Don't Make Me Laugh (SpongeBob SquarePants)
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 Episodes like this are the reason why most fans of the show don't take kindly to a huge chunk of what it offers these days.
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"Don't Make Me Laugh" is an episode from Season 14 of SpongeBob SquarePants.
Plot
SpongeBob finds everything funny, much to everyone's annoyance, and tries to contain his laughter to no avail.
Why It's No Laughing Matter
- To get the elephants out of the room, this episode is Mr. Lawrence's take of "Funny Pants", and that episode, despite being no better than this one, at least had more of a substance and conflict than this one.
- It also rips off "Something Smells", "A Day Without Tears" "Face Freeze!", and "SpongeBob's Bad Habit", the latter three of which are already infamous episodes within the SpongeBob fandom.
- This episode is notorious for failing to provide edgy humor and justifying immense misbehavior in serious situations, teaching kids insulting morals about this.
- Stupid and offensive dialogue like SpongeBob at a funeral saying, "Holy herring, I'm squatting on a corpse."
- SpongeBob is unfairly tortured into becoming unlikeable. He clearly wanted to stop laughing, but due to his funny bone broke out, his condition ended up hurting others. This is palpable when:
- He annoys everyone at the movie theater by laughing during a romantic film, causing others around him to become extremely annoyed. Even the actors of said film are annoyed at him.
- He offends the people around him by laughing at inappropriate situations with a man wearing a hat and a milkman, respectively.
- He goes into the Krusty Krab where he causes Upturn to fall, and then proceeds to laugh at her injury. Although he gets scolded, but he never actually gets punished.
- In an operating room, his's tears of laughter short circuit a robot and make it attack the doctor and nurse without any repercussions.
- In perhaps the most notorious scene of the episode, he enters an cemetery knowing that it's not the place for laughter, where he finds a joke funeral that he finds funny.
- This particular scene suggests that funerals are a laughing matter and insulting the dead is fine if it's a joke, which this message was issued incredibly wrong.
- He once again visits a theater, this time in a sad movie, and drives the patrons away with his laughter, this time with no punishment whatsoever.
- SpongeBob's laughter takes up roughly 2 minutes.
- Tom Kenny's voice is incredibly dry in this episode, more so than any other episodes, and it shows that he needs to retire before this show does any more damage to his vocal chords. It sounds as if he wasn't really happy about working on this episode at his age, especially with the script that he received. The worst part is that his laugh samples are reused throughout the episode and sound nowhere close to his laugh in Seasons 1-4. This gets annoying very fast.
- To make matters worse, Kenny himself stated that he was done with the SpongeBob laugh well before this episode was aired.
- The face that SpongeBob makes as he eventually gets consumed by his laughter is disturbing, and that results in a rather distasteful callback to "Face Freeze!", which Zeus Cervas also storyboarded.
- Bad Moral: It's okay to insult dead people by laughing.
- This episode seems to have no identity or substance whatsoever, entirely surrounding the episode around the concept of SpongeBob being a literal laugh box.
- Insulting ending: SpongeBob runs into his grandma in the theater, who got her funny bone stuck at SpongeBob's age, stating it happens to everyone in the family. This scene not only brings back Grandma SquarePants on a mediocre note but normalizes SpongeBob's behavior and cements him as a Karma Houdini.
- Speaking of her return, while it was decent, it comes off as a bad way to send off what could potentially be her final appearance.
- The idea of a "funny bone" seems to be a rather cheap way to avoid rehashing "Funny Pants" and its "laugh box" concept.
- Also the "funny bone" is in SpongeBob's brain and looks and acts like a stick shift, and can't get downshifted.
Qualities That Made Us Laugh
- Grandma SquarePants returned with Marion Ross reprising her role.
- The first scene of the episode with SpongeBob and Patrick at a movie theater is good.
- There are several references to previous episodes, such as "Face Freeze!", "Don't Feed the Clowns", "Dying for Pie", and "A Place for Pets".
- Surprisingly enough, Patrick is likeable in this episode and even has a few funny moments, such as in the ending.
- "I'm all out of popcorn. Now it's a tragedy."
- On top of that, most of the characters, except for SpongeBob and the clowns at the funeral, are likable.
- The title is a nice reference to the idiom, "Don't make me laugh".
- All thanks to the animators and Ian Vazquez here, the animation is still well-done and is very colorful.
- On that topic, Lucky (Kamp Koral)'s design is great, even though it only appears on a truck.
Reception
This episode was received overwhelmingly negative reception by many fans and critics and is often called not only the worst episode of Season 14, but one of, if not the worst episode of the "post-threequel" era. It has a 7.1/10 of 54 reviews on IMDb along with its sister episode "Blood Is Thicker Than Grease", likely because that episode was better received. Many fans online expressed their distaste for this episode.
Galleries
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"Hey, what are you laughing at? This is a melodrama, not a comedy."
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"Can you believe this guy, laughing all through the movie like that?"
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SpongeBob laughing at Lady Upturn's trip up like a maniac.
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Threat detected.
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SpongeBob laughing at the funeral like a maniac.
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