Jack rocks the vote, manipulating a congressional election to help a particular candidate, thereby leveraging advantage for the network. Meanwhile, a perfect pair of new jeans gives Liz confidence; Tracy organizes a Golden Globe event with Jenna's help.
Five-act structure sustains 87 jokes at 3.66-per-minute velocity without losing character coherence.
Directed by Michael Engler · Written by Ron Weiner
WAR
159.8
Wins Above Replacement
“Brooklyn Without Limits” ranks #13 of 138 30 Rock episodes on the Humor Index, scoring 100.0 — Elite. The episode packs 90 scored jokes at 3.8 per minute, averaging 7.9 on craft and 7.7 on impact, with Steve Austin landing the most laughs. Every joke is ranked below with its individual craft and impact scores.
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Top Jokes
Jack: Halliburton. In the mid-'90s, they found themselves with a surplus of canvas waterboarding hoods, so they had sweatshops make them into messenger bags to sell to outer-borough idiots.
Jack Dark/Subversive Setup/Punchline ★ Rewatch Jack: It's not handmade in USA. It's pronounced hond-made in oosa. The hond people are a Vietnamese slave tribe, and USA is their island prison. They made your jeans. You know how they get the stitching so small? Orphans.
Jack Dark/Subversive Escalation Character Comedy ★ Rewatch Tracy: I trust award shows. They tell me how much to care about different dead people.
Tracy Character Comedy Observational ★ Rewatch Tracy (in film): Your mother exploded.
Steve Austin: Goo goo gaa gaa, Jack. That's the theme of my campaign. Renaissance means rebirth. I want to usher in the rebirth of this country. That's why the theme of all my campaign commercials is 'I'm a baby.'
All Jokes — 90 analyzed
Show all ↓ Hide ↑ Liz Lemon: Trying on jeans is my favorite thing. Maybe later I can get a paps mirror from an old male doctor.
Liz Lemon Character Comedy Deadpan/Understatement Jenna: It's huge with all the young people. I mean... all the us.
Jenna Character Comedy Irony/Sarcasm Liz Lemon · Jenna: Why are there straightjackets everywhere? Because before this was a clothing store, it was a mental hospital. It's winky and fun, Liz.
Jenna: I swear to Kaballah monster.
Jenna Character Comedy Absurdist Jenna: Boy on the bottom, girl on the top.
Jenna Misdirection Character Comedy Jenna: O.M. God, those jeans are zing!
Jenna Character Comedy Wordplay/Pun Liz Lemon: This online slang dictionary says it's short for 'amazing.' Or it's a club drug made from a tooth whitener. Either way you win.
Liz Lemon: No. Burn them. Burn them!
Jack · Regina Bookman (via news clip): Kabletown still has an auxiliary button on their remote. What is that for? It just makes the screen go blue.
Jack: It's not your fault nobody watched America's Next Top Black Guy.
Jack Dark/Subversive Irony/Sarcasm ★ Rewatch Jonathan: I thought you said you didn't need any more friends.
Jonathan Deadpan/Understatement Character Comedy Tracy: Zing leg-tubes, Liz. Vunderhinder!
Tracy Character Comedy Wordplay/Pun Callback Liz Lemon: Brooklyn Without Limits — locations in Gay Town, White Harlem, and the Van Beardswick section of Brooklyn.
Liz Lemon: These jeans totally make up for all the times I took a long, hot shower because I was bored.
Tracy · Jenna · Liz Lemon: Now we both have amazing butts. Make that all three of us. Jenna, a word. Specifically, the word 'talking.'
Tracy: I was in a film called Hard to Watch. And the pundits think I have a chance at an Oscar, and I just learned about air quotes.
Tracy Character Comedy Meta/Self-Referential Jenna: I talked about your movie with my therapist last week for 20 hours.
Jenna Character Comedy Escalation Jenna: My exercise video is dropping soon. It's called Jenna Gets Hard.
Jenna Misdirection Character Comedy Tracy: And when the time is right... Be bad at snapping. Got it.
Tracy Character Comedy Misdirection Tracy · Jenna: I'm not an expert at morality, but isn't that wrong? You're asking me?
Steve Austin: Actually, I go by Steve Austin. That way people see my name on ballots, they think I'm the wrestler, and they vote for me.
Steve Austin: I don't believe in parties. I don't join 'em, and I never get invited to 'em... Hint, hint.
Steve Austin: Goo goo gaa gaa, Jack. That's the theme of my campaign. Renaissance means rebirth. I want to usher in the rebirth of this country. That's why the theme of all my campaign commercials is 'I'm a baby.'
