Once a day, until Dec. 25, we'll be highlighting a specific small, good thing that happened in popular culture this year. And we do mean small: a moment or image from a film or TV show, a panel from a comic, a brief exchange from a podcast, or a passage from a book.
"Jiggle television," it was called: a kind of programming popular in the 1970s and '80s that highlighted the physical attributes of its female stars. Think Charlie's Angels, Three's Company — shows that made sure their nubile leads found themselves in bikinis and lingerie as often as possible.
Decades later, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend co-creator and star Rachel Bloom answered that trend with a musical number that took the concept of "jiggle television" to its natural conclusion.
The song "Heavy Boobs", and its accompanying dance moves, are not meant to titillate 14-year-old boys, but to demonstrate, in a defiantly and deliberately unsexy way, the sundry practical challenges faced by those who look at the world from behind a set of double-Ds.
In the process, she tosses out fun facts concerning the literary output of the song's titular objects, the density of astronomical objects, and offers up the following, in a laudable effort to inform and educate:
Here is a list
Of all of the objects
That I can hold
Under
My boobs:
Stapler
Ten pencils
Paperback copy of Arabian Nights
Dog bone
Remote control
Hardback copy of Wuthering Heights
Previous Pop Culture Advent Calendar Entries
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
