I did not stumble upon this sitcom. My close friends (Emmanuel and Tomi) had recommended it a number of times earlier but I was reluctant to watch it. I was reluctant to watch any long movie at all. I cannot remember when I started to watch it. However, since I started, I must have seen the episodes up to twenty times over. The Big Bang Theory is in its final season after 11 years of amazing geek comedy.

There’s so much to love about the Big Bang Theory. Starting with the cast, who seem perfectly suited for their roles, I fell in love more with the main character, Sheldon Cooper and then Penny.  These two offer the extreme of two worlds.

Sheldon Cooper is a theoretical physicist who got his first doctorate at 13 years. He has two PhDs and a Masters with an IQ of 187. The beautiful and social Penny, on the other hand, starts as a struggling actress and waitress at the Cheese Cake Factory but eventually builds a career as a pharmaceutical sales rep.

When artists exaggerate certain features, it is to highlight what we often clearly miss or overlook. Images that we see every day tend to blur and become forgotten. You know they are there, but you don’t give them much thought. It is the same with the gifts most people have. You forget how good you are, because you are used to being that good.

The Big Bang Theory brings to fore the beauty of the mundane. You find yourself giving gratitude for understanding the rather simple things while also hoping to embrace life’s complexities. With Sheldon Cooper’s intelligence comes a lack of social intelligence thereof. In most humans, social intelligence is more distributed. Thus, you find people who are adept at keeping social discourses and relationships but fall outside the small class of people called geniuses. A lot of people fall in the middle. These are the people who easily understand and appreciate the intelligence of a genius while pondering on their poor mastery of social relationship.

How can you have the ability to solve the most difficult physics problems yet you are sluggish at identifying sarcasm, or worse, people’s moods? What is rather perplexing is that many people suffer from same in different ways. When we pay more attention to ourselves, we realize how limitless and limited we are in many ways.

In the genius Sheldon Cooper and the ritzy Penny, you find two people who are at the end of two important classes of intelligence. Penny’s mastery of social skills ensures she gets her way around things. Her success as a pharmaceutical sales professional where one’s ability to persuade fellow humans to one’s side is critical, speaks volume about her interpersonal skills. Her ability to also accommodate Sheldon who is a pain in every other person’s ass is another chink on her shiny armour. In the sitcom, Sheldon Cooper and Penny both journey from these different ends of intelligence as they seek to build a more balanced life. Sheldon struggles through building social relationships, while Penny struggles to understand the nuances of science and other things that call a person’s IQ to test. What you find are two people who tease and explore each other’s weaknesses and allow the audience to fully grasp the importance of both types of intelligence and how crucial they are to our existence. At certain times, Sheldon’s superior intelligence prevails when they seek to resolve a conflict. At other times, his intelligence kowtows to Penny’s superior social skills or street smartness. Both grow because of each other. 

Penny and Sheldon also sought to define their own normal. What is normal to Sheldon is different from what is normal to Penny. The repeated clash and coming together of the cultures of two souls, brought up in different backgrounds and with differing ideals, is another conflict that the sitcom tries to resolve. A resolution that is thrilling to watch and follow. 

I am usually excited to see how ‘geniuses’ deal with everyday life. How they try to balance their empirical expectations with life’s chaos. I have long realized that life is beyond just logic. It is okay not to have an explanation for everything. Not everything has an empirical basis. Sometimes, we need to have a grasp of facts to make certain decisions. Other times, we have to rely on our guts or our hearts or worse, we just wing it. Penny and Sheldon provide a mix of those two. And the lessons they share through their amazing relationship come with reeling laughter.

*I believe one of the biggest questions about the sitcom, for those who pay attention, is why Penny and Sheldon never got together despite that amazing chemistry of two people who are spectacularly different but who extremely enjoy each other’s company.

P.S. This is the first post on my blog, but this is not the last time I will be writing about TBBT.

Habeeb X