I’ve tried to share this skit from The Whitest Kids U’Know with 3 people now expecting them to enjoy it the way I had and no one likes it at all so far so I’m willing to accept that it just doesn’t work in the conventional sense – and that’s fine – but i’m here to educate you as to why why y’all are wrong.
First, you have to watch it so you know what I’m talking about, so here it is, it ain’t long, just give it a look before continuing to the autopsy ~
Okay… so you watched it, right? And you thought it was dumb? Okay. Great. That’s fine. That definitely means that the artists intent didn’t land and that’s a bummer, but a walkthrough of each beat of the bit here will explain why you’re wrong for not liking it. Here is a step by step breakdown of what is going on in it and why its clever and why those points constitute funniness that you’re wrong for not recognizing:
The suspense of the approach
It starts out good with the doctors cautious approach to the patient after clearly having found some disturbing results from his blood work. Not wanting to alarm or offend the patient, the doctor takes a non-aggressive interrogative angle to getting to the bottom of something implied to be at best – a curious anomaly in the patients results. This casual approach baits the viewer with the punchline by immediately revealing that something about this guys diet is so fkked up that its leading his physician to ask the bizarre question of how many hot dogs he eats in a day.
The Patients Response
The “sorry what?” style response from the patient who, like the viewer, finds the question to be abnormal is funny because it sets a humorous premise that whatever was in the patients bloodwork made it completely obvious that something is cartoonishly wrong with what he is eating, yet that patient appears oblivious to any such abnormality at all since he doesn’t go “oooh. yea – well [blah blah blah about all the junkfood he eats]” and instead treats the question with an earnest pause for thought and tone of “gosh, I guess I’d have to live-think that one out”. The patient answers that “some days I could have a couple and some days I don’t have any” and the doctor responds with a deadpan “mk… well let’s just say for an average” and asks him to map his whole week out to deduce what the daily amount would be. At this point, the humor is still in the anticipation of the joke because we don’t know if the punchline is that the doctor is nuts and the patient is fine, the patient is nuts and the doctor has discovered something horrific he’s trying to gently broach, or if the tests are nuts and are confounding both patient and doctor alike. So the patient goes through his daily diet – specifically focusing on how many hot dogs he eats, per day.
The sincerity of the patient
The patient guesses that the average amount of daily hot dogs he eats comes out to around 7 – which is an absurd amount rendered hilarious by his obliviousness to that reality. This is compounded by the doctor, with raised eyebrows having to double check wtf the guy just said by asking “7 hot dogs?” on the off chance that he misheard such a radical answer and to incredulously confirm that the answer he heard was indeed the answer to his question. The patient shows no understanding of a hot dog being bad for you, or how abnormal his casually reported intake of the food item on a daily basis is, asking “is that high?”, forcing the doctor to combine an honest answer with some bedside manner and say “its a little high”. The patient cluelessly asks “is that bad?” forcing the doctor to answer “its not good”.
This is funny because of Dramatic Irony: we the viewer know something at least one of the characters on screen doesn’t and we get to watch that character stumble through that reality without the tools we have. Further, there is a character in play who has our same approach and knowledge of the situation who must interact with that initial player and we get to see how they navigate the tension between educated-helper and a affably-ignorant person in the charge of that helpers care.
The Journey…
The patient says “i’m just ball parking here”, which is punny since hot dogs are traditional baseball concession items, but also humorous under the premise as if any person could possibly estimate that they eat 7 servings of one food every day. This creates a mystique around what kind of mind we’re dealing with as we the viewer take on the role of the doctor in needing to find out how a human life form came to this state of being. So the doctor and I walk through Timmy the patients average day as he recalls it and the dude says he gets up and showers and has a bagel and something for breakfast to which the doc asks for clarity on that “something”. Sure enough – Timmy has a hot dog for breakfast. This is funny because no one has hot dogs for breakfast but doubly no one doesn’t realize that if they were to have a hot dog one time for breakfast – let alone as part of their daily routine – that it’d be a normal thing to do – so normal in fact that it didn’t stand out in the patients mind as worthy of note even though that subject is the only reason he is analyzing his daily routine. Then he reveals that after his breakfast hot dog, he has a hot dog at work – but oh wait, now that he’s prompted to think about it, yes, he also stops by a hot dog stand on the way and usually has “one or two”. At this point we – well, not you, cuz you were bored by the sketch – but ME – the “me” version of us is fully planted in the position of the doctor keeping a mental tab of how many hot dogs this Timmy dude is eating every day.
