How I Met Your Mother: The Yips

(S03E10) I am so happy to know that gyms become passé by the year 2030. I agree with Old Ted / Bob Saget's voice: They are silly things. Silly, silly things that make you sweat indoors in a boring environment for extremely high amounts of money. After all, a pair of walking or jogging shoes are cheap and the outdoors are free, and more interesting...

Anyway, do I dare say that this episode was funnier than "Slapsgiving?" Yes, I do dare. I think the reason this episode was so good could be summarized in one word: Barney. Whenever we delve into Barn's life, we always find gold. Tonight, given Barney's yips at the Victoria's Secret after-party, I think we skipped past gold and struck uranium.

Oh, Barney's yips were classic... from "Yeah, it's called I'm Gonna Get In Your Panties Incorporated," to telling a model who doesn't know much English that she has "very nice honkers," then pointing them out to her and goeing "Auoooga!" when the comment goes over her head.

But the best one is when he choked when holding his "legen... wait for it..." signature line, leading a model to think he was having a stroke. That is my Best Barneyism of the week.

He even went "goobody goobody goobody" to Heidi Klum. But her pep talk on how to get past the yips (or whatever made-up 20-letter German phrase she used for it) was a highlight of the night. By the way, did anyone notice that Ted was extremely smooth with all the models, including Ms. Klum (or Mrs. Seal... didn't Barney know she was married)? But he didn't get anything because of Barney. And what happened to Marshall? There are CBS publicity photos of him interacting with Klum and others, but those scenes must have been cut out.

As fun as all that was, the story of how Barn lost his virginity to Rhonda "The Manmaker" French might have been even better. We got nested flashbacks -- Rhoda telling Barney's mother about her conquests, using not-so-clever single-entendre -- Wayne Brady's return as Barney's brother James, and another glimpse of the wimpy, hemp-wearing, Coffee Shop Barney we met last year. It figures that James, who didn't quite know he was gay "all the way back" in 1998, would overcompensate on the macho side, equating everything to football and sports, when all he wanted to do was think of baseball players during sex (and not for the reason most men think of baseball during sex). "Hers is the only vagina for me. It's not scary at all" he tells The Manmaker when she wants him to pay her in a certain way for his request to deflower Barney.

As you'd expect, we had shifting perspectives and realities when it came to the deflowering. But when Barney shrugged off the yips by re-bedding Rhonda, there was only one perspective: she had her world rocked, and he was bored. At least we don't have to see Barney in a hoodie anymore.

The gym plot was minor, but had its funny moments, mainly when we saw Lily get stretched out from Marshall's perspective of doing seemingly thousands of sit-ups. I'm guessing the insane trainer is a take-off of the nutball trainers we see on reality shows like The Biggest Loser, but it wasn't particularly funny. Except, of course, when Lily told her "You're fired, bitch!" over the phone.

Ted and Robin's pieces of the gym story were better. It seems fitting, given Robin's alpha-male tendencies, to see her not only butch it up at the gym but sweat and grunt as she lifted free weights. She may be skinny, but she's a lot more man than Ted probably is. "I want to get super strong so I can punch you in the face!" she tells Barney when he tells the group about why he's a gym member: to invest in women who are trying to lose weight ("They fat!" he tells Ted). Did the grunting and sweating really kill Ted's lingering sexual tension with Robin (and, conversely, did Ted's straining with the medicine ball kill Robin's desire)? We'll see...

More fun stuff:

• The response to the loss of sexual tension: a hand wave and the word "Gone."
• The Victoria's Secret tie-in wasn't exactly subtle, given the ad for the fashion show CBS put on right before the tag and the credits.
• I haven't seen Stephanie Faracy (Rhonda) in a while. According to IMDb, she was in an episode of Ugly Betty this year, so she's still around. She's guest starred in more shows than even Maggie Wheeler...
• "This isn't a regular season game," said Barney about the VS after-party. "This is the World Series." I wonder why he uses so many sports analogies....
• Marshall to Lily: "You'll always be my sugar." I love when Marshall gets all Barry White with Lily.
• I wonder if the beer hat James was wearing was just part of Barney's retelling of his deflowering or did James actually wear that thing in an effort to overcompensate? I liked how he called having sex with women "gross" but felt it had to be done.
• "I rose like a phoenix from her mentholated bosom" is one of my favorite lines of the year.
• Ted's had some creative excuses to not work out, huh? I'd have just gotten a massage every day and forgot about making excuses. The extra expense would have been worth it.

Bays and Thomas and company did a very nice job with this one. Let's hope we get another Barney story or two before we run out of episodes.