Steve Austin: My name is Steve Austin, and I'm the manager of a local paintball facility. I will clean out Washington, like it's the bathroom of a paintball facility.
Steve Austin: Vote Steve Austin. And if you're blind, I am the wrestler.
Steve Austin: Dwarves, tiny buildings... Pizza bagels for lunch.
Steve Austin: What happens inside a man's own rain poncho at a minor league baseball game is his own business.
Jack · Steve Austin: Jack is handed a baby rattle and says 'Goo goo gaa gaa' with visible discomfort.
Jenna · Kenneth: Kenneth is our human Sushi platter, and I'm doing a dry run so everything will be perfect... For my friend Tracy.
Kenneth: Lying perfectly still reminds me of hiding under our porch during a hill people rampage.
Kenneth Character Comedy Dark/Subversive Tracy: I should get a chafing dish and fill it with my underwear in case some Saudi guys show up.
Tracy Character Comedy Absurdist Liz Lemon: You, the person who is still jealous of the attention baby Jessica got, are helping Tracy win an award for acting?
Tracy: I trust award shows. They tell me how much to care about different dead people.
Tracy Character Comedy Observational ★ Rewatch Jenna: If they could be bribed, I would have won a Golden Globe for my lifetime original movie 'Sister, Can You Spare a Breast?' So you've tried this before? And they were so offended, they banned me for life.
Jenna Character Comedy Setup/Punchline Jenna: Just like I did to my niece when she tried to sing at our family's Christmas party.
Jenna Character Comedy Dark/Subversive Liz Lemon · Jenna: I don't know which of you to be more disappointed in. Me, silly. I'm more aware of what I'm doing.
Jack: Lemon, those jeans make you look like a Mexican sports reporter.
Jack Character Comedy Deadpan/Understatement Steve Austin: You probably know me from the future, where I am the president of the United States.
Steve Austin: The rebirth of America starts now. Waaaaah! My name is Steve Austin, and if you're senile, yes, I am the six-million dollar man! Paid for by the broken vending machine at the paintball place.
Steve Austin Character Comedy Absurdist Escalation ★ Rewatch Callback Steve Austin: I got a zappos box coming today, and there's nobody there to pick it up because my wife left me for my twin brother. Can I use your phone? Yeah, I got a cell phone. I walk around all day with a CIA tracking device in my pocket.
Liz Lemon · Jack: Okay, that guy is bananas. Obviously he should not be in congress... What are you doing? He's running against Regina Bookman... I need him.
Jack: You're being awfully high and mighty for someone who once claimed her husband drowned so she could get out of a gym contract.
Jack Character Comedy Dark/Subversive Liz Lemon: And I live like a cowboy by buying quality, locally made jeans. Also by eating beans out of a can due to impatience.
Liz Lemon Character Comedy Deadpan/Understatement Liz Lemon: But hey, it's not all bad, 'cause you get to watch me walk away.
Liz Lemon Character Comedy Irony/Sarcasm ★ Rewatch Tracy: Well, definitely the foreign films. Like the political ones where you think there'll be no boobies, then bam! Boobies.
Tracy Character Comedy Absurdist Tracy: Tracy, what is an actor? I think the better question is, what isn't an actor? A lamp. A couch. That mirror. Or a hidden pistol.
Tracy Character Comedy Absurdist Jenna: A special voters-only screening of Hard to Watch, based on the book Stone Cold Bummer, by Manipulate.
Jenna Character Comedy Absurdist ★ Rewatch Tracy (in film): Now the only thing I use a football for is as a toilet.
Tracy (in film): Funny thing to happen to a guy named 'Lucky.'
Steve Austin · Jack: No paved roads. Rum used as an anesthetic. Legalized slavery. All right. Some good pieces.
Jack: My generation never votes. It interferes with talking about ourselves all the time.
Jack Observational Character Comedy Jack: It's not handmade in USA. It's pronounced hond-made in oosa. The hond people are a Vietnamese slave tribe, and USA is their island prison. They made your jeans. You know how they get the stitching so small? Orphans.
Jack Dark/Subversive Escalation Character Comedy ★ Rewatch Jack: Halliburton. In the mid-'90s, they found themselves with a surplus of canvas waterboarding hoods, so they had sweatshops make them into messenger bags to sell to outer-borough idiots.
Jack Dark/Subversive Setup/Punchline ★ Rewatch Liz Lemon · Jack: The liberal media would have told me about this. There's no such thing. The New York Times is owned by NYT incorporated, which is owned by Altheon Ballistic Dynamics, which is owned by the Murdoch family, who are owned... by Halliburton.
