Funny Friday: Oh What Tangled Webs We Weave

Some time back, a couple of friends confessed that they were avoiding another friend.

“He was forcing us to treat him and his friends to dinner tonight,” one of them explained, “so we told him we couldn’t because we have our event to go to.” Our event was actually in the afternoon.

“So now we can’t post pictures of the event yet because he might see it on instagram and figure us out,” he went on. “So we’ll post them tonight to pretend that it’s happening at night.”

“But what if we have dinner tonight after the movie?” I asked. “How will you be able to post those pics then?”

“Then I will pretend that it happened before,” he replied. “I will caption it as ‘chilling before the event.'”

Okay my head hurt a bit.

I thought this was the perfect moment to talk about one of my favourite episodes on Big Bang Theory which is very hilarious. In the episode called “The Loobenfeld Decay” (S01E10) Penny invites Leonard and Sheldon to a show where she sings. Leonard knows she sings horribly, so he lies and says that they can’t go because they were attending a science symposium.

That should have been fine, but Sheldon feels that the lie could easily be verified by Penny if she went on a website and saw that there was no schedule for that particular symposium on that particular day (which Penny was very unlikely to do).

So, the next day, Sheldon approaches Penny to tell her that Leonard lied to protect Sheldon, that the truth was they were actually going to help Sheldon and his family stage an intervention for Sheldon’s drug addicted cousin “Leopold.” He then asks Penny to pretend not to know about it so as not to embarrass Leonard. Later, he tells a frustrated Leonard about everything and tells him to pretend not to know that Penny knows he had lied to cover up for Sheldon.

I know, right. Getting confusing yet?

But it gets worse. Or better (in the funny sense).

On the day of Penny’s show, she drops by Sheldon and Leonard’s apartment and wishes them well for the symposium. Raj and Howard, friends and fellow scientists, get angry that they were left out of the “symposium.” So Penny tells Sheldon to tell them the “truth” about going to an intervention. After she leaves, they explain the truth. They then decide to go to Long Beach where the “intervention” was supposed to be held, to make it more believable, but to do something else there.

Later on when they are back home, Sheldon suddenly bursts into Leonard’s room to wake him up and say that there was a flaw in their lie, based on the personality and motivation of “Leopold.”

The next morning, Leonard wakes up to find a stranger in their kitchen. It was an actor that Sheldon had hired to pretend to be his cousin Leopold. You can watch the scene below. It’s really funny.

Later on when we were at dinner, I suggested to my friend that maybe he could hire someone to pretend to have seen him at the “evening event.”

“When you’re out with him,” I explained, “this actor will suddenly show up at your restaurant and say, ‘Oh hello! What a coincidence to see you here! Didn’t I see you at the evening event at insert specific date here? That was a very nice event, wasn’t it?'”

You know, just in case his friend had doubts, to make sure he covered all his tracks.

It’s the perfect plan. Sheldon likes this.