Can a Boneless-Chicken Commercial Be Art?

October 22, 2024

Looking for some quality comedy entertainment to check out? Who better to turn to for under-the-radar recommendations than comedians? In our recurring series “Underrated,” we chat with writers and performers from the comedy world about an unsung comedy moment of their choice that they think deserves more praise.

More than most late-night shows, Late Night With Seth Meyers has real longevity in the writers’ room. When people get hired there, they stay there. Perhaps that is, in part, because Late Night makes a lot of space for each writer to let their particular freak flag fly. Ben Warheit tends to get weird with his desk pieces. He’s had an ongoing campaign to play Billy Joel in that biopic that can’t use Joel’s name or songs. He made Meyers indulge the lie he told his parents about hosting the show. And he wrote a heart-wrenching monologue about the fair-weather friendship of the McRib.

I reached out to Warheit after the WGA strike, but before the SAG strike, about recommending something for this column. A unique mind such as his must have unique recommendations for comedy. And boy howdy, he sure did. Warheit wanted to talk about a 2013 KFC campaign, “I Ate the Bones.”

Written by Katie Rich on the cusp of her Saturday Night Live hiring, the “I Ate the Bones” spots are simple: A man eating KFC’s new Original Recipe Boneless believes he must have eaten the bones. “I ate the bones!” he screams with the intensity of There Will Be Blood. In the year of the Barbie movie, it seems fitting to talk about whether a commercial can be recommendation-worthy art. Warheit talked about KFC, finding comedy in joy, and provoking his father through art.

I’m really pleased with what you selected to talk about because I feel like it fits directly into the issues of the strike. We’re talking about a commercial that’s really funny, and it speaks to how many incredibly talented people work in marketing instead of the arts.
Because that’s where you can get paid to do something. You have to be incredibly lucky to get a break. When Katie Rich wrote that commercial, it must have been very shortly after that she got SNL.

Did you know Katie when you saw the commercial for the first time?
No, I found out later. It must have been several years after the commercial came out, and it was still in my head a lot. There was at least a year or so where I tweeted “I ate the bones” almost exclusively. I don’t know why I got so hooked on that little quote, but it was so funny to me. It’s so simple: This guy thought he ate the bones. He didn’t. [Laughs.] And he’s freaking out about it.

That was around the same time that a lot of commercials were trying to go in a funny direction. The Skittles commercials were getting extra weird, and it seemed like everybody was trying to mimic this sort of weirdo, random style, like the Old Spice commercials. You still see people trying to do that same style now. We haven’t really moved on. But for me, it was always “I Ate the Bones.” I think that was the pinnacle.

Also, I don’t know why they don’t still offer that. When I was emailing you about this the other day, it made me want to get some fried chicken. I was like, I’m gonna grab some KFC. I was looking for the boneless Original Recipe, and they don’t have it. They haven’t had it since 2013. Why? I went with Popeyes, and I just got the regular because I don’t want to do tenders sometimes. It’s not the same feel.

I do feel like we’ve gotten to a place now in society where all the boneless fried chicken is just in sandwiches. Do you have a particular allegiance to any fried-chicken sandwich in New York?
Not really. I remember when the Popeyes fried-chicken sandwich came out. It was insanity, right? Nobody could get one. I remember I wasn’t able to get one until I was doing a comedy tour — one of those USO tours for the troops over the holidays. I was in South Korea doing these tours around military bases, and they had a Popeyes at the DMZ, the North Korean border. That was the place that I was able to get it: at the North Korean border.

And how was it?
It was fucking awesome. I mean, it was a little different. I think they had different sauce choices there.

People often will debate the merits of whether commercials can ever be good art because they’re literally commerce-driven. But you’re saying, “No, this is a good sketch.” Do you think a commercial can be art?
Yes. I think Mad Men showed us you can elevate advertising to an art form. I love Mad Men. I’ve watched it through a couple times, but whenever I’m jonesing for a little hit, I always watch Don or Peggy’s pitches. It’s not about this object; it’s about the deeper meaning. What is it Don says about the Carousel? It’s a time machine. It’s not for showing you pictures; it’s taking you back to where you were happy.

Every time I’m home, my parents always have MSNBC on 24/7. They’ll eat in front of the TV, and that’s just how it goes. I’ll be watching something with them, and the only thing that my dad laughs at are commercials. I remember, this past December, I was home for a little bit, and every time the Wendy’s commercial came on where the little guy sat on the Santa-looking guy’s lap, he’d bust out laughing. My dad doesn’t have a favorite movie. He doesn’t know any actors. He doesn’t care about media at all, but he laughs every single time at that commercial, the sight of this guy sitting on the lap of some man he thinks might be Santa. And you know what? I appreciate that they’re trying to get people like my dad, who cares about nothing but Michigan sports.

Not to get too deep too fast, but what is it like pursuing a creative career with a dad who doesn’t care about the arts?
My parents have always been very supportive of me. My mom is more interested in creative pursuits. When I was growing up, I was a theater kid. I was a singer, playing in bands, and they were never not encouraging of me doing these things. They would come to any show I was in. But I can’t really relate to my dad. I can’t be like, “What do you think of that performance?”

Last time I was home, we watched Boyhood. My mom and I were talking about making a movie over the course of 12 years and what that means to the actors and why it’s different. And I’m like, “What did you think, Dad?” And he’s like, “About what? I wasn’t really paying attention.”

