It's Probably Time To Retire the "Normies Eat Gross Food" Joke
I regret having written millions of them
Writing for a late night show is a volume business. A few days a week, they lock you in a room with the other writers, send you clips, and you write jokes off of those clips until your brain turns to sand. Some days, I would write 60-80 jokes, three of them good. 3-for-80 would constitute being “on fire”. My point is: You frantically send jokes down the joke assembly line and don’t think too hard about what you’re doing or why because JOKES JOKES JOKES the boss needs more JOKES!
That’s why I’m willing to mostly give Food Insider a pass for an unbelievably-dickish short video called “Millennials try Cracker Barrel for the first time” (below). Pitching ideas at a food publication is probably like pitching jokes — I’ll bet you just pitch pitch pitch pitch pitch. You probably find yourself in a room, half-insane, saying: “How about the business side of the office and the creative side have a chili cookoff. No? We get some firefighters and they rank every flavor of gummy worm. No? Ex-cons tour restaurants seen on Seinfeld. No? Octomom versus Jonathan Taylor Thomas wedding cake bake-off. No? Millennials try Cracker Barrel for the first time.” That’s the most charitable explanation I can give: That someone wasn’t really thinking when they conceived this four minutes of weapons-grade condescension.
If a conservative activist had made this video, I’d accuse them of making what’s basically blackface for young progressives, in that it’s an egregious caricature of what they imagine a group to be. “Okay,” I’d say, “you got a bunch of presumably-highly-educated, urbanite 20-somethings — half of whom came to work in clothes that would be too casual for laundry day in a freshman dorm — and had them sneer at food that most Americans deem fine-to-good.1 Apparently, none of them have been to a restaurant that has 663 locations in 45 states, few of them — though they work at a food publication — have heard of country-fried steak, and they treat their trip to a chain restaurant in New Jersey like it’s an expedition to the Congo to observe lowland gorillas. And, of course, this project to label food tacky and gross is directed at the one chain restaurant that happens to have a cultural-political association (except for TGI Friday’s, which everyone knows is anarcho-socialist). It’s a cartoonish portrayal of young progressives pulled straight from an Ann Coulter fever dream. Fuck you.”
Unfortunately, this video — which, if it was a James Lindsey prank, would be his best one — appears to be real.
This video essentially settled a question I’ve been asking myself for a while: Are jokes that liberal comedians tell about food often condescending and elitist? I’m now ready to say: Yes, I think they often are. I’m not saying that I consider all jokes about food out-of-bounds — too many jokes these days are out-of-bounds! — but I think it’s time to be honest with ourselves about what these jokes are saying.
A brief history of food jokes: Jokes about food “read”. That is: People get them. A joke about how Star Wars is no longer good reads, a joke about how David Duchovny’s House of D is one of the most cringe-worthy vanity projects ever put on film doesn’t read, because nobody saw that movie. Jokes about food, pets, relationships, airline travel, and how the ex-president’s hair, you see, is quaffed in a somewhat unusual way all read, and therefore they will always be with us.
But I think that many food jokes have evolved from being about the food to implicitly being about the people who eat the food. In the olden days, you had jokes about particularly gross or unusual food. Hot Pockets, obviously, made the cut. There were jokes about how Taco Bell gives you diarrhea and how McDonald’s is playing fast-and-loose with with the word “chicken”. The Olive Garden dramatically overplayed its hand by trying to brand themselves as authentic Italian cuisine, which led to the obvious rejoinder: “You’re a perfectly-whatever restaurant that’s typically found in malls next to H&R Block, get over yourself.” All of these seem to me to be totally-fair and not-condescending jokes about food.
At Last Week Tonight, we wrote a ton of food jokes. Many of them aired, partly because a joke about Taco Bell provides a moment of levity in a piece about Forced Kitten Labor or Octogenarian Spleen Explosions. At the beginning, I considered these jokes to be in the same vein as Jon Stewart’s Arby’s riffs, which, after a while, came to actually be about how egregiously over-the-top the riffs were (Stewart often tagged them with “Arby’s is fine”).
Eventually, I started to wonder if there was any food we would not deem “gross”. I was once assigned to write a short piece about Chipotle, which ended up including two or three “Chipotle is gross” jokes, and I remember thinking: “Chipotle is good, I go there all the time.” But the jokes worked, probably partly because John sells the hell out of those food-rant jokes. And, as I’ve argued before, when a comedian tells a joke they maybe shouldn’t have, the explanation is often “they told it because it worked.”
After a while, it became clear that we would deem any food “gross”. We had a joke on the show about how salmon is disgusting — I think we called it “glorified cat food” or something. That was a good indication that our viewpoint had jumped the shark. After all: Salmon is not gross. It is a high-end food. It’s expensive, and you can get it at a fancy restaurant — it also happens to be what my dad would ask for on his birthday. If salmon gets the “ugh, are you serious???” treatment, then it’s fair to ask: What wouldn’t?
All late night shows do these jokes. Again: They read, they’re a standard tool of the trade. But, over time, “this particularly bad food is gross” has often become “any food that most people eat is gross.” It’s no longer just Taco Bell; it’s any fast food, any chain restaurant, any processed food whatsoever. Worse still, the angle is often more than just “this food is bad”; it’s “can you believe people eat this?” Jim Gaffigan’s classic Hot Pockets bit worked partly because he was the one eating the hot pocket. The joke was on him. It wasn’t on whatever knuckle-dragging trash pile was unsophisticated enough to eat food that he, personally, would never touch.
I’ve argued before that what should determine whether a joke is offensive or not is what the joke is really saying. And what’s being said in the worst version of these jokes is: “Ugh, this food is trash. It’s trashy food for trashy people and anyone who eats it garbage.” That’s my takeaway from the Food Insider video.2 Even if one or three or five of these jokes could be laughed off — and I admit the line between innocuous food jokes and the ones I’m calling offensive is blurry — the cumulative impact of going after fast food and chain restaurants night after night is to say “this is garbage food for trashy people.” To the extent that jokes about how bad the food is at phenomenally-successful chain restaurants get laughs, it’s a sign of elitism among the audience. I’m honestly stunned that a cohort so concerned with not “punching down” wouldn’t recognize that past a certain point, this is just elites laughing at normies.
And now a fair question some might have for me: “Did you say anything about this when you were still at Last Week Tonight?” And the answer is: Nope, not really! I said something once or twice in reference to specific jokes. But I mostly stayed silent partly because my thoughts about these jokes were still forming, and partly because I was a coward. I had spent a decade scrapping and clawing to get a job that was better in every conceivable way than anything else I could get, and I didn’t want to risk rocking the boat. One reason why I frequently write about how the fear of normative violations causes conformity in elite spaces is because I’ve felt that fear intensely.
Food Insider isn’t an arm of the Democratic Party, so they don’t have to care if this video costs Democrats a House seat in 2022. But — since a party’s brand is most of what matters and everything everyone does anywhere affects the brand — it probably will. Oh well. Going forward, I’m going to try to make sure any food jokes I make are about legitimately terrible or unusual food, and not about ordinary stuff that 95 percent of Americans (including me) eat all the time. Liberals will always be accused of being out-of-touch elitists who sneer at the rest of the country. We should try very hard to make sure those accusations aren’t true.
FWIW, my dad really liked Cracker Barrel and I’ve been there many times. It’s fine.
I should say: Part of me thinks that Food Insider MEANT for the joke to be on the millennials (who, of course, are actually mostly “zoomers”, but whatever). I think that maybe they were trying to do that Seth Myers bit where he brings on Karen Chee and asks her if she knows what a fax machine is. But if that was the intent, I don’t think it came off that way.
It's Probably Time To Retire the "Normies Eat Gross Food" Joke
I really appreciate your takes. They not be as hot as Hot Pockets, but they're as juicy as Cracker Barrel is carb-y.
“What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?” ― Lin Yutang