You know how people who quote Family Guy all the time kind of… suck? And have become an actual genre of people who suck? Because Family Guy is only ever quoting other things? And people who quote it are thus only ever regurgitating regurgitation, creating such a bilious verbal mess as to make you wish Family Guy never existed, which perhaps Family Guy doesn’t deserve? Well, I’d hate to think such a thing could happen with so dear a show as Arrested Development, and yet here I am, posting this link with quotable Arrested Development moments, because secretly, I want to be loved. So love me, love these quotes, but just don’t abuse them. Otherwise, you know, “you can say goodbye to these.”
Speaking of quotes, remember when Gloria Steinem famously proclaimed that “A woman without [Peter Florrick] is like a fish without a bicycle,” or when she suggested that “a liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job [as an equity partner at Stern, Lockhart & Gardner] after”? Yeah, those were big moments for feminism, and given their uncanny applicability to The Good Wife, Steinam’s just-announced cameo in Season 6 should go swimmingly.
Guest appearances are, indeed, a funny beast. If they go well, like Brad Pitt’s guest appearance on Friends, Jennifer Aniston gets married (and, you know, eventually divorced); if they go poorly, like these strange Sesame Street celebrity cameos, you could be scarring a whole generation. (As Prachi Gupta points out, it’s not that Kim Cattrall is doing anything at all offensive in her Sesame Street cameo, but rather our inability to separate her from Samantha that makes her exaggerated utterance of “conga” here sound oh-so-sexual.)
When you hear President Taft invoked, it’s almost guaranteed that you immediately think of the stuck-in-the-bathtub incident – and that if asked to think of something – anything – else, you might not be able to; the president has been at once reduced and enlarged into a historical body-shaming joke. But, as Mental Floss would like you to know, there was so much more to the man than the parts that could or couldn’t fit into a bathtub. For example, did you know that he was the last mustachioed president, or did you know about the fuss that was made about his prized dairy cow, Pauline, when she went missing? Did you??? I bet Gloria Steinem didn’t even know about Pauline.
Alas, with all of my yammering – a mere imitation, of course, of the Internet’s incessant yammering – you may be finding yourselves longing for some silence. Which is why you should read some more verbiage about these sidekicks who cannot verbalize.