2x07 Ghost Monkey

[7.4/10] Again, a lot of the humor here was pretty broad, but I appreciated the Arrested Development-esque clockwork nature of all the gags coming together in the end, and some of the stuff was amusing, so it gets bumped up.

Let’s try to take it character by character. The best part of the episode was 100% Jenny and Kevin (as usual). The whole idea of Jenny wanting to be sexy but being stuck in a frog costume for Halloween, and Kevin trying to merge kid and adult Halloweens was a solid if sitcom-y bit. And the whole deal with Jenny’s costume getting ripped and Kevin trying the “poor girl” routine on her was a nice button to put on it.

My second favorite bit was Peter psychologically torturing Ruxin by letting him pick Peter’s line-up for their match up. There’s a certain “slap bet” quality to it that I appreciated it, and Ruxin slowly unraveling is the best use of Nick Kroll on the show so far.

I didn’t really like the other bits in the episode. Peter dating a girl whom he thinks is dressed up for Halloween, but who turns out to be a legitimate Wiccan had potential, and the gang’s reaction to her (thinking it’s just a costume) was good for some awkward laughs. But her doing a seance for the missing monkey was a bridge too far. By the same token, the monkey-search crap with Taco was way too broad and corny, and felt like another thin excuse to have Jon LaJoie do one of his songs on the show. The actual monkey stuff was equally cheesy, with the scary chords and whatnot, and the punchline, with the monkey humping Jenny’s froghead was pretty lame.

At least we got some good stuff for Andre here, between his terrible taste in music and his deploying the “poor girl” bit to success.

Overall, not an amazing episode of anything, but one of the funnier ones thus far, which managed to tie its disparate storylines together in a generally entertaining way.