In Memorium: my Gilligan story [View All]

[yurbud]

As an undergraduate, I had an upper division seminar in comedy in literature, that required one paper at the end of the semester on a topic of our choice. The only restriction the professor put on the assignment was we could NOT try to be funny ourselves.

I took that as a challenge and wrote a paper on the appeal of Gilligan's Island, trying my best not to make it openly funny, talking about archetypes and all the usual English hoo-ha.

Since it was a small class, we had to do a presentation on my papers and have a discussion. The class loved my paper,and they would have gone on talking about it all day if my professor hadn't interrupted and said, "You are full of shit. You were supposed to write about literature, not a third rate sitcom, and besides, I've never seen the show." (he had been living in Italy the years it was on the air.) The whole class turned on him and argued for how significant Gilligan was in pop culture and how we all bonded over it the way past generations would over religious or folk stories. He said he wasn't buying it.

I ended up getting a B in the class, but it was worth it for the story.