User blog comment:Mattalamode/A Second Opinion: The Slap/@comment-26215750-20171228140737/@comment-31194372-20180102003215

Only took four days. Pfft.

First of all, you should definitely watch "The Slap" again, maybe with a more open mindset, making note of what I outlined. I was a little bit off-set too, but the episode was able to prove me and my prudish sensibilities wrong, so I don't see why you couldn't do the same. Sometimes, you just have to look at something as comedy without the strings attached, and that's what "The Slap" is: universal, goofy chicanery.

And yes, a lot of the success of the joke lay in how Gumball and Tobias were used. On one hand, there's that Gumball is very clearly in the wrong here, but on the other, Tobias is no less perfect throughout; he's the victim, but he's still a massive oaf. Nobody's the real champion here, and that helps make the comedy roll on by a lot more smoothly. It's like vaudeville - all we really do, at the end of the day, is laugh at the sheer stupidity on display, and they tackle that with a deceptive level of complexity instead of dragging the characters down.

Have good fortune and all of that stuff with the new year, dude. Don't do anything too dumb.