms appear it would have died
out thousands of years ago. Somewhere between tool-using and cave-painting,
homo habilis would have figured out to kill the guy with the runny nose.”
“This
sandwich is an unmitigated disaster. I asked for turkey and roast beef
with lettuce and Swiss on whole wheat. (They gave me) turkey and roast
beef with Swiss and lettuce on whole wheat. It’s the right ingredients
but in the wrong order. In a proper sandwich, the cheese is adjacent
to the bread to create a moisture barrier against the lettuce. They
might as well drag this (one) through a car wash.”
Sheldon’s
use of wordplay is exceptional. He once got ill, for instance, when
he was a visiting professor at the Heidelberg Institute in Germany.
As he explains to Penny, “The local cuisine was a little more
sausage-based than I’m used to and the result was an internal
Blitzkrieg with my lower intestine playing the part of Czechoslovakia.”
Other examples
include:
“The
wheel was a great idea. Relativity was a great idea. This is a notion,
and a rather sucky one at that.”
“A
little misunderstanding? Galileo and the pope had a little misunderstanding.”
“You
want me to use my intelligence in a tawdry competition? Would you ask
Picasso to play Pictionary? Would you ask Noah Webster to play Boggle?
Would you ask Jacques Cousteau to play Go Fish?”
“Leonard,
please don’t take this the wrong way, but the day you win a Nobel
Prize is the day I begin my research on the drag flow effect of tassels
on flying carpets.”
Even the
old riposte “I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever you
say bounces off me and sticks to you” comes out differently in
Sheldon-Speak: “Well, I’m polarmarized tree sap and you’re
an inorganic adhesive, so whatever verbal projectile you launch in my
direction is reflected off of me, returns on its original trajectory
and adheres to you.”
One highlight
of The Big Bang Theory is Sheldon’s tendency to apply
“real-world” reasoning to various sci-fi related situations.
For example, when Penny states that her favorite Superman movie
scene is when Christopher Reeves catches a falling Lois Lane, Sheldon
points out that the “scene was rife with scientific inaccuracy,”
and not simply because of the obvious “men can’t fly.”
“Lois
Lane is falling, accelerating at an initial rate of 32 feet per second
per second. Superman swoops down to save her by reaching out two arms
of steel. Miss Lane, who is now traveling at approximately 120 miles
an hour, hits them and is immediately sliced into three equal pieces.”
In another
episode, he questions the casting of attractive Summer Glau in the television
series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. “Assuming
all the good terminators were originally evil terminators created by
Sky Net but then reprogrammed by the future John Connor, why would Sky
Net, an artificial computer intelligence, bother to create a petite,
hot seventeen-year-old killer robot? Artificial intelligences do not
have teen fetishes.”
Other sci-fi
observations include:
“Here’s
the problem with teleportation. Assuming a device could be invented
which would identify the quantum state of matter of an individual in
one location and transport that pattern to a distant location for reassembly,
you would not have transported the individual. You would have destroyed
him in one location and recreated him in another. Personally I would
never use a transporter, because the original Sheldon would have to
be disintegrated in order to create a new Sheldon.”
“I’ve
been thinking about time travel again. It occurs to me that if I ever
did perfect a time machine, I would just go into the past and give it
to myself, thus eliminating the need for me to invent it in the first
place.”
Conventional
sayings and situations are also lost on Sheldon. His response to the
adage “when one door closes another one opens,” for example,
is quite literal: “No it doesn’t. Not unless the two doors
are connected by relays or there are motion sensors involved. Or that
the first door closing creates a change of air pressure that acts upon
the second door.”
When a
fourth player is need for Halo night, roommate Leonard asks if Sheldon
is really going to make friend Howard choose between sex and a video
game. “No, I’m going to ask him to choose between sex and
Halo 3. As far as I know, sex has not been upgraded to include hi-def
graphics and enhanced weapon systems.”
