What's So Funny

Defining The Humor That We Use To Define Ourselves

September 20, 2021

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Make ‘Em Laugh

My favorite comedy video of the last 10 years is titled “Letters From Elvis To Food.”

In the video, produced by a sketch comedy group called Butt, comedian Joe McAdam portrays mid-period Elvis—think big hair and sideburns, but no jumpsuit yet—doing a series of mundane activities as he narrates love letters to different food items. It’s a pitch-perfect send-up of slice-of-life, 8mm home video footage, except featuring Elvis in the bath, Elvis shaving, Elvis cooking a pancake and then eating the pancake straight out of the pan, Elvis playing guitar, and Elvis miming playing guitar on a pool skimmer.

I’m obsessed with this video. I can recite it word for word. I’m still fascinated by the way its premise comes together. It’s not Elvis on screen; it’s Joe McAdam in a wig, clearly. And yet. If you’ve ever listened to Dana Carvey talk about impressions, he’s quick to note that a good impression doesn’t really sound like the person you’re mimicking—a good impression is a caricature of that person. It’s a few cultural touchstones wrapped up in a repetitive pastiche that lets the viewer know that we all know who this is supposed to be. 

The Internet has given us direct lines to so many new avenues for content distribution over the last 10 years, along with direct lines to the people who make the content. “Letters From Elvis To Food” isn’t a million-dollar production with A-list celebrities—it has 865 views on YouTube, and was made by two comedians whose Twitter DMs I slid into without any difficulty. 

That gave me the opportunity to ask Joe McAdam and his Butt co-writer and co-star Chris Stephens, about how “Letters From Elvis To Food” came together: 

Joe: I have no idea where this idea came from. Probably that Elvis has a funny voice and our default comedy position is to make everyone stupid. So, what if Elvis had the mind of a 10 year old. Some things excite him, some things confuse him and he’s grappling with those feelings in real time. 

Chris: The bit was 100% conceived/written by Joe and was a pre-Butt thing, so I’ll defer to him on how it came into existence. As far as turning it into a video, we didn’t really think it out too far beyond the idea that we’d just show Elvis doing boring stuff around his apartment. When Joe does the bit live, it’s just him dressed as Elvis reading the letters into a microphone which is super funny and works great in front of a crowd but as a video that can feel a little weird. We landed on just showing Elvis farting around/doing boring, everyday stuff, since it felt it matched the spirit of the bit. You’re hearing these insane letters this legendary guy has written while also watching him clean his pool. Going totally nuts is just one of his many mundane chores. 

Joe: I wrote the entire bit, front to back, in 5 minutes on a car ride because we were on our way to a show and I had nothing to perform. I think this was before “Butt” existed and me and Chris and [stand-up comedian] Joe Kwaczala were doing a show at this place called Raffa’s in LA. I’m pretty sure I wrote it while in the passenger seat of Kwaczala’s car. The video was just an excuse to get more people to see it, and I already had some clothes that kinda looked like Elvis might casually wear. We shot a bunch of stuff at our friends’ (Alex Hanpeter and Jude Tedmori) apartment in like an hour. Very little thought was given to that stuff besides make Elvis look kinda happy and kinda dumb. I think there’s a direct line from this bit to early and mid-90s SNL Dana Carvey. An impression with no real regard for accuracy but just done because you think it would be funny for that person to say something stupid. This was my favorite thing as a kid.

Chris: Joe’s definitely right about the Dana Carvey influence of it. Just a big, dumb, barely-there impression where the whole point is “what if a guy was dumb.” I’d add that I think, at least with the video, there’s a Bruce McCulloch (from Kids In The Hall) influence there too. He would make videos all the time that had other-worldly feels to them, where whatever bizarre thing that was happening was extremely normal and not something anyone’s thinking twice about. Elvis writing letters to food takes place in a universe where it’s perfectly normal, dare I say encouraged, for Elvis to write letters to food.

Joe: I think [the point of our comedy is] just make people laugh. Sometimes the things we think are funny really take some work to get it to register with people that aren’t us. Personally, I just want what’s in my brain to be out of my brain and in someone else’s in a way that they like. We talk a lot about how our favorite dialog is just someone saying “thank you” and someone replying with “you're welcome.” I think somewhere in that is the answer? Like how it’s weird to say “hello” to someone. No one says hello, but it’s supposed to be the most common greeting.

Chris: Yeah, like Joe said we’re probably the biggest fans of “thank you” and “you’re welcome” outside of three year olds. We’re very drawn to the absurdity of quiet, mundane conversations. I think it’s kind of a push back against what’s normally considered to be “out there” comedy. The stuff where everything’s TOTALLY random and everyone’s TOTALLY screaming. Unfortunately I think a lot of people’s ears have been fine tuned for that kind of stuff now, so it’s tougher to find people that go “oh hell yeah, a sketch where two middle aged men are having a nice quiet lunch!” But those freaks are who we do it for.

It’s me: I’m freaks. 

I’m not sure that there’s a bigger fan of Butt’s comedy than me. One night I was so frustrated by the low viewer count on one of their videos that I drunkenly DMed all the people who followed me on Twitter who had sizable audiences, telling them that they were absolute fools for not promoting these absolutely hilarious videos. (I’d like to insert a brief apology to John Hodgman here.) 

That’s a different part of my identity, though. That’s the part of me that needs to be heard and needs to be correct. Being a professional opinion-haver was a dream I chased before the collapse of criticism as a profession; today, it’s just another flawed operating system my brain boots up in the morning that I have to actively turn back off.

The difference now is that I have a better handle on when something is specifically made for me, and I don’t need that thing to be a bridge between me and a loved one. When Joe and Chris talk about “hello,” “please,” and “thank you” being a core part of Butt’s sense of humor, I knew specifically the moment that landed for me. In their Job Interview Sketch, the premise gets pretty wild pretty fast. The funniest part of the whole damn thing, however, is that when the two men are saying goodbye, one asks the other what his name is, then thanks him for telling him his name, and the other guy says, “You’re welcome.” In a sketch whose premise is so out there, this quiet moment of awkward manners is somehow the weirdest part, and it gets me every time. No one else I’ve shown this video to seems to pick up on it, though.

My comedy obsession might not always be healthy, but I’ve been getting better at separating what I like from who I am. My worth isn’t tied up in being able to accurately quote “The Simpsons,” and my friendships aren’t based on other people remembering that scene in “Norm” when he asks Laurie Metcalf if they can have sex and she jokingly tells him to just go get naked in the kitchen and she’ll meet him there and then five minutes later you hear Norm yell from the kitchen, “Wow, the table’s really cold!” It’s okay that when James Austin Johnson started getting attention for his Trump impressions, I was the only one shouting “IT’S DORVIS!” 

As far as that other part of my personality? Well, you read this whole thing, didn’t you?You should probably scroll back up and actually watch “Letters from Elvis to Food” now. 

I know you’re gonna like it.