It’s official! According to a tweet by show-runner Dan Harmon, NBC’s Community will be returning from its mid-season hiatus on March 15th, airing in its original time slot of Thursdays at 8pm (ah, the tried and.. uh.. true?). This is great news for fans of the show, and I join their legions in eagerly anticipating the remaining episodes of season three (and hopefully a fourth season beyond). BUT… let’s not forget the more profound travesty that’s gone largely forgotten throughout all of this: the perpetual absence of a Community porn parody from my hard drive.

In case you didn’t know, in early 2011, news spread that such a porn parody was in the works. Now, a year later, we have yet to see any sign of it. Apparently it was made but it turned out awful, according to an audience member at this past December’s Harmontown, where adult film actress Dana DeArmond—one of the stars of the parody—was a guest.

Of course, it doesn’t surprise me that the attempt failed. Parody itself is one of the key elements of Community—how exactly does one parody parody without collapsing under the sheer weight of it all? Ultimately, a television show as nuanced and intelligent as Community deserves an equally nuanced and intelligent porn parody, and anything less than that is bound to be disappointing.

But I don’t think it’s impossible. And I don’t think we should give up. While I personally have neither the expertise nor the equipment (ahem) to produce a porno myself, I would like to take this opportunity to offer up a few ideas for what I think might constitute a successful Community porn parody.

To start, such a film would, in my opinion, have to operate within a so-called “holy trinity” of meta-ness—what I like to call the homage à trois: Pornography, Community, and Parody, or a multi-layered pornographic world that acknowledges not only that it’s a porno, and not only that its reference point is a television show, but that said reference point has countless other reference points and that it (the porno) itself has the potential to be one of those reference points; that the object of its parodic attention has the capacity to magnify and reflect that attention back on it ten-fold, thus inviting the porn parody into a self-reflexive universe where it is both subject and object, signifier and signified, parody and parodied. A Community porn parody, then, would not be merely another porn parody—it would have to be so much more. It would have to exist and function not only as porn-parody, but as Community-parody and porn-parody-parody as well—all at the same time.

Now, how does this homage à trois manifest itself practically? Is the parody aware of itself as parody? Does Abed know that they’ve entered a pornographic medium? Are certain pornographic tropes lampooned, or is the lampooning of those tropes itself lampooned? I don’t know. I don’t claim to have all the answers. My main goal here is to begin forming a kind of dialogic space where fans, filmmakers, story-tellers, and artisans of all kinds can collaborate in producing a preliminary conceptual framework, hopefully leading to an inspired and informed cinematic experiment whereby we can finally see Jeff and Annie fuck.

Some stray thoughts:

  • A Community porn parody with a satisfying amount of sex would somehow have to explain why all of these characters are suddenly engaging in wanton sex acts with one another with little to no regard for their existing circumstances or friendships. I don’t know about you, but when I think of characters having heightened physical and emotional experiences with one another in an irrational haze, I think of the Star Trek: The Original Series episode, The Naked Time, in which the crew is infected by a virus that destroys their inhibitions. Could a Community porn parody utilize this idea somehow? Could the Greendale campus fall victim to an infection much like the one in the zombie episode, only instead of turning them into zombies it turns them into uncontrollable sex fiends? One possible bonus would be that, at the end, when Troy expresses sadness that the bacchanalia is over, Abed could hint at a potential sequel by pointing out that the inhibition-destroying virus story happened twice in the world of Star Trek: “The Next Generation remade it… Why can’t we?” (Or, who knows—maybe it could be a Mirror Universe  reference, and Evil Troy and Evil Abed could somehow be involved! The possibilities are endless!)
  • Speaking of Troy and Abed—they would need to have at least one threesome in the porno. They could do their trademark high five while double penetrating Britta! “Troy and Abed banging Briiiiitta!”
  • Also, speaking of Troy and Abed, I for one wouldn’t be opposed to a Community porn parody featuring both heterosexual and homosexual sex scenes… hmmm…
  • Annie and Jeff need to hook up, that’s obvious. What’s less obvious is that, later (and bear with me here), Annie and Pierce need to hook up too. No no, hear me out! I’m envisioning a scene in which Annie reveals to Pierce that she had sex with Jeff, and that it made her realize that she’s really into older guys—but that Jeff just wasn’t quite old enough for her tastes. And then BAM. Pierce’s dreams come true. Of course, later Annie spots Leonard and—well, that can happen off-screen.
  • Could a character named Dan Hardon make an appearance, perhaps played by Dan Harmon himself? I don’t even know why or what his function would be, I just think there should be someone named Dan Hardon. Get it? Like hard-on? Oof.
  • The most obvious title is Cummunity. But what other options are there? Let’s brainstorm. (I’m counting on you, Internet!)