At a Halloween
party at Penny’s apartment, the gang is intimidated by all the
guests they’ve yet to meet, to which Sheldon offers, “Like
Jane Goodall observing the apes, I initially saw their interactions
as confusing and unstructured. But patterns emerged. They have their
own language, if you will. It seems that the newcomer approaches the
existing group with the greeting, ‘How wasted am I,’ which
is met with an approving chorus of ‘dude.’”
Sheldon’s
response when an upset Penny doesn’t want to talk is also taken
literal. “Not surprising. Penny’s emotional responses originate
in the primitive portion of the brain known as the amygdala, while speech
is centered in the much more recently developed neocortex. The former
can easily overpower the latter giving scientific credence to the notion
of being rendered speechless.”
Then there’s
Leonard’s birthday. “The entire institution of gift giving
makes no sense. Let’s say that I go out and I spend $50 on you.
It’s a laborious activity because I have to imagine what you need
whereas you know what you need. And I could simplify things, just give
you the $50 directly and then you could give me $50 on my birthday and
so on until one of us dies leaving the other one old and $50 richer.
And I ask you, is it worth it?”
Despite
his intelligence, geek heritage and non-social behavior, Sheldon still
possesses a keen sense of wit that enables him to fire off some great
on-liners.
When Penny
interrupts Halo night because her sexually-active friend from Nebraska
is in town, Sheldon responds, “Who needs Halo when we can be regaled
with the delightfully folksy tale of the Whore of Omaha?”
Penny’s
exclamation of “holy smokes” in regards to Leonard’s
formula board is met with, “If by ‘holy smokes’ you
mean a derivative restatement of the kind of stuff you could find scribbled
on the wall of any men’s room at MIT, sure.”
Leonard
asks Sheldon why a letter was in the trash and is told, “Well,
there’s always the possibility the trash can spontaneously formed
around the letter, but Achman’s Razor would suggest that someone
threw it out.”
When Leonard
doesn’t know how to tell Penny she has no vocal talent, Sheldon
suggests, “Singing is neither an appropriate vocation nor avocation
for you, and if you disagree I recommend you have a cat scan to look
for a tumor pressing on the cognitive processing centers of your brain.”
Upon hearing
that he has been thrown off the Phsyics Bowl team, Sheldon responds,
“At this point I should inform you that I intend to form my own
team and destroy the molecular bonds that bind your very matter together
and reduce the resulting particulate chaos to tears.”
Leonard’s
crush on next-door neighbor Penny is also often subject to Sheldon’s
wit.
“Well,
at least now you can retrieve the black box from the twisted smoldering
wreckage that was once your fantasy of dating her and analyze the data
so you don’t crash into Geek Mountain again.”
“I
think that you have as much of a chance of having a sexual relationship
with Penny as the Hubble telescope does of discovering (that) at the
center of every black hole is a little man with a flashlight searching
for a circuit breaker.”
When Leonard
finally does gets a date with Penny and wonders what will happen if
he “blows” what may be his only chance with her, Sheldon
offers, “Well, if we accept your premise and also accept the highly
improbable assumption that Penny is the only woman in the world for
you, then we can logically conclude that the result of ‘blowing
it’ would be that you end up a lonely bitter old man with no progeny.
The image of any number of evil lighthouse keepers from Scooby Doo cartoons
come to mind.”
Still,
despite all of Sheldon’s annoying qualities, he does often manage
to say the right thing at the right time. The best example is in the
season finale, when Penny questions whether she should actually go through
with her date with Leonard. Sheldon’s advice is both simple and
longwinded, but accurate nonetheless.
“In
1935, Erwin Schrödinger, in an attempt to explain the Copenhagen
interpretation of quantum physics, proposed an experiment where a cat
is placed in a box with a sealed vial of poison that will break open
at a random time. Now, since no one knows when or if the poison has
been released, until the box is opened, the cat can be thought of as
both alive and dead. Just like Schrödinger’s cat, your potential
relationship with Leonard right now can be thought of as both good and
bad. It is only by opening the box that you’ll find out which
it is.”
The box
that is season one of The Big Bang Theory has indeed been opened,
and thanks to Sheldon-Speak, it can be considered “good.”
Anthony
Letizia (February 8, 2010)
