Perfect bit: Jim Gaffigan’s Hot Pockets

It's "one of those perfectly realized, no-meat-left-on-the-bone-of-the-idea jokes" according to Patton Oswalt.

Patton Oswalt on Jim Gaffigan’s Hot Pockets bit.

It’s amazing. One of those perfectly realized, no-meat-left-on-the-bone-of-the-idea jokes that also so perfectly captures the personality and intelligence of the teller that it becomes a part of how you think of them. Martin Scorsese and Rolling Stones songs in films. Salvador Dali and melting watches, desert landscapes. Carson McCullers and that specific kind of insanity that festers in the Southern heat and haze.

What I love about Gaffigan is how he’ll wring every last drop out of a subject. He attacks it from all angles until there’s nothing left. There’s a cumulative impact too. Even if not every one of the individual jokes on a given subject is a killer, the momentum piles up and it all becomes a metajoke that he’s still talking about Hot Pockets, bacon, manatees, etc. Hilarious.

Turns out Gaffigan didn’t even eat the things. Here’s the origin story:

Instead, it was the terrible advertising that inspired Gaffigan's routine. "It was really that the commercial was so bad. It showed this mom giving their kids Hot Pockets, and the song, and the jingle was so silly," he recalled. "It just seemed like a clumsy name. It just seemed really silly."

Along the same lines of famous Saturday Night Live faux commercials for "Mom Jeans" or "Oops! I Crapped My Pants," Gaffigan wondered for a moment whether the TV jingle might have been a parody — that's how bad he thought the ad was. "I thought the commercial felt like an SNL sketch. So I did it as a joke, I developed a couple of jokes on it, not realizing that it would be as big as it got," Gaffigan said. "It was just more about the commercial."

Good lesson there: Find something that already seems like a parody but is legit. Then take that and ham it up.