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Who Else Loves the GLEE Cheerleaders?

The cheerleader non-sequiturs sound like they were transcribed from the consciousness of a very weird person

So I was discussing Glee with someone, and got into a minor difference of opinion over those cheerleader characters. My conversationalist (if that’s the word I want, and it isn’t) thought Brittany and Santana are weak links, while last night’s episode confirmed them as my favourite part of the show.

This despite the fact that I’m not a huge fan of “dumb” characters. But Brittany’s not “dumb” in the sense of just being not very smart. She’s dumb in the sense of being completely insane — every word that comes out of her mouth implies that she is kind of psychotic in a chirpy way. It’s like instead of being stupid in our world, she’s living in another world where she is the smartest person alive. And the lines she gets are kind of like Ralph Wiggum lines from the golden age of The Simpsons, except aged up a few years:

Dolphins are just gay sharks.

Sometimes I forget my middle name.

She’s the one they made me talk to when they found out I was keeping that bird in my locker.

“‘Ballad.’ Who knows what this word means?”
“It’s a male duck.”

I find recipes confusing.

Sue is funny, but you kind of know what she’s going to say in a given situation, and like most of the characters on Glee, she talks in what Jeremy Mongeau compared to Futurama-speak — dialogue that is very arch and “writerly” and doesn’t sound like human beings communicating. The cheerleader non-sequiturs, on the other hand, sound like they weren’t so much written as transcribed from the consciousness of a very weird person. And that makes Brittany, strangely enough, more of a plausible human being than some of the other characters. Anyway, I definitely think Heather Morris is one of the best TV airheads since the days when Michele Matheson was by far the best thing about Mr. Belvedere.

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