There are community colleges, and then there is Greendale Community College.

Most community colleges offer practical courses designed to help students better their lives. You might find accounting, basic biology, introductory Spanish… the kind of classes that add credentials and open doors. Greendale offers those, too. It also offers a class called “Can I Fry That?” It offers a class about whether or not Nicolas Cage is good or bad. And it may or may not have once offered something called “When Is It OK to Shake a Baby?”

This is why we love Community.

For the uninitiated: Community is a sitcom that ran from 2009 to 2015 (five seasons on NBC, one on Yahoo Screen) centered on a ragtag study group at fictional Greendale Community College in Colorado. Created by Dan Harmon, who based the premise loosely on his own experiences at a real community college, the show stars Joel McHale as Jeff Winger, a disbarred lawyer who enrolls at Greendale to get an actual degree after it turns out his supposed Columbia University diploma was fraudulent. He’s surrounded by an ensemble of lovable misfits: pop culture obsessive Abed (Danny Pudi), anarchist activist Britta (Gillian Jacobs), overachiever Annie (Alison Brie), former football star Troy (Donald Glover), devout mother Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown), and elderly millionaire Pierce (Chevy Chase). Their campus adventures were presided over by the flamboyant, perpetually costumed Dean Pelton (Jim Rash).

The show made its name through sharp writing, meta-humor, and elaborate concept episodes. But running quietly underneath all of that was one of television’s most committed background gags: Greendale Community College’s absolutely, genuinely unhinged curriculum.

The Legitimate Courses (Briefly)

To be fair, Greendale isn’t entirely bereft of real academics. The study group’s very existence was born out of a Spanish class. Jeff invented a fake study group to spend time with Britta, and the rest is history. The show cycled through Spanish 101, 102, and the mention of Spanish 103 over the years. There were genuine offerings in Accounting, Biology, Chemistry, History, Anatomy, Statistics, Women’s Studies, Introduction to Film, and even a Fundamentals of Law class that Jeff eventually ended up teaching himself. Anthropology made an appearance. So did History of Ice Cream, which is technically still history.

The point is, if you needed actual credits, Greendale could provide them. It just didn’t stop there.

The “This Is Fine” Zone

Before we get to the truly unhinged stuff, there’s a middle tier worth acknowledging. Courses that aren’t exactly Ivy League material but could probably exist at a school somewhere without causing a formal inquiry.

Take Italian Wine Tasting. Jeff and Pierce signed up for it together in Season 2 (“Competitive Wine Tasting”), mostly because they spotted a beautiful woman in the class. This is, of course, the exact correct reason to sign up for Italian Wine Tasting. The class itself functioned more as a backdrop for relationship chaos than any actual viniculture education, but sure… it’s wine tasting. That exists.

Then there’s Pottery. In Season 1’s “Beginner Pottery,” Jeff convinces himself this will be the perfect easy-A blow-off class, right up until a fellow student named Rich proves to be inexplicably gifted at it and Jeff completely loses his mind with envy. The pottery professor, meanwhile, has exactly one rule: no reenacting the famous wheel scene from Ghost. He had a picture of Patrick Swayze with a red X through it made before Swayze died. The professor is insistent it was therefore not in poor taste. This is, again, a Greendale thing.

Sailing also technically appears in the course catalog. Except that Greendale’s nearest body of water is two hours away, so the sailing class was held in the school’s parking lot. With an actual boat. On concrete. Shirley took to the captaincy role with alarming enthusiasm while Pierce nearly drowned on dry land. Twice. Truly, “drowning in the Greendale parking lot” is the kind of sentence that only makes sense in context and barely makes sense even then.

Courses That Raise Questions

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Among Greendale’s offerings: Grifting. Just… grifting. There was a class on grifting. This is not a creative license interpretation of the course title. They taught students how to be better con artists. In a somewhat bleak observation about the institution, this might actually be one of the more immediately practical skills Greendale imparted.

PA Announcements is listed as a course, which means someone, somewhere, decided there was enough academic content in making school announcements to constitute a full class. The fact that Dean Pelton used the PA system mostly to invite students to events involving elaborate costumes or to make puns about geese suggests this curriculum was shaped from the top.

