The Joke That Was Too Dumb To Include On The Good Place
Contains spoilers for The Good Place
Apparently, there are some lines The Good Place just wouldn't cross.
Throughout the run of NBC's philosophical, sweet, and hilarious sitcom The Good Place, created by Mike Schur, the show's most consistently lovable yet dumbest afterlife resident was always Jason Mendoza, played to perfection by newcomer Manny Jacinto. When audiences met Jason during the show's very first season, they, along with other residents of the fictitious Good Place, meet him as Jianyu, a Buddhist monk whose vow of silence extends beyond death. However, it quickly turns out that Jason, a dirtbag Floridian DJ, is only masquerading as a monk because he doesn't actually belong in the Good Place at all.
As all Good Place fans now know, Jason not belonging in the Good Place didn't matter, since he and everyone else were actually in the Bad Place being tortured. Ultimately, as the series went on and Jason joined forces with Tahani (Jameela Jamil), Chidi (William Jackson Harper), Eleanor (Kristen Bell), reformed demon Michael (Ted Danson), and a being who is neither a robot nor a girl, Janet (D'Arcy Carden), Jason remained his ridiculous and dimwitted self — all while gaining real emotional depth, going out of his way to care for and support the other members of "Team Cockroach."
Thanks to Jason's limited intellect, some of the show's dumbest and funniest moments often fell to him — from his unsettling obsession with Molotov cocktails to the moment he announced that he was "born in a swimming pool" to every time he shouted names of the Jacksonville Jaguars (switching between Blake Bortles and Nick Foles when appropriate). However, there was still one joke Jason was supposed to make that simply crossed the line for Schur and his team.
Jason's dumbest joke never made it to air
Despite the fact that Jason was incredibly dopey on both Earth and in the afterlife, there was still one joke simply deemed too stupid even for Mr. Mendoza: one where he confessed to not knowing what a farm is.
As Schur told Entertainment Weekly, "I was doing a rewrite of someone's script and someone mentioned the word farm, and I wrote in a joke for Jason where he said, 'What's a farm?' When we were going through the script, I was like, 'Obviously we have to change this. This is insane.' And the [writers] were like, 'No! What are you doing? That's hilarious!' And I was like, 'I know he's a total bonehead, but we can't say he doesn't know what a farm is. That's not a person who's uneducated or unworldly — that's a person missing 12 years of his life because he has some disease.'"
However, though Jason never asks what a farm is on the series, it's still canon in The Good Place that he's not up to speed on the ways of agriculture. It even became a running joke — much to Schur's annoyance — during production. Schur explained, "The room decided, against my will, that it was canon — even if it never got on the show — that Jason doesn't know what a farm is. And just to troll me, every time someone wrote a script, they would write in a line where Jason expressed the fact that he didn't know what a farm was. It drove me so crazy."
Whether or not Jason Mendoza ever learned what a farm is, Manny Jacinto's character will live on forever in all his idiotic glory even now that The Good Place is gone.
The first three seasons of The Good Place are available to stream on Netflix, and the final season is streaming on both Hulu and NBC.