Season 3, Episode 6, “Star Search”

Pre-Credits Gag:  DJ and Stephanie gift Michelle with a tiara and tutu that once belonged to each of them.  They all begin to dance like ballerinas together and Kimmie Gibbler remarks that she’s glad that she took bowling lessons instead.  Reminder:  Kimmie Gibbler is rad and everyone else sucks.

Danny forces everyone to watch a tape of him interviewing Joey on his old college talk show, “Campus Rap”.  Before the interview, Danny spends his opening moments on the show praising disco and sharing his photo of a newborn DJ.  Not that anyone’s surprised by it, but there’s conclusive evidence that Danny has been a bumbling, self-indulgent talk show host since day one.

Joey appears on the show and does a bunch of lame ass impressions, so he’s pretty much exactly the same as we’ve always known him except he has bigger hair.  Danny praises Joey’s talents and Joey responds with a remarkably immodest proclamation about how he’s gonna get hella famous.  Back in the present, Joey realizes that he’s just 2 weeks short of the 10-year anniversary of those ambitious proclamations and he still hasn’t done shit.  Joey decides that it’s crucial that he make something of himself before that 2 weeks is up and the family all support him.

Stephanie and DJ try to get Michelle to take off her tutu before bed but she refuses and Danny decides that it’s ok for her to sleep with it on.  I’m not really sure what the lesson is there, but I did notice that this is one of those rare cases where the pre-credits gag ties into the episode.  Anyway, Joey rolls up on the scene and immediately goes into comedy overdrive.  He flies into this manic riff that’s a lot like an old Robin Williams routine except without the excuse of being really high on cocaine.  God damn, like it’s not bad enough that we have to deal with this annoying asshole and his shitty jokes all the fucking time, now we have to sit through several minutes of pure unbridled Joey comedy at a frantic pace.  The only consolation for this scene is that the family seems pretty freaked out by it and it ends with the baby running away in terror, so at least there’s some acknowledgement of how awful it is.

Danny secretly submits a tape of Joeys act to Star Search and a letter arrives on the anniversary of Joey’s 10-year proclamation (AKA the very next scene) that says that he’s been accepted.  It’s kind of interesting how Joey didn’t do anything to try to achieve his goals other than bug the shit out of his housemates and then he gets his big break because someone else did all the legwork for him.  I really hate Joey, you guys.  I really mean it.  I hate him.

Backstage before Joey’s appearance on Star Search, the girls all harass a production guy with the hope that they’ll get on the show themselves.  They actually walk out of the room after him one after another, shouting the lyrics for “Tomorrow” from “Annie”.  Assholes.

Joey appears on Star Search and it’s basically like watching Star Search instead of Full House for about 5 minutes.  I guess that this technically counts as a cross-over episode.  As for Joey’s act, I don’t really know   what to say about it.  This shit is getting exhausting.  I mean, we already saw several minutes of his excruciating comedic riffing and now we have to sit through his whole stand-up act.  Fuck that shit.

Five thousand years later, Joey’s act wraps up and then we get to the part where the judges vote for him or the other terrible comedian and, wouldn’t you know it, they have a tie.

Ed Mcmahon explains that ties result in an audience-based decision, not to mention that they raise tension and pad out the storyline for a few more minutes.  Once the decision comes in it’s finally announced in no uncertain terms to the whole world that Joey’s a fucking loser.

The family console Joey backstage and then Joey announces to the other dad’s that he’s gonna retire from comedy.  It’s a miracle!  Rather than allowing Joey to gift the world with the absence of his comedy, Jesse tries to inspire Joey to punish the world all over again by delivering a powerful motivational speech about the meaning of success and loving what you do.

Ok, so we’ve already sat through 2 lengthy sequences of Joey performing, but then we get one final, gigantic fuck you with a quiet, pensive Joey moment.  Joey walks onto the empty Star Search stage and contemplates his career.  He sentimentally tells a few terrible jokes to an empty crowd and then the baby enters the scene, presumably because the family just lets her wander around by herself all the time, and he opens up to her about his love of performing.  Joey ultimately decides that he hates humanity enough to continue performing and then the family comes out and sing his praises.

Fuck, that was bad, you guys.  I mean, I know that it’s always bad, but this was on a whole other level.  I know that I said before that Jesse’s inspiring Christmas speech was the worst scene ever on this show, but I think it’s fair to say that any one of the 3 Joey-centric scenes in this episode offers up some stiff competition.  Even the one terrible scene that I dread re-watching above all others that comes up later in the series might not even match up to the shitstorm of garbage that Joey delivered here.

As far as what this episode says about Joey, there’s not much I can write here that wouldn’t be repeating what I wrote in my review of Season 1, Episode 16, “But Seriously, Folks,”  in which Joey goes through pretty much the exact same personal journey.  Suffice it to say that Joey is the most annoying asshole who’s ever been on tv, and once again he delivers his ongoing lesson of, “don’t follow your dreams because what if you’re just like this guy?”

But despite my deep hatred of Joey that intensifies with each viewing of this show, there’s something else that happens this episode that makes it stand out among the worst of the worst.  Full House is brimming with terrible qualities from the very first episode but by the third season it seemed to really settle into itself and start to enjoy it’s inexplicable success.  By the time we get to this episode, several characters have established catch-phrases that are farted out regularly and this entire episode is basically just one big love letter to Joey’s comedy act.  Although the show’s been bad since the beginning, there seemed to be something missing from the earliest episode’s that made it so much more bearable than the later episode.  I was never able to figure out what that one distinguishing quality was before I saw this episode.  This is the episode where the show became smug.

Firsts:  Crossover with another show