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.
