The episode won an Emmy award, and the series a Peabody award for "fearlessly smashing traditional comic formulas".
These quips are classic Johnson, and follow familiar comic formulae: they're triumphalist, low-level xenophobic, undiplomatic and a little naughty.
Rhona Cameron returns to the Fringe after a five-year absence with her familiar mix of confessional and observational anecdotes, and proves that one of the most successful comic formulae is to find a shared frame of reference with your audience.
When it aired in the US, Girls generated a lot of what television executives like to call "noise", most of it approving, for the tartness of the writing, for its refusal of standard comic formulas and for what many saw as the unblushing realism of its depiction of young women's lives.
In fact her job was much less glamorous than plotting for those superheroes, but the comic strip formula of threat/pursuit/fantasy life/alter ego/secret identity was the formula she used in all her work.
Cosby hardly wavers from the typical comic book formula, right down to cheesy jokes and a final showdown.
Don't expect too much characterization or plot development outside of a standard comic-book formula.
Katevas is confident that his comic-timing formula works well enough to get laughs, though he hasn't tested it out on his own.
The plot, after Richard Brinsley Sheridan's "Duenna," itself a parody of comic-opera formula, is a mere wisp: in old Seville, the charming Louisa outwits her blustering father, Don Jerome, to avoid marrying the wealthy fish merchant Mendoza, winning instead her beloved Antonio.
