Introduction to the Humanities: CommuniCon 2013

For two days at Los Angeles City College last week, fans of NBC’s Community gathered to celebrate a show that has meant so much and defined so much of their understanding of television and the media.

Organized by a fan after the success of PixelDrip’s “Six Seasons and an Art Show” over the summer in Los Angeles, the con was designed to bring fans of the show together with some of the creative team.

Saturday morning started out with a writers’ panel, featuring a few of the current writers (Andy Bobrow, Megan Ganz, Tim Saccardo, and Stephen Basilone) and Chris McKenna, who recently left the show. In an hour, the writers laid down some hilarious stories about Chevy Chase (including one about how someone had come up with a confused line for Pierce just before Chevy said it in a table read) and also discussed the writing process of some of the more difficult episodes. There’s nothing quite like learning that one of your favorite shows is made in shifts of nearly 18 hour days, but it does produce some comedic goal. One episode that has never been written involved the study group being forced to watch the entire Nicolas Cage filmography in one night.

Following that panel, the writers battled groups of fans in a trivia contest. In the end, the fans were victorious, and the audience had a great time.

In the back of the room for the convention, artists were happy to sell their prints, including a few seen in the “Six Seasons and an Art Show”. At the end of my two days, I came away with a set of Valentine’s Day cards, an Inspector Spacetime poster, an awesome depiction of the cast, and some 8-Bit versions of both Annie and Jeff from Digital Estate Planning.

After lunch, some of the smaller, but not less important, characters had a panel called “No Small Parts”, featuring Erik Charles Nielsen, Charlie Koontz, Marcy McCusker, Danielle Kaplowitz and Brisco Diggs. There’s nothing to compare this panel to, save if you’ve ever wanted to work in background and wanted the lowdown on what it was like to be part of a show in a recognizable way, but not one to get too much attention (not that any of these actors doesn’t deserve additional praise).

The culminating piece of Saturday’s event was a conversation with Dan Harmon. If you’ve ever been around his Tumblr, you know how he can talk and this one lived up to the hype, and to the humanity that I think captured what Harmon set out to do in creating Community.

Just before that panel, Gillian Jacobs and Yvette Nicole Brown stopped by as well, happy to take photos with fans as they could. In fact, all the creative teams behind the show were happy to take photos or sign posters for fans all day long. During one break, Harmon had a crowd outside the main room as the end of the “No Small Parts” guests were signing and taking photos.

A fabulous costume contest ended the day, with some truly exceptional displays from so many fans.

On Sunday, the team from PixelDrip showed the documentary that chronicled the creation and effort into the art show last summer, and the panel after highlighted by the team in charge of creating the show, the production team and at least one artist who contributed to the show.

The end of the entire weekend was set off with a series of fan testimonials about what Community has meant to them and how much people gain from the show.

For those who couldn’t make it to CommuniCon, fear not. There are talks to organize others later, all across the country if possible. Though, the group of people at the first will be a hard group to tackle: I don’t know if any other iteration can bring the man who dubs the show into Swedish, but I hope another one tries.

Viva the Human Beings!