The Mind of Timmy
The humor at this point is now firmly in the incomprehensible delusion of the patient and how their mind works at large as well as in a context where they are non-threateningly being asked to recount patently abnormal behaviors as if they were the most normal things in the world.
We just heard him blithely state that he has 2 hot dogs every morning – 3 “if you count the one at home” – as if eating a hot dog at home has a different caloric effect on your body because, after all – you were at home. But it’s funny because we’ve all heard someone use a similar sort of rationale to explain behavior that sounds peculiar to us but not to them. We’ve all done some level of this ourselves even. But to this extreme degree combined with the casual self-unaware nature of the words being said makes it a masterpiece. Especially good is Timmy saying “this is all just breakfast” as a way of cutting a moment of almost-tension where it kindasorta appeared as if he was realizing that something about what he is saying is not normal. The doctors dutiful “no, I understand, I get it” reassurance is a position every person has been in some context where they have absolutely no point of reference to identify with something another person is saying but are trying hard to not ostracize that other person and shame or out them – or yourself – for not having any point of reference to their experience whatsoever.
Addiction. Denial. Acceptance. & Shame.
When Timmy tries to end his day with the summary of him simply going to work – the end – we, along with the doctor suspect something is up and sure enough, when the doctor voices our suspicion by, again – non-accusingly asking him to just walk us through his work day, we get another round of this satirical illustration of the mentality that “I think this batshitcrazy thing I do is so normal that its not even worth mentioning”. Timmy says “some days I just blow through lunch because of how busy I am and all” and like the doctor, we call bullsh#t. Timmy edits that statement with “well, I’m pretty sure I did that once”. This is a satire of a person being forced to compare their vision of themself with their reality and slowly, in the tiniest of ways, realizing the discrepancies between the two. Timmy wants to say that there is no pattern or routine to what is revealing to be an entirely consistent obsessive addictive behavior he has been hiding to himself and the world and only confronting now for the first time. At every turn he wants to add doubt and chance but has to admit that there is certainty and routine to his daily actions: it’s always hot dogs. He doesn’t have a salad for lunch – he has hot dogs. He has told himself that its no big deal but if he believed that then he wouldn’t feel a need to retell these events with less precision than exists.
His fantastic* recollection (*in the original sense of that word in where, his recollection is fantastical, or, rooted in fantasy) is shattering in the same way an alcoholic who has convinced themself that they only have one drink a night because that is what they start out to do and then have another “just by chance” (always) and a swig in between that doesn’t count, and a glass afterward – that is really only a shot glass amount but looks like its more cuz they don’t put ice in that one – and yea they taste it before all that and then have a night cap or finish off a bottle which again doesn’t count as a drink in itself and so on — and this beautiful allegory is all told through the lens of being over hot dogs. How many does he have at night? “anywhere between one and…four?” he asks as if it makes it more etherial – like – how could anyone really know for sure, right? cuz I dont even fully know myself – when we all know that he knows and that the answer is 4 – bringing the total so far to 7 hot dogs a day when this dude started out feigning that he didn’t have any idea how many he ate in a given week or day.
Timmy finally says with a sigh that his estimation of 7 hot dogs a dight might, “on second thought” be a little low.
That’s funny because it’s clever. It’s a structured recreation of human emotional manifestations of obfuscation and conclusion perfectly mimed by the actors in an allegory that uses something as silly and unheard of as a hot dog dependency as a stand-in for common indulgences and vices that
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