2 Broke Girls - season 3 premiere - "And the Soft Opening"

2 BROKE GIRLS is an odd couple comedy: Beth Behrs is the chipper, vivacious, chic, optimistic blonde Caroline and Kat Dennings is her opposite, the dour, slothful, slovenly, pessimistic raven-haired Max. The pair are waitresses in a diner who in this episode open up a cupcake shop in a back room. Roughly half of the humor is derived from dick jokes, another twenty percent from vagina jokes, the remaining thirty percent divvied up among ethnic and racist stereotypes, drug jokes, jokes about Matthew Moy’s diminutive stature and jokes about Kat Dennings’s ample chest. The show’s racism is delivered with carefree aplomb, unlike the aggressive, attention-seeking, desperate racism of Fox’s DADS; and the crude humor comes with a snappy and cheerful zing – the nastiness never feels nasty because the characters take the insults with shrugs and indifference. The story becomes moralistic as it wraps up – the characters’ learn a corny lesson and hug it out. Not having seen this show before, which is now in its third year, I’m puzzled by Dennings’s muddied delivery – one would hope after two years she’d be better at getting lines out, but nearly each of her quips gets snagged and garbled in her throat.