The Sting is one of my favorite movies of all times. My brother and I have watched and bonded over it several times since we first saw it about ten years ago. It’s probably the best exemplar of the spirit of American filmmaking in the 1970s; it’s not the decade’s finest film, but it’s perfectly emblematic of an era where a caper movie could win Best Picture at the Oscars. To put it in perspective, that’s like Ocean’s 11 walking away with the trophy. So when I realized that “Grifting 101” was going to be Community‘s episode-length tribute to The Sting, I knew right away I’d be in the tank for this episode. And don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed “Grifting,” but I was surprised at how slight it felt. Of this entire season, this seemed like the best episode to really go over the top, so I was surprised at the show’s restraint.

The setup is pretty familiar to anyone who’s seen Community or any grifting movie (except 1990’s The Grifters, which features, as Abed points out, John Cusack, Angelica Huston, and almost no grifting). The study group takes a class that isn’t what they thought it would be, and they have to deal with the ramifications thereof. Only this time, it’s exactly what they thought it would be, because Jeff has already warned them several times that taking a class called “Basic Grifting” is tantamount to volunteering to be grifted (why there’s a disconnect between the title of the class and the title of the episode, I’m sure I don’t know). Jeff ends up being office mates with the class’s professor, Roger DeSalvo (The IT Crowd‘s Matt Berry), which he’s on board with until he realizes that DeSalvo is an asshole.

You know this setup: the group sets out to grift the grifter (I think this episode must have started out as a writer’s room contest to see how many times the word “grift” could be used in 28 minutes). The group tries and fails to employ the “African telegram” – called the “Jim Belushi” of grifts by DeSalvo – and are quickly found out. Any grifting story worth its salt will keep things from its characters and from its audience, and the joke here is that there’s nothing being kept from us: Jeff is just bad at grifting. It gets to the point that they all sit down to watch The Sting as an instructional video.

It’s here that “Grifting 101” starts to lose its bearings a little bit. The episode never completely goes off the rails, but I found myself wondering why Community – and Greendale – didn’t go bigger. Look at last week’s “Intro to Recycled Cinema” – this is not a show, or a group of students, that is unwilling to blow out its budget. So when Abed points out that in The Sting they hire “1,000 people to work together in secrecy” and in Matchstick Men they build a hospital (“So much construction!” Annie moans), it seems like the setup for a huge gag that never arrives.

I’m not going to detail every facet of the group’s grift, but I do want to point out that season six is cementing Britta’s MVP status. She’s been unfairly boxed into the role of airhead over the last few seasons, but with Chang firmly a member of the group, that role is taken care of, and Britta can once again be the smart, tough, slightly goofy anarchist we (and Jeff) fell in love with in season one (for instance, it was great to hear Britta shout her old refrain “I lived in New York!“). This is the second time this season that Britta has shown an aptitude for duplicity (after “Advanced Safety Features”), but her remaining at Greendale is a nice subtle indicator of her basic goodness.

Ultimately “Grifting” had a stronger middle than it did an ending, which just kind of dragged on a bit. In The Sting, when Doyle Lonnegan gets grifted he loses half a million dollars (god I love that movie). When DeSalvo gets grifted, the 50 grand just (presumably) goes back to Greendale. Nothing really changed, and the status quo was preserved (one assumes that Britta’s expulsion is impermanent). So overall, it was an enjoyable episode, but I wish it had stuck the landing better.

A Few Thoughts

• Great cold open, with dialogue flying back and forth over the study room table. Loved Abed and Annie’s enthusiastic “I’ll get it from your parents!”

• Nice Donald Glover reference: at one point DeSalvo says “Because the Internet,” which is the title of Childish Gambino’s last album

• DeSalvo mentions a grift called the “reverse Jim Gaffigan,” which I really want to know more about

About Author

T. Dawson

Trevor Dawson is the Executive Editor of GAMbIT Magazine. He is a musician, an award-winning short story author, and a big fan of scotch. His work has appeared in Statement, Levels Below, Robbed of Sleep vols. 3 and 4, Amygdala, Mosaic, and Mangrove. Trevor lives in Denver, CO.

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