I have been ignoring Parks and Recreation in favor of writing about The Office, 30 Rock, or Community, but no longer. The show was uneven and awkward last season, but this season has been absolutely hysterical, and I can’t go another week without mentioning it. Last night’s episode, “The Camel,” had both a stellar main plot as well as one of the silliest, funniest throwaway subplots I have ever seen on the show.

Donna's Last Supper, Gerry's mosaic, April's postmodernist multimedia piece, and the final Frankenstein mural

After decades of controversy and defacement, the city of Pawnee, Indiana finally decides to replaces its city hall mural for something that doesn’t feature Native Americans being run over by a train. Each department of government gets an opportunity to submit a mural design for consideration, and in typically enthusiastic fashion, Leslie Knope decides that the Parks Department needs to win. April submits a multimedia performance art mural featuring dead rats from a Pawnee dumpster and a man in a life-sized hamster wheel running ceaselessly. Donna offers a mural of Da Vinci’s Last Supper, with the apostles heads swapped out for famous people from Indiana. Gerry submits a mural that would be perfect, would win hands down, a mosaic of Pawnee citizens’ faces that forms the shape of the Pawnee City Hall. Leslie immediately rejects him because he accidentally says “murinal.”

Comedic representations of art criticism can go a few different ways. Either it can be self-deprecating, awkward, and have a tiny grain of compassion, like the strongest Christopher Guest films, or it can come off as pretentious and self-loathing (think Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip). No question, Parks and Recreation is the former. Particularly once the department starts to create the eponymous “Camel” by randomly combining all of their murals into one, it’s obvious you can read this as a gentle joke on the process of writing television. It cannot be easy to create a coherent, quality piece of television with multiple writers, each with different agendas and senses of humor. As Leslie explains, “It’s like if you got Michelangelo, and Andy Warhol, and Jackson Pollock, and Jim Davis from Garfield to do one painting. Imagine how good that painting would be!” But this allegory, which could have been bitter or too obvious, comes off as a little love-note to the process, especially given that Parks Department love the camel they produce.

The entire episode was great, but two subplots really pushed it into excellence. The first one was really just a part of the mural

"I've stared at it for five hours now."

plotline, but deserves its own mention. After paying a poor art student to make him a mural, Tom Haverford initially scoffs at the abstract expressionist Kandinsky/Miro knockoff, but slowly becomes overwhelmed by it. (“A piece of art caused me to have an emotional reaction. Is that…normal?”) It was a pretty obvious little story to follow, but watching him weep over the painting by the end of the episode made it worth it. And then of course, the entire Andy and Ron Swanson shoe shine story: silly, very slightly homophobic, and so funny I got hiccups. I really recommend you watch it. Which is what I am doing right now, for the second time.