In honor of the 6th birthday, of this, our humble blog, I wanted to share with you some clips from NBC’s great comedy 30 Rock, which have some great classics content.
In the first, Alec Baldwin—faced with the prospect of a business model that produces nothing, but simply collects money (a brilliant skewering of Comcast)—demonstrates the benefits of a pop culture education:
‘”And Alexander wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.” Hans Gruber, Die Hard.’ Jack Donaghy, 30 Rock.
That’s a non-classical non-quotation we dealt with just over three years ago, in the Pretense of a Classical Education:
Quoth Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber in Die Hard,
‘When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.’ Benefits of a classical education.
Read more to find out why it’s not.
Elsewhere on 30 Rock, Alec Baldwin’s character is at it again, this time with a bit of cryptic Latin. Taking the resident handsome actor under his own handsome wing, Jack Donaghy plots this bit of revenge against the nerds of the writing staff, retaliation for a prank they’d pulled. It’s a classic 80s style Preps vs. Nerds showdown:
‘Surculus et pruna. Surculus et pruna.’ I won’t translate it, but it does have a suggestive meaning. It’s the Latin form of a code word in his collegiate secret society, and though its revelation brings him a bit of danger, he has the last laugh. The handsome always do.