“Wadiyatalkinabeet” - A Meta Analysis of The Big Lez Show
Spoilers if you haven’t seen this amazing show. It’s fairly short and all on youtube so please do yourself a favor and watch it!!!
The Big Lez Show handles the 4th wall in really interesting ways. Even as early as Season 1 characters will reference the episode or show they are in as a passing joke and nobody will bat an eye. This all ties into the fact that the entire show can be seen as a show within a show, with Clarence Claymore as the director and creator and all the characters as actors. This gives Clarence’s role in the story as this immortal tortured soul such an interesting touch. The fact that Clarence created the Choomahs, these Homer Simpson like killing machines also plays into Lez’s own self determinism. The fact that Choomahs look like Homer Simpson and always attack Lez and his friends is symbolic of the formulaic nature of adult animation and how it totally kills any depth characters have. Lez’s own hatred for Norton can be viewed as manufactured by his father and the show as a whole, and Lez needs to break through that hatred to find his own happiness. After Lez’s sacrifice in the end of the story, the Choomahs show that they’ve grown intelligence and want to end the conflict, showing our cast has been freed from the cycle of stagnation and continued senseless combat.
Before I get into the next section I want to get into the cosmology of Big Lez, so I’ll need to talk about Sassy the Sasquatch. Sassy is essentially the universe itself, he houses infinite universes with himself. The Sassy we see in the show is only an observer sent to experience the many worlds and return to the larger universal Sassy. These infinite worlds mean that the multiple sorts of meta ideas at play, seemingly messy, can all coexist in the same way a multiverse does.
In the finale to Season 3, Choomah Island, Lez smokes a joint Sassy gave him and enters a sort of world beyond earth and meets the universal Sassy. Sassy opens Lez’s eyes to the fact that he lives within the box of a digital art software. His whole life has been drawn and created by someone else, every second of it. But with this realization Lez can take his life into his own hands. With the help of Sassy he breaks down his wants in life to, at its core, a desire to be happy. Lez doesn;t know how to achieve this but Sassy simply tells him “What’s the first thing everyone does before they start their day? They wake up.” That really is the heart of why I love these instances of meta cosmological mumbo jumbo.
All of these lenses you can view The Big Lez Show through are forms of escapism. Even in Sassy the Sasquatch spinoff we see how Sassy got lost in Lez’s world choosing to stay there instead of exploring the multiverse, but through exploring a reality where all of the show was the dream of Big Jez, Sassy is able to escape a self made time loop and return to his purpose . We can find millions of billions of external excuses for our bad habits and choose to ignore the root of our problems, and even the root of our desires. “Aren’t we all chasin’ the light mate? Lookin’ everywhere to find it. Everywhere but within.” These external forces far higher than ourselves can redefine our lives and make us get lost in our own heads when deep down the answers we need are within ourselves. Ironically once we wake up, our dreams are within reach.