Store employee: Do you know who owns this place? Halliburton, bitch. So what?
Store employee: Oh, so gay men can't be conservative? You're so 'norant. That's short for ignorant.
Jack: Che Guevara... If only you knew what this place stood for. His great grandfather was Domingo Halliburton.
Jack Dark/Subversive Irony/Sarcasm ★ Rewatch Callback Steve Austin: Of course you know Ed Perlman. Perlman, isn't that last name Jew...
Jack · Steve Austin: New strategy. I'll raise the money and you stay in here and cultivate an aura of mystery. Ooh, good idea. Maybe I'll add to it by making some mysterious sounds. Oooohhh... Yeeee-eeee...
Tracy (in film): Oowwww... I'll go to jail in Deshawn's place 'cause he's my brother. Don't say nothin'.
Tracy (in film): Your mother exploded.
Jenna: That movie gave me drunk-in-the-bathtub face.
Jenna Character Comedy Deadpan/Understatement Jack: Like Anne Coulter's underwear. Crunchy on the outside, right-wing nut job on the inside.
Jack Irony/Sarcasm Dark/Subversive Liz Lemon: I'm skyping later with Carol, and we like to dance together. And I want to do this 'back it up' move that I haven't been able to pull off since high school.
Jack: No. I believe in Steve Austin and his plan to put a casino on the moon. Then I believe in Halliburton.
Jack Character Comedy Absurdist Tracy: Sabotage? But I'm the one who does that to me.
Tracy Character Comedy Deadpan/Understatement Tracy: Wait, great like good, or grate like the thing I dropped my asthma inhaler down the other day?
Tracy Character Comedy Wordplay/Pun Jenna: And when you do, I'll be furious. Like waking up next to Rob Schneider furious.
Jenna Character Comedy Setup/Punchline Liz Lemon · Tracy: In real life, you have to make compromises. No, Liz Lemon, it's like the thing I said in another movie I made. Compromises are for lesser souls. Die, werewolf zombie!
Jack · Liz (reaction): I would hit that. Too small.
Steve Austin: Lesbian Mario brothers.
Jack: That is the most unflattering item of clothing I have ever seen you wear. And I'm including 2008's turtleneck with smiley-face vest.
Jack Character Comedy Deadpan/Understatement Liz Lemon: In my shorteralls I found a bag of Taste-tations, a discontinued chocolate hard candy.
Liz Lemon Character Comedy Deadpan/Understatement Liz Lemon: And not just because in my shorteralls I found a bag of Tastetations, a discontinued chocolate hard candy.
Liz Lemon Character Comedy Deadpan/Understatement ★ Rewatch Liz Lemon: Sometimes you gotta do the right thing, even when the wrong thing would be a whole lot easier. Die, werewolf zombie.
Liz Lemon Callback Character Comedy ★ Rewatch Callback Liz Lemon: Die, werewolf zombie. (repeated by Liz as a moral lesson)
Liz Lemon Callback Character Comedy ★ Rewatch Callback Jack: Good God, Lemon! I will never allow casinos on the moon!
Jack Character Comedy Irony/Sarcasm ★ Rewatch Callback Steve Austin: Friend or foe?
Jack: Damn you, shorteralls!
Jack Character Comedy Reaction Beat ★ Rewatch Callback Steve Austin: Americans are a simple but powerful people, which is why I have written a new national anthem. ♪ Ooga booga big / ooga booga strong / I am going to sing my ooga booga song ♪
Tracy: Wow! That's worse than the speech my grandpa made when my cousin married a Japanese girl.
Tracy Character Comedy Dark/Subversive Jack: As if that weren't enough, Austin was mocked in Jay Leno's monologue tonight. The kingmaker has spoken. It's over.
Jack Irony/Sarcasm Deadpan/Understatement Jack: Letting morality get in the way of making money... I might as well go and be a teacher.
Jack Character Comedy Deadpan/Understatement Jonathan · Jack: Would you like some cake? Yeah. Cake boy!
Steve Austin: I believe ketchup bottles should be 500% larger. We are all responsible for heroes becoming terrible. But what kind of jail are these alien prisoners being held in?
Steve Austin: We are all responsible for heroes becoming terrible.
Steve Austin: But what kind of jail are these alien prisoners being held in?
Steve Austin: We should bring back slavery! And they're backed by big corporations. Animals can govern themselves.
Steve Austin: Taken out of context. It was exactly what I meant.
Steve Austin: As God is my witness, we will build casinos on the moon!
Steve Austin Character Comedy Absurdist Callback ★ Rewatch Callback 