“Community” 8 tonight, NBC

“Community” returns to NBC’s schedule tonight, attitude at least partly intact.

“It’s cool that Andre and Shirley are getting married again — there’s a whole generation of viewers that didn’t get to see the original,” Abed (Danny Pudi) said, deftly recasting the second marriage of one of his community college study-group partners as a Hollywood sequel. His colleague in idiot-pop-culture savantism, Troy (Donald Glover), smoothly extends the metaphor: “Let’s hope it’s more of a Bale than a Kilmer situation.”

People, or TV shows, speaking in “Batman” references aren’t everyone’s glass of ginger ale, and it’s understandable if you’d rather not sit next to one at a bar or dial it in on your DVR. That’s one reason “Community” was a dead show walking in the first place, pulled from the NBC lineup in December before being given its current 12-episode reprieve.

But to dismiss “Community” as no more than the sum of its movie parodies, “Dr. Who” shout-outs and elaborate narrative games would be unfair and wouldn’t explain the passion of its advocates.

Analyzing comedy is a notoriously fruitless enterprise. But it seems safe to say that the web of allusions woven by the show’s creator, Dan Harmon, and his staff serves a double purpose. It’s potentially funny in its own right (that varies from episode to episode, and was more true in Season 2 than it has been so far in Season 3), but it also serves as a kind of code, in both the moral and the encryption senses.

What’s really distinctive about “Community” is that it’s so consistently about what it’s about: Every episode is a miniature essay on friendship and belonging, and nearly every incident and every obscure line of dialogue works toward those themes.

As a corollary, the characters in “Community” are unusually consistent and true to themselves, partly because they’re defined not so much by action — will they slip on a banana peel or sleep with a friend’s wife? — as by how they react to and participate in the continuous contest of language, memory and adolescent obsession of which Abed and Troy are the game masters. That interaction is both the glue that holds together this fellowship of hopeful community-college retreads and the test that reveals when someone is straying from absolute loyalty to the group.

Playing such an elaborate double game must be hard work, and perhaps that’s why the writers of “Community” show unusual care and affection for their creations, which in turn informs how the characters feel about one another. In Thursday’s episode two members of the group find out why Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown) sometimes uses her “Miss Piggy voice” — it’s also her sexy voice, it turns out — and beam at each other like proud parents.