Reno 911! heads into its midseason break in standard form this week, with an episode that typified most of this season thus far: pretty funny, mostly disconnected, and with a generous helping of sexual deviance, ball, vibrator, and racial jokes.
The racial theme was especially pronounced this week, as the episode’s main storyline concerned Garcia and Junior driving down to Yuma, Ariz., to build an eighth-of-a-mile-long fence segment along the U.S.-Mexican border–”It’s like Burning Man for right-wing rednecks,” says Dangle. The first scene after the opening bit–the third and apparently final attempt to jump “the goddamn shark”–is in the briefing room, where Garcia wears a T-shirt proclaiming “SPEAK ENGLISH,” with Junior rocking an American-flag hat and a T-shirt of a brick wall that says “If you build it, they can’t come.”
The obvious joke here is that Garcia is of some kind of Hispanic descent–his name is Garcia–but the show never points out the disconnect. I can’t decide if that was a missed opportunity or well-executed restraint. I have to imagine, though, that the ensemble–rounded out this week by the reliably funny A.D. Miles as a one of the fence-builders–could have done something good with that. They did have some fun with Garcia, though, with the ongoing gag that he’s a terrible shot. He manages to miss a gasoline canister at close range with what looks like an automatic weapon. (Gun freaks out there, help us out with the ID.)
If this season has proven anything, it’s that Kerri Kenney is Reno 911!‘s not-so-secret weapon, and this episode gave her a lot of space to deliver plenty of disturbingly funny lines. The best segment had her and Dangle on a city bus in an undercover sting operation for groping creeps. Dressed as the world’s least convincing school girl, Wiegel pranced around the bus delivering lines like “I got my first pubic hair this week!” and making jackoff motions to potential marks. Dangle, dressed as construction worker who somehow looked more gay than the one from the Village People, observed from nearby, scanning passengers for erections or other signs of an impending grope. Needless to say, their operation fails miserably and ends with a young woman telling Wiegel, “You’re an undercover cop, right? That construction worker has been showing me his balls since Second Avenue.”
But Kenney had some funny moments elsewhere in the episode, too, particularly when she paraphrased Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech by saying, in a bad approximation of a black person’s voice, “I gots a dream!” Or when she thinks the new German “nightstick” they ordered–see below–is voice activated, so she yells, “Hitler!” She showed her typical disconnect from reality in a scene where she and Williams address the camera in the office. Wiegel mentions that she misses having Garcia around, because he clocks in for her early so she can nap. She says all this in a weird voice while barely moving her lips, thinking that will somehow prevent Williams from hearing it. Oh the shenanigans she could have on a Reno spinoff. Title: That’s Our Trudy!