I’m sure you’ve all this feeling while watching a movie or a TV-show. The actor that has suddenly appeared in front of you seems somewhat familiar, but you can’t really point your finger on where you’ve seen him before.

That happened to me last night while watching Buffy, season 3, “The Beauty and the Beasts” (a good episod, but that’s not the point).  The principal had decided that Buffy had to go to the school counselor in order to make sure that she wasn’t going to go completely postal on them. This’ mostly due to the fact that the principal is a world class jackass with a revenge motive.

But we’re digressing. The counselor that Buffy meats is played by an actor I’ve seen somewhere before. The wheels in my mind start turning, taking his picture and matching it against mental photos of actors in other shows.  I guess it took me a whole minute to figure out his origin. And then I laughed.

If you’ve seen season 5 of the NBC show “Scrubs”, you might remember a reappearing doctor named “Hooch”. Like every other doctor in “Sacred Heart”, Hooch isn’t completely sane. Turk and J.D. actually makes several jokes where they prove and later on state that “Hooch is crazy”. “Hooch” plays a counselor in Buffy, a counselor who has as his foremost work task to treat  crazy people. Later on in the episode “Hooch” is killed by a crazy person.

The air is thick with something… but with what? Irony, surrealism or both?