Even leaving aside the headaches and nausea that are specific to the fans of the Jets and Giants, and the flu-like symptoms that universally apply to all AFC South games, watching the NFL does something to a person. You may sit down in front of a game as a normal human—again, not applicable to Jets or Giants fans—but when you rise you will have been at least somewhat altered by what you’ve seen. In real life, Drew and I are at least acceptably decent humans and disinclined to laugh at others’ suffering. If you got mononucleosis, I would not jeer at you; I might bring you some soup. But when it’s Sam Darnold? Well, that is very different.
This week’s Deadcast was not entirely about cracking jokes at others’ misfortune, but if I’m being honest there was a decent amount of that. We didn’t linger too long on the injuries that have befallen Drew Brees, Ben Roethlisberger, Cam Newton, Drew’s aforementioned large son Sam, and seemingly another dozen of the league’s most recognizable passers, but that was mostly because this isn’t that long a podcast and there was so much other howlingly inessential stuff to get to.
In this case, that meant talking about the dreary and extremely Of This Moment saga surrounding the comic Shane Gillis’s brief, polarizing, and predictably unsatisfying stint at Saturday Night Live; the broader tragicomic self-importance of comedy circa now; and a discussion of what it means to attempt bachelor party things as a washed-up middle-aged dork. The Funbag was The Funbag, and nothing good or remotely sanitary came out of that thing, but it did give us a chance to engage in a surprisingly heated round of Let’s Remember Some Dinosaurs. We have watched too much football, and lived too poorly and too long, to be the people we might have once wanted to be, but it was heartening to know that all the old dinosaur facts we used to treasure are still in there somewhere, under all that damage.
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