I couldn't agree more. The idea seemed to have been "Hey, lets take a joke that was just luke warm at best to begin with, and then over use it in an attempt to wring every single spec of amusement out of it until our audience gets physically sick when they hear it"
It is kinda brilliant though, the way they set it up.
If you don’t like the joke, you can always fall back to the meta level: this is a 40-something dad recalling how dumb and cringe-worthy he and his friends were in their 20s.
Yeah it's not really supposed to be "funny". It's just Barney being corny because that's who the character is. (When he's not being a sociopath with women.)
Sometimes that can happen with a joke - like it's kind of mid when you first tell it, then you keep pushing it and everyone hates it, then at a certain point something breaks and it becomes the funniest thing ever for some inexplicable reason. Not saying that's what happened with with this joke necessarily, but it is possible! Old Family Guy used to do it quite well sometimes I think.
Same. Every episode I watched was trying too hard to make the guys relatable because "look at what dorks they are when it's just the guys! Haha! Isn't this funny?!"
Also it felt like a much worse version of Friends.