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Who Are You Calling a Dummy?

The second and third-most-popular CBS comedies had a little too much of, respectively: Penny/Leonard (can’t they just leave him at the North Pole and give Penny and Sheldon more time for hilarious bits like the door-knocking routine?) and Ted (not a bad episode, but why spend a whole half-hour on a relationship nobody cared about and a creepy, self-loving lead character who pities himself because true love hasn’t come to him by the time he’s 30?).

But while I left halfway through the world’s most popular comedy, Two and a Half Men — I actually don’t dislike it, it just doesn’t compel me to watch it all the way through — I’m now left wondering: since part of the episode involved Jon Cryer getting a ventriloquist’s dummy, was there a scene in the second half where someone talks to the dummy as if it’s real? Because quite apart from shows like Soap that built four years’ worth of stories on that gag, it’s tradition that any episode involving a ventriloquist’s dummy must involve a scene where a character acts like the dummy is real. Now I may have to check the West Coast feed of TaaHM just to see which character followed tradition and tried to kill the dummy.

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