The Ole Miss Football Experience, as told by 11 “I Think You Should Leave” sketches

“I Think You Should Leave” is a brilliant, absurd, stupid, hilarious television show created by SNL cast-member-turned-writer Tim Robinson. The show is a sketch comedy show, made mostly of sketches deemed too weird for most other television programs (namely, SNL). Robinson’s comedy style is something of an aggressive awkwardness, one of people who are perpetually disappointed and angry in their own shortcomings, of people’s whose lives cannot live up to their own impossible expectations, driving them pants-shitting mad.

Oh, and speaking of, there are poop jokes too.

It’s an uncomfortably funny show, chock full of cameos from Andy Samberg, Cecily Strong, Will Forte, Vanessa Bayer, Steven Yeun, Tim Heidecker, and a whole host of other funny people. And, with its six episodes typically only including a handful of sketches and lasting not much longer than 15 minutes, it’s a perfectly binge-able format for those of us with severe attention deficit issues or busier than busy lifestyles.

So watch it! It’s funny! It will also provide you with the content needed to understand whatever the hell the 3000+ words below are trying to be!

What we—the ITYSL enthusiasts of Red Cup Rebellion’s masthead—have done is taken our ten favorite sketches, plus an honorable mention sketch, and used them for metaphors for the Ole Miss football fan experience. If this sounds like a terrible idea then that’s probably because it is, but it’s also our website so we’ll do as we please. If this sounds like a good idea, then we see that you too are an enthusiast of the show, and welcome you as one of our own.

In all sincerity, very little of this will make any sense to you if you haven’t watched the show. Do that if you haven’t already. “Oh gee, this sure sounds like super niche season preview #content being published by an Ole Miss football site within a week of the football season kicking off,” you may complain. Well this website is free and nobody asked you anyway.

So, with that, our ten (plus one) favorite ITYSL sketches as metaphors for Ole Miss football.

Honorable Mention: “Has This Ever Happened To You?!”

A commercial for a local attorney starts off as typically as you’d expect, with a stiff, awkward suit staring dead into the camera and asking “has this ever happened to you” before telling the story of a person who purchased a home under false pretenses. There is a termite infestation that was not disclosed by the seller, and you’d like to take them to court over it.

This is pretty basic, bread-and-butter, back cover of a phone book attorney stuff. But then the situation gets more and more specific and less and less believable. So you have the termite infestation, which leads you to call inspectors, who then show up and hang out in your bathroom for hours making sloppy mudpies and flushing a lot. They then distract you from your art books (which you’re reading while they’re working) to ask for your help getting their foot unstuck from the toilet, but that was all a lie, nobody’s foot was actually stuck in the toilet and the joke’s on you. They then shout that it’s “TURBO TIME!,” jump on your furniture, and admonish you for trying to join in. You later notice that they’ve replaced your regular toilet with one that has a hole that’s too small for you to use. Now your have a toilet with a joke hole that’s just for farts.

“Has this ever happened to you?” the attorney asks. “Call me now, please!” he pleads.

Yes, he wants to do something about this, and wants to help you deal with this situation, but what he really seems to want is for you—or anybody—to believe him. He has to know that his suffering is not something he’s experienced alone. He is an Ole Miss (or Arkansas!) fan after watching Ole Miss and Arkansas play football. The whole experience of that rivalry is bizarre and confusing and terrifying, and nobody who hasn’t experienced it first hand can really believe any of it.

“4th and 25 bullshit laterals converted into first downs... HAS THIS EVER HAPPENED TO YOU?!”

10. Chunky

“Dan Vega’s Mega Money Quiz,” a typical, corny daytime television game show premiers to an excited host and