Fencing, Horseback Riding, Water Skiing, and Tap Dancing round out a physical education wing that suggests Greendale’s administration either had extremely eclectic personal hobbies or was simply throwing things at the wall. Phys Ed was a course. Physical Education Education was also, apparently, a course. One letter off and raising so many follow-up questions that it is perhaps better not to ask them.

Opinions is listed as a course. Not Critical Thinking. Not Introduction to Rhetoric. Opinions. There were presumably tests. One shudders to imagine the grading rubric.

The Hall of Fame

And then there are the classes that belong in a museum. Or possibly a courtroom.

“Nicolas Cage: Good or Bad?” aired as a central plot point in Season 5’s “Introduction to Teaching,” in which Abed signs up for this two-day course and becomes completely unraveled trying to determine where exactly Cage falls on the spectrum of acting quality. The episode is, unironically, a genuinely thoughtful riff on how Nicolas Cage defies conventional categorization as a performer… Troy’s observation that Cage “seemed scared to smell that flower but happy to get shot” remains one of the more accurate critical analyses of the man’s career ever put to television. Abed eventually emerges from the class in a full Nicolas Cage impression spiral, having concluded that people are essentially random and pointless. This is what happens when Greendale offers continuing education in film criticism.

“Who Indeed? A Critical Analysis of Who’s the Boss?“ was taught by a professor who had literally written the book on the subject… a real published academic text about the 1980s Tony Danza sitcom. In Season 2’s “Competitive Wine Tasting,” Abed enrolled expecting to settle, once and for all, the question of who the boss actually was in Who’s the Boss? He did settle it. He was right. The professor was wrong. Abed dismissed the class. This was the most decisive moment of academic clarity in Greendale’s history, which is either impressive or deeply depressing depending on how you look at it.

Ladders returned multiple times across the series… it appeared in the “Curriculum Unavailable” episode and came back in full force in Season 6’s appropriately titled “Ladders,” in which the professor drank on the job and then climbed a ladder. Presumably the syllabus covered at least some degree of ladder theory, though the show remains frustratingly vague on this point.

“Advanced Advanced Decomposition” suggests that somewhere along the way Greendale offered regular Advanced Decomposition and that enough students needed a follow-up. This is not a chemistry course. This is not a forensic science elective. This is a deep dive into decomposition so thorough it required a sequel class. One imagines the group project requirements were unique.

“Skull Fragments Collection” needs no additional commentary.

“Intro to Senselessness” feels almost like a mission statement.

And then the crown jewel, the piece de resistance, the course that most clearly summarizes everything Greendale Community College is and was and will always be… “When Is It OK to Shake a Baby?”

The fact that this course exists in the catalog implies a few things. First, that enough students at Greendale arrived without a settled answer to this question that someone felt compelled to address it formally. Second, that the answer is hopefully covered in the first session. Third, that the professor who designed this curriculum had to submit it for approval through some kind of academic committee, and that committee said yes.

Why It All Works

What makes Greendale’s curriculum so funny and so strangely endearing is that it’s never played purely as mockery. The show doesn’t just want you to laugh at how bad Greendale is. It wants you to love Greendale because of how strange it is, the same way you might love a hometown that has a bizarre annual festival and a mayor who takes it all completely seriously.

Dean Pelton’s relentless, slightly unhinged pride in his institution mirrors the show’s own affection for it. Greendale is where broken, directionless, overlooked people land and somehow, inexplicably, in between the parking lot sailing classes and the grifting seminars, those people become a family. The absurd curriculum is part of the texture of that world. Of course this is the kind of place where you can take a class on shaking babies. Of course this is a school that would hire a professor to spend two days meditating on Nicolas Cage. That’s who Greendale is.

Dan Harmon based the show on his experiences at Glendale Community College, and whatever liberties the writers took with the curriculum, they kept the emotional core of his experience: that you can end up somewhere that looks nothing like where you thought you were going, surrounded by people who don’t fit any plan you had and it can still be the most important place you’ve ever been.

Even if you spent part of your time there learning, definitively, that Angela was the boss.

Community is currently streaming on Peacock, and a feature film has been in development for Peacock as well. All six seasons are worth your time. Though be warned that the Nicolas Cage episode alone may permanently alter how you think about the man’s filmography.