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LeBron James Is Now A Bad Sitcom Joke

LeBron James is an easy target. After garnering a tremendous amount of hype coming out of high school, he single-handedly returned a struggling franchise to prominence before famously ripping its heart out (and ripping the heart out of the sports-depressed city it called home).

So even before he crapped the bed in crunch time during the 2011 NBA Finals, the vultures were circling.

After the Heat’s loss to the Mavericks, late night TV was mean. The internet was even meaner. LeBron’s late-game failure soon became an acceptable thing to be a dick about, so much so that even genial NBA legends ripped him. And now, to make sure that the “LeBron is a 4th quarter pussycat” joke comes full circle, the writers of ABC’s Happy Endings are jumping on a bandwagon that’s already been jumped on by everyone else.

Are they late to the party? Totally. Like three months late. But that’s usually the case with sitcoms: they let edgier mediums take the first shots, then make their way in once the water’s been tested. With LeBron, that water has been tested, and it’s the perfect temperature: come on in everybody, the guy’s a joke! And a safe one, at that!

So if I’m LeBron James, I’m not making any more Twitter lists of people I hate. I’m DVRing primetime comedies, and counting the shitty jokes they make about me. Then I’m watching them, and watching them, and watching them, until the shittiness inspires me to be less shitty in the fourth quarter.

Because if I don’t do that, sooner or later, I’m a joke on Last Man Standing. And there’s no coming back from that shit.

Follow Dan Fogarty on Twitter.