Behold, my greatest creation.
Now normally I wouldn’t dispense with this kind of breakdown for free, but I’m extremely fucking baked and feeling generous. I’m not anyone any of you have ever heard of, but in my little circle, I’m kind of a big deal. Again, to most of the world, I’m a nobody. But to a few people in the world—and it doesn’t have to be that many—they treat what I have to say about storytelling and meme making like it’s the gospel. I just mean they pay me every now and then to say what works or why it doesn’t.
Thus in true self-glorifying nerd fashion, I will explain why my meme is funny, thus making it even funnier.
CRINGE HUMOR AND THE ESSENCE OF THE OFFICE
The Office is cringe humor at its finest. The critics of the show didn’t understand that the cringe was essential to why it worked. Even the fans didn’t understand that fact until the cringiest character in the show—Michael Scott—departed for true-love-fulfilled pastures that were conspicuously adjacent to the Schrute Farms pastures.
That means that where a healthy, mature show that shows any semblance of sensitivity to its characters and its audience would cut away, The Office instead awkwardly lingers on the subject of misery and cringe.
And that’s what happens in this scene of Kevin spilling his chili. It’s heartbreaking. Kevin is good at very little in his life, and he knows it. But he is VERY good at making this chili. He puts his heart into it, and it’s one of the few things a person can put their heart into and know it will always give back what he puts into it, so he always give it EVERYTHING.
That’s what he did last night. He put everything into this chili. And he is fucking EXCITED to share it with his colleagues. He doesn’t care about popularity. He doesn’t care about credibility. He doesn’t care about impressing anyone. That’s not Kevin. He loves food. And he’s very good at making this one particular dish. It is true pleasure, true heaven. And he is sharing that experience with The Office.
And then he spills the chili. And the show, being based in cringe humor, will not look away. It spends an UNCOMFORTABLE amount of time on Kevin’s grief. He desperately tries to scoop the chili back into the pot. It doesn’t make sense, no one will eat it, but he’s desperate to salvage one tiny piece of the euphoria he experiences every year and knew he would experience this ear and more than this that he would SHARE with people in true community, at least as they ate the chili, they could be The Office.
But the chili is gone. And if we had a heart, we’d look away. But we keep looking. And then keep looking. It’s almost cruel.
That’s the first layer of humor.
Back to the meme.
RETURN OF THE MEME: THE SECOND LAYER OF HUMOR
The meme says we don’t spend enough time on Kevin’s grief. And there’s just a still image of Kevin in his grief. It’s funny on its own even if you barely remember The Office. Then the viewer has to ask okay, exactly how much time did we spend on Kevin’s grief? Was it as brief as this image? Wasn’t it at least a little longer?
Then you fully remember it, or maybe you actually go back and watch the scene—it works just as well if this is your first time seeing it—and holy fucking Christ. The camera lingers on Kevin an uncomfortable amount of time.
This is the second layer of humor.
THE THIRD LAYER OF HUMAH
Now you go back to the point of the meme, which was to tell you that in the midst of us already spending a cringe-worthy amount of time on Kevin’s grief, you should feel guilty about not spending MORE time.
I don’t know if y’all are among the people who pay me very handsomely to say such things or just the folks I like to call friends. A few of you think I talk too much as it is. But thanks all the same for coming to this special unannounced speaking engagement that was in no way associated with TED, TEDx, or its many scam-worthy affiliates.
