Dr. Hawkeye Pierce on 30 Rock

In The Mad Peck’s seminal article “How J.R. Got Out of the Air Force and What the Derricks Mean” (a title too faux-Freudian for my tastes) it is effectively argued that Major Nelson, the astronaut from I Dream of Jeannie once made a wish to be a Texas oil millionaire, and through Jeannie’s magics attained this wish, becoming transformed into J.R. Ewing on the popular prime time soap opera Dallas. The argument is that for audiences, a popular television actor, who inhabits several different roles over several different series, provides a kind of continuity that links those characters together, despite the differences of genre, format and tone.

In other words, James T. Kirk is T.J. Hooker is Denny Crane, on a sideways timeline that cuts across the three shows.

30 Rock concerns the zany goings on behind the scenes of a Saturday Night Live-like comedy television series. On the season finale of 30 Rock, Alan Alda continues his guest star turn as Jack Donaghy's liberal college professor father. A subplot concerns Tracy Jordan's delusions about his high school days. He remembers a drug dealer telling him to cut open a kid named "Baby." In truth, the drug dealer was Tracy's biology teacher and "Baby" was a frog Tracy was too afraid to dissect. Confronted with the truth Tracy begins to cry "There was no Baby, I was chicken!"

At this point Alan Alda's character shows up and says "A grown man crying about babies and chickens? I thought this was a comedy show."

That was the funniest line I've heard on TV this year. In the series finale of M*A*S*H in the episode entitled "Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen," Alan Alda's character Dr. Hawkeye Pierce has a nervous break down. Hawkeye berated a woman into smothering her crying baby to avoid being killed by enemy soldiers. Unable to deal with his actions, he mentally he replaces the baby with a chicken. In discussion with Sidney, the psychiatrist, Hawkeye has a dramatic, overacting crying breakthrough and screams, "It wasn't a chicken, IT WAS A BABY!"

Now, I've heard from some people that this self-referential in-joke was obscure. Obscure? That episode of M*A*S*H remains the highest rated episode of any show in television history. You might not get it, or might be too young, but it was hardly obscure. It was brilliant and smart and funny as hell.