Welcome! We’re interrupting your regularly scheduled Moments of Joy for this special presentation – the First Annual Spunky Awards! We’re looking back at the most notable shows, events, characters, performers, and fruit-based injuries of 2010. So if you wouldn’t mind helping us roll out the red carpet, we’ve got a lot of winners to honor. And in some cases, mock. (Hey, Brendon!) Enjoy yourselves, and we’ll see you at the afterparty!
COMEBACK OF THE YEAR – The mustache. Yes, we at spunkybean consider ourselves experts in the field of manly facial hair. And this was the best year for mustaches on record. No longer a signifier of creepiness, this year’s mustaches were sympathetic, sometimes even heroic. Leading the charge was, of course, Parks and Recreation’s Ron Swanson. And considering that Parks also gave us the faintly-mustachioed Tom Haverford and Andy Dwyer, we think we know why Mark Brendanawicz left the Parks department – his unadorned lip just couldn’t hang with the big guys. We also spotted mustaches (sometimes accompanied by a beard or goatee, sometimes as a standalone) on Dan Stark of The Good Guys, Lost’s Frank Lapidus and Sayid, Louis C.K., Walter White of Breaking Bad, Kenny Powers, Shore Leave, Officer Jay of The Sarah Silverman Program, and Conan O’Brien, among others. The mustache is no longer a visual shorthand to indicate that a guy owns a windowless van – the mustache is back, and it’s proud.