That’s some classic Dad Shit right there.
My dad, he cares a lot about Michigan sports and he’s retired, but he still works as a consultant. He’s a scientist, and he cares a lot about his science stuff.

Does he ever get mad if science is depicted poorly in a movie?
No, that’s the thing. You should be right. I love my dad, but those are not things on his radar that he cares about. I should make it a mission to try to provoke my dad through some sort of artistic media.

Speaking of provoking through art, I feel like in a lot of your Late Night desk pieces, there’s a tendency to go for the emotional appeal. Do you think that it’s kind of funny when things get emotional quickly?
I think it’s funny when things get emotional — period. If I’m doing something, I don’t want it to be corny or sappy, but I do think that simple joy is as important as satirizing contemporary issues. In fact, I think it’s maybe more so. I tend to think that things that are more universal aren’t really brought to attention on a day-to-day level. Using whatever is happening in the news as a jumping-off point to talk about something more universal is interesting to me.

That’s interesting because I can see a line between “I ate the bones” and when you ask Seth to sit in the silence with you. A big point of both is everybody else reacting to someone having a primal experience — a physical experience of being inside of their own body. And it weirds out all the people in button-downs trying to have jobs and be normal.
I was thinking about it recently, and I realized that the first four minutes of that sketch is me trying to convince Seth to do the thing. I remember working on that with Seth. He is a really great person to work for as a host because he’s really smart and he’s a really good writer, so he knows what he wants. I remember bringing that idea in and saying, “I think it would be funny if somebody was flipping through the channels and landed on NBC and nothing was happening for a minute.” And he said, “You can’t, unless there’s all this setup of me saying I don’t want to do that.” I was like, “Okay, this is your show. So we’ll have to do that.” But when I was rewatching it, I was like, This is kind of sentimental. All that stuff I say is true — like, if you aren’t funny for a minute, the people who still matter will still care about you. But it’s really hard to not come across as sappy when you’re trying to do something like that.

People get a little bit uncomfortable with sentimentality in comedy. I think it’s been a good while where it’s just definitely cooler, or more typical for people, to be cynical or ironic or sarcastic. I dig that kind of stuff too, but there’s something about sweetness that I think is also very fun. When I’m writing a sketch, I’m more concerned with fun. I think fun gets you to funny. If you’re having fun out there, it’ll be funny. I’m less about How can we do hard jokes to get to the funny thing? than I am about What if we just get to a place where we’re both making each other try not to laugh?

That’s counter to a lot of comedy where the main emotion is anger and not joy.
And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. One of the things that I love about having worked on the show is all the different, great writers that I’ve gotten to work with. We started with a bunch of strong personalities. Conner O’Malley sat right next to me, and Michelle Wolf sat right behind me. Everybody on the show had their own very strong, unique voice and was not trying to do a Seth Voice. You can learn how to do the voice that works for your boss, but showing your own strong, unique voice is important. I think what we see a lot in the current comedy community is the trend of having a sort of detached cynicism. And when people don’t have that, I appreciate it. Joe Pera is totally against the grain with that, and I think that’s why he’s so beloved. He’s taking a big swing.

It is hard to not come from a place of detached cynicism because, you know, all the stuff. It’s understandable that it’s a major through-line of comedy right now. Because we’re coming up on a double strike, talking about the merits of a KFC commercial — and even the KFC commercial has a nepo baby in it.
Yeah, it’s interesting. I can’t say that the nepo-baby phenomenon doesn’t really make me angry. I wrote a sketch about nepo-baby stuff, and that perspective was completely not a part of the sketch at all. But — I don’t want to name names per se — when I see products of nepotism getting gigs, it does make me angry a lot of times.

At least with this commercial, it’s Jim Belushi’s son Robert. Chicago is such a Belushi town; there’s probably a statute about having at least one on set.
I worked on this project a few years ago, maybe five years ago. I got attached as the writer to create an animated–Blues Brothers pitch.

Shut the fuck up.
I got to work very closely with Judy Belushi, John’s widow. And Anne Beatts, who was one of the founding SNL writers.

Queen.
And Dan Aykroyd was also part of it but was not really present in development. He was just there for the pitches. Judy was sort of the driving force. She’s a writer in her own right; she’s really funny, and she’s really creative.

I gotta say, I respect Dan Aykroyd as a liquor salesman way more than these other Johnny-come-latelys. He had a bar in Toronto; he had a bar while he was doing SNL. If anything, liquor is the job and comedy is the hobby.
He’s a natural salesman. We would go to these meetings, and wherever we were, he never took off his sunglasses. He was like, “I know what my brand is. I know what people want.” And the second he would walk into the room, he doesn’t say anything. He walks in, takes a marker, and just starts writing numbers on a whiteboard. Everybody’s just staring at him and then he turns around and just starts pointing to them and listing the millions of dollars that the brand the Blues Brothers currently represents. He was like a fucking shark, a consummate salesman.

This interview has gone in a direction that I could never have predicted and I’m so happy. I guess my final question is easy: Is there a better way to fund the arts than the system we have now? Would you want to bring back cultural patronage? Universal basic income? Or just keep letting comedic brilliance sell KFC?
It’s such a good question because I don’t know — and I don’t think anybody knows. And I think the last people who have any idea are the people in charge of trying to make that happen.

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