Ordi—why wait for it—nary! Ordinary!

Only one show has the power to bring me from horribly ruptured in one moment, to slamming my keyboard in sheer delight in the next. This show, right now, is How I Met Your Mother. And this is Barney’s Bro-Mitzvah.

Let’s break it down.

Barney, for his epic bachelor party (I think it could have been “bro”chelor party), gave his four friends ultra-specific guidelines to follow—in near-Hebrew font, no less! While I adjusted to the dradle-drabble, Barney left Robin, Ted, Marshall, and Lily with no real room for error or surprise.

We’ll get to their fix later.

“Precious little love-love.”
“First of all, it’s wuv-wuv.”

-- Robin and Barney

Ted and Marshall kidnap Barney before a dinner he’d planned with his fiancé and mother to go to Atlantic City for his party. And things go just about as well as you’d guess from someone that had to bail on their future bride to go gamble with bros.  I.e., the very opposite of well.

The two wingmen sort of follow Barney’s list, though not in the ways Barney (nor I) expected. They pulled stunts like:

> Reserving a motel room outside Atlantic City,

> Ordering a balloon “contortionist”; a clown,

> Inviting the wrong Karate Kid, Ralph Macchio, to the party instead of the true Karate Kid,

> Hiring Quinn as the stripper. Yes, that Quinn,

> and forcing Barney into losing eighty-thousand dollars in Chinese gambling money.

Barney doesn’t learn until the reception at his apartment that his friends were actually planning the only thing they learned from him for sure. A play.
This one is called: The Barney.

In essence, The Barney means giving this soon-to-be-former bachelor a night he’ll never forget, not by giving him the BEST night, but by giving him the WORST.

They even did a stellar job of delivering, in the end, the “true” Karate Kid.

It was the clown. The clown was the Karate Kid.
Commence keyboard smashing.