This week’s episode of 30 Rock may have been the funniest one yet, and that’s saying a lot. In case you haven’t seen it (get thee to Hulu), it’s basically an episode of Tracy’s Wife’s reality show, called Queen of Jordan. The episode is more conceptual than most, acting as a parody of Bravo’s programming and the fleet of Real Housewives series. Community has experimented with conceptual episodes this year, including a faux documentary and claymation, but often a lot of humor is lost in favor of adding nuance to the concept and I get bored. But 30 Rock didn’t sacrifice any attentional to detail, and the funny quirks made me girl crush on Tina Fey harder than ever.

What was strange about my experience with watching Queen of Jordan was that despite finding it hilarious, I knew that because I never watch the shows it was mocking I was probably missing tons of precise attacks. Basically, I was watching it in one dimension – as a funny show – while missing the other dimension – as a critical commentary. I could understand the base level of its attack on The Real Housewives and other reality shows: Yeah, yeah they throw wine in each other’s faces to get attention; Yeah, yeah confessional areas have ridiculous props. But there was a lot I was missing without seeing the original material.

Was their attempt to paint Jack as gay and clumsy a reference to something? Was Kenneth’s mitten non sequitur another one? To a certain extent, I almost didn’t want to know because they were even funnier to me if they were totally random.

This is not the first time in life this has happened to me. When I was a kid, I loved the movie Austin Powers. I loved it so much I frequently wore a shirt that said “Yeah, baby!” to my fifth grade class. After watching it over and over, I slowly figured out that it was supposed to be a parody of James Bond movies. Call me dumb for not figuring that out, but I didn’t. I had never seen any James Bond movies, and this made me uncomfortable. What if a lot of the moments that I thought were blissfully random were actually calculated references to something I didn’t know about?

Now that I’m older and wiser and can buy my own beer, I’ve decided that media that are full of references that you don’t need to get in order to laugh are probably the best. There are so many mistakes people make using references that this feat is truly hard to pull off. Filling a show or even a song with references can instantly make it esoteric, hard to understand and even intimidating. To do this in a way that makes a reference that is not understood into a funny moment of seeming randomness takes a lot of ingenious writing. Plus, it’s a win/win scenario for all viewers. Clueless me just thinks it’s random and the savvy audience feels a sense of gratification in “being in on the joke.” Cheers, Tina Fey.

-Once Becky Lang’s boy roommates ate all her cheese and she stalked around the house asking, “Who ate my cheese?” One said, “Calm down, Liz Lemon” and she was very flattered.