Again, Schmidt comes into his own this episode. Anyone watching New Girl for the first time, starting with the last few episodes, would pick out Max Greenfield as the funniest actor here, wrestling with words as he says them to wring the maximum amount comedic value from them. His use of the words “Cotton-Eye Joe” as a creepy threat towards Jess is absolutely hilarious.
The idea that the song “Cotton-Eye Joe” is something more than a song, almost akin to a subliminal technique for brainwashing whoever listens to it, is great. Nick’s subconscious fist-pumping – and the cutaway sight gag to Nick dancing to the song while it plays loudly in the car, with Jess shouting over asking “Why do you need me for this?!?” – is awesome, and is a possibly unintentional callback to one of my favourite Simpsons lines, between Marge and Homer:
Marge – “You punch the cat!”Homer – “I do not!”
Marge – “You do! You’re doing it right now!”
Camera pulls back to reveal Homer punching said cat.
Winston’s love of pranks reaches its apotheosis in this episode, achieving levels of minor supervillainy. He’s goaded into pranking the entire wedding ceremony by Schmidt, following his bursting in to the bride’s private room, where Cece was getting ready for the ceremony. Their eyes met and he interpreted her look as reluctance to go through with the wedding. Even though this was a rare time that Schmidt was completely right, his attempts at persuading Winston and Nick to help stop the wedding are mostly laughed off, until Schmidt dangles the prospect of committing juicy pranks in front of Winston’s nose, and he bites.
First off, he sounds an air horn as Shivrang is riding a white horse to the venue – on hearing about the groom’s horseback entrance, Schmidt opines “So basically, they’re just copying my bar mitzvah.” The air horn causes the horse to gallop, which results in Shivrang experiencing quite intense pain to a delicate area of his body.
His testicles.
After this, Winston rigs the music that accompanies Cece as she walks down the aisle to be “Cotton-Eye Joe.” Initially, Nick didn’t want anything to do with the pranking of the ceremony, to prove to Jess that he isn’t a child, but on receiving the blame for the musical prank he decides to go all in with the pranksters and get involved in the biggest one of all – taking a badger into the air vents of the venue, to drop onto the priest as he is officiating the ceremony.
You’re probably asking yourself why there’s a badger at the wedding – well, there just is, OK? He’s Bucky the Badger, mascot for the University of Wisconsin. And he’s there at the ceremony, an Indian wedding. What else is there to know? The badger is not explained in any way beyond that, and really felt out of place with the rest of the episode, even though it is incredibly important to the outcome of the episode as a whole. That a lynchpin like that is placed on the shoulders of a plot point so bizarre as the badger mascot of the University of Wisconsin shows either bravery or stupidity. It’s just a good job that the cast and writers are so talented; a lesser show could never make that fly.
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