Community’s return to Netflix is your second chance to learn analogies from Britta
In honor of the return of Community to Netflix, I’m taking a rhetorical look at my second favorite moment in the show, when Britta, the free-spirited millennial, describes an analogy for the judgmental Gen-X lawyer, Jeff, played by Joel McHale.
Britta brilliances while Jeff mansplains
When the scene begins, Jeff, as usual is mansplaining to Britta about something or other (full disclosure: was a lot more charming when I was a ten years younger.)
Britta: No to everything you both said! Weddings are like little girls’ tea parties, except the women are the stuffed animals. The men are making them talk, and they’re not drinking tea, they’re drinking antiquated gender roles.
Jeff: Somebody tell Britta what an analogy is.
Britta: I know what it is! It’s like a thought with another thought’s hat on!
Watch the banter here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR33ydE5QSY
The basic structure of an analogy is A is like B because C. Now if that sounds like a metaphor, it kind of is. We’ll talk about differences in a minute.
A = weddings
B = little girl’s tea parties.
C = antiquated gender roles.
The analogy is technically pretty solid. The issue is that within the analogy, Britta starts crossing streams between A and B and winds up with the last piece,
“they’re not drinking tea; they’re drinking antiquated gender norms.”
Jeff mocks her for being illogical, but it makes perfect sense.
In rhetoric we call a bad metaphor a catachresis–in some sense all metaphors are bad because anytime you make comparisons you oversimplify, but when the mixed up metaphor really sticks out, it’s a proper catachresis.
Britta’s analogy is just fine; it’s just messy, which is also why it’s cool and works well for an offbeat, witty comedy like Community.
Britta’s definition of an analogy–a thought with another thought’s hat on–is even better. Because that’s exactly what an analogy is and she uses more embedded metaphors to make the point even more engaging and intriguing, if not necessarily more clear.
But who watches Community for clear, efficient communication right? Who does ANYTHING, really, for that reason? Except maybe, like, email.
Fundamentally, an analogy is a comparison of two thing–two thoughts–that aren’t already connected in our minds. Essentially, you have two things; one is something that you know about and the other is something you don’t know about.
The thing that you don’t know–in this case, the weddings–are usually the topic; they’re the thing you’re trying to get someone to get. And to help people understand your topic– to understand your perspective on the topic more accurately– you use an analogy or a metaphor so you can compare the thing people don’t know to the thing that they do.
Jonathan is a tiger–basic analogy structure
So let’s take the basic metaphor/analogy: Jonathan is a tiger.
Jonathan is the unknown idea. I don’t know who Jonathan is, I just found this example on the Internet. Jonathan is the thing we don’t know about but we know about. Tigers or at least we think we do. If we say Jonathan is a tiger or
Jonathan is like a tiger; what does that mean? Does that mean he’s furry and has stripes and claws? Does it mean he naps a lot? Does it mean he’s a carnivore?
We don’t know.
And this is the difference between a metaphor and an analogy. In a metaphor the idea is already so well-circulated that you know the difference. When I say my roommate is like a pig, you know what means she’s messy because we circulate that all the time
However, if I say my roommate they’re like a dump truck it’s like okay so they’re dirty or big? We don’t really get it. That’s how we know we’re in analogy land. Because the “C” or the hat isn’t immediately clear. So you have to give more details to clarify the comparison–hence the synonym extended metaphor.
So, then I give you more details about my roommate–they come home at all hours of the night it’ll be three a.m. and I’m asleep in my bed and all of a sudden crash! and I hear these loud noises and these lights are shining in my window and things are, you know, banging around.
Then you’re like oh okay your roommate is like a dump truck because they’re disruptive.
Then the wheels start to turn
Analogies and metaphors have the same structure; we have the letter A which is the unknown topic. We call that the tenor so like in music the tenor is the bottom part of the music. The tenor in an analogy is the unknown idea; it’s the thing you’re talking about.
Then we have this other idea: tiger or dump truck or pig whatever and that’s called the vehicle because it literally drives the idea into the speech so you’ve taken one things hat and put it on the other thing
Metaphors work because they are efficient. Analogies work because they require some work. Your audience is working to transfer the idea. As you’re constructing the analogy. They get to participate in what’s happening.
Of course, analogies come with a downside. One is that analogies aren’t true so they’re easy to rip apart if you’re on the opposing side. But that’s true of everything so I don’t think it’s a good reason to steer away from, especially given that humans are fundamentally analogy-making reasoners. We make sense of things by comparing and contrasting them to our previous understandings.
But they do have a big downside that you can actually control, which is losing the forest for the trees–a metaphor you may or may not understand — getting so focused on the details that you lose the point. That’s what makes Britta’s analogy so good; it’s clever and stylish and has enough details to be fun but not to lose track of the point. Jeff’s mockery is off her creative use of language–not her fundamental reasoning skills.
This is an excerpt from the RhetoricLee Speaking blog entitled, “Drink Analogies, Not Bleach + Fresh Prince, Obama, Trump’s Lysol Moment” available at https://rhetoriclee.com/drink-analogies-not-bleach-fresh-prince-obama-trumps-lysol-moment/
