In an early How I Met Your Mother episode, Ted repeatedly drunk-dials Robin, the latest “love of his life,” from his favorite bar. Much to her credit, she keeps picking up the phone. During one of their calls, Ted plays a song called “Voices” from the jukebox, belting along the lyrics to confess his love.
The band’s name is Cheap Trick, and oh, what a cheap trick it is to win a woman’s affections that way—but it works, at least according to Ted’s best friend Marshall. Until Ted falls off a table and now has more pressing issues to tend to, that is.
Much later in the show, playboy Barney reveals his many well-documented strategies to seduce women to Lily, another friend, who tries convince him to abandon his lustful ways. “You can’t go back to these cheap tricks,” she says. “Cheap tricks?!” Barney is offended. “Not one of these is a cheap trick…except for ‘The Cheap Trick’!” That play in particular involves, you guessed it, dressing up as the bass player of the band Cheap Trick—and then hoping to find a groupie.
What’s interesting is that, though named for what they are, all these “cheap tricks” are actually kind of endearing. Or, at the very least, the show manages to present them that way. It made me think about the crutches, hacks, and shortcuts we, too, sometimes can’t help but rely on.
It feels like a cheap trick to write about my coffee mug, a quote from a book, or, well, the Cheap Trick scene from How I Met Your Mother—but on some days, I need these props in order to move forward. We all do. We copy a great slide design theme we found on the internet. We repeat a good idea we overheard during our coffee break. We apply our best wits to the inputs we have available right now, ship them, and move on.
That’s not a cheap trick, I think. That is just life, and us trying our best to live it—and, like a drunk person confessing their love through a song, though far from perfect, it is oddly worth commending.