Season 4, Episode 7, “Viva Las Joey”

You always know you’re fucked when Joey’s name is right in the title, especially when the title is about the prolonged life of Joey, rather than his painful death.  Well, that’s a pretty generous interpretation of the meaning of this title’s episode, because once you try to translate it, it’s pretty much nonsense.  Once again, Full House blatantly disrespects the Spanish language.

Pre-Credits Gag:  Jesse’s cooking something in a pan… I can’t tell what it’s supposed to be.  Maybe a pancake or an omelet or something?  Anyway, he flips it around all fancy-like and then when he tries to toss it onto his plate it falls on the floor and the dog eats it.  Usually these pre-credits gags are quick, one-note shticks but this one continues after the initial hilarious punchline when Michelle enters the scene to announce that she has an “owey.”  Yeah, howsabout you come over here, kid?  I’ll give you a fuckin “owey.”  So Jesse pulls out a band-aid for her and then the “owey” mysteriously changes locations, disclosing that Michelle was actually just selfishly vying for attention.  Jesse’s like, what the fuck?  and Michelle explains, “owey’s are verrrrrry tricky!”  which is the best phonetic description I can give for her most common method of line delivery.  I guess that somebody decided that it was really funny when she drew out the second to last word of a sentence and then said the last word really quickly and, since you can only get about one stupid baby trick working at a time, they just decided to have her do it as much as possible.  It’s really annoying.

The episode picks up literally the second that the pre-credits gag ended, which has never happened before.  Given that it had a different formula than every other pre-credits gag so far, and that it was pretty clearly just the extracted first 30-seconds of the opening scene, I think it’s fair to assume that they just didn’t make a pre-credits gag for this episode and tried to cover it up at the last minute.  Maybe it has something to do with this being one of those on-location type episodes (SPOILER ALERT:  They go to Las Vegas!), because for whatever reason those kinds of episodes have usually had pre-credits gags that unconventionally tied into the rest of the episode.  There’s probably some technical explanation as to why that is, but since I couldn’t find one when I looked up the episode on IMDB and that’s the most research I’m ever willing to do, it may forever remain a mystery.

So, anyway, the phone rings and it’s Joeys agent, inviting him to perform at some charity benefit.  Joey is so happy at having found a new opportunity to soil the world with his execrable comedy that he embraces Jesse.  Danny walks in and makes the first comment about the uncles being gay that we’ve heard in a while, probably out of spite because he feels left out.

Joey reveals that he’s going to be the opening act for Wayne Newton and excitedly begins packing his shit.  The girls catch wind of these unforeseen travel plans and, allured by legalized gambling, prostitution, and outdoor drinking, beg the dads to take them, too.  Danny’s like, hey, who gives a fuck about anything, right?  And so, the Tanner family prepare for the Las Vegas episode.

As Joey continues to pack, Jesse suggests that he invite his parents to come see his big opportunity to be shitty at what he does in his largest venue to date and, for the first time, we get some information about Joey’s family.  Apparently his mom walks around in a Goofy suit at Disney World for a living and his dad is some sort of a colonel.  Joey dismisses the idea of inviting them by saying that his mom will be working and that he and his dad don’t really get along.  Yeah, it really puts a strain between you and your dad when you’re the most annoying, useless fuck-up who ever walked the planet.

Far be it for anyone in the full house to respect the wishes or boundaries of another person, the girls decide to call up Joey’s dad and invite him to the performance while pretending to be his personal secretaries.  Yeah, I don’t know how they got his phone number, either. The call is a confused mess and clearly could never be taken seriously by a rational adult.  They don’t even say where the show is.

So then there’s an amazing montage of the bright lights of Vegas while John Stamos sings “Viva Las Vegas.” It really made me wanna do a bunch of cocaine and then contract an STD, all while gambling.

The family wait in their first place position in line outside of the Wayne Newton show and then Jesse just straight up runs up to them and pulls the velvet rope aside and tells them to check out some bad ass shit he saw inside.  Damn, Tanner family, first in line just wasn’t good enough, was it?  You might have thought that they only got special privileges inside the full house but, uh-uh, the Tanner family does whatever the fuck they want everywhere they go.  That’s what this show’s about.

The cool thing that Jesse couldn’t wait to show everybody is a bunch of lame Elvis memorabilia that nobody gives a shit about.  Jesse goes into an Elvis-inspired manic frenzy that escalates into some sort of a trance-like state in which he becomes completely disconnected from his surroundings and has no choice but to perform “Heartbreak Hotel” while  a bunch of people walk by, each of them desperately avoiding eye-contact.  That’s right, you guys, for at least 3 full minutes, Uncle Jesse goes straight up mentally insane.  That’s how much he likes Elvis.

The family meet Joey backstage to lend him support before he humiliates himself in front of thousands of people.  Joey steps out to mop up the sweat that’s accumulating under his clothes (gross!) and while he’s gone the girls mention that they’ve invited Joey’s dad, which Danny tells them was a shitty idea.  Joey returns to the scene just as a knock at the door heralds the arrival of Joey’s dad, which immediately freaks Joey out.

After the commercial break, Joey’s dad realizes that Joey didn’t know that he’d be coming and things get pretty uncomfortable.  The family excuse themselves, leaving Joey alone with his dad, and Joey’s dad immediately starts to belittle the path that Joey’s taken in his life.  I guess that the idea here is that we’re supposed to feel bad for Joey, but it’s really hard not to take his dad’s side considering that Joey has proven again and again that he should have been aborted.  I mean, Joey’s dad says a bunch of stuff about how being a comedian is not real work and stuff like that that’s pretty easy to disagree with, but once it’s applied to Joey it’s hard not to see where he’s coming from.  Joey tries to call his dad out for his lack of involvement in his life but if I was that fucking guy’s dad I wouldn’t go to his soccer games, either.  I’d be sitting at home with both barrels of a shotgun in my mouth, wondering how I could have unleashed such horror into the world.  Anyhow, Joey’s dad eventually gets tired of being berated by the living embodiment of his every failure and eventually says his goodbyes.

After that excruciating dearth of dramatic emotional conveyance, we are subjected to its stark, even more intolerable opposite, as the next 4 minutes consist of nothing but Joey’s terrible stand-up routine.  This reminds me of the shitty ass episode from last Season when he went on Star Search, and makes me wonder if he didn’t have occasional episodes that featured his stand-up routines worked into his contract.

I refuse to make any sort of comment about Joey’s stand-up, as it’s pretty redundant by now to say that I wish he would die a slow, painful death, and outside of expressing that yet again, I can’t really conjure up any meaningful commentary.  It is worth noting, however, that Wayne Newton comes out at the end.  Hey, check it out, you guys:  It’s Wayne Newton!

Backstage after the show, the Tanner family share an apple juice toast (no, I did not make that up) in honor of Joey cheating a bunch of Wayne Newton fans out of 4 minutes of their lives, but the party is quickly broken up by the reappearance of Joey’s dad.  The Tanner’s cut out in search of a miniature golf course, leaving Joey alone once again to try to work things out with his old man.  Joey’s dad says that it was hard having such an idiot fuck-up for a son but maybe he could have been around more to try to shape him into something better than the parasitic deadbeat permanent house guest of some unqualified morning show host.  The two of them then bond over Joey’s dad’s recollection of them watching cartoons together when Joey had the chicken pox when he was 3 (although this contradicts the chicken pox episode from Season 1) and then Joey’s dad tries to appeal to him by doing a shitty impression of Popeye.  Although this is clearly the only way Joey and his dad can find a method of relating to one another, I think that the Popeye laugh represents an emotional wall, or at least some sort of deeply rooted inability to connect on any sort of meaningful level.  Regardless, if you were either of these guys I guess you’d just take what you could get at this point, and so they decide to hug as gentle music comes on, resolving everything.

I know that I always rag on this show for its lack of character development, but this is one of those cases that points out that things are generally better when they don’t bother to try at all.  At least I can take consolation in the fact that we will never see Joey’s dad ever again.  I don’t know if he technically qualifies as a grandparent on this show, but he sure is about to get treated like all the others that came before him.

First:  The pre-credits gag leads directly into the episode, Joey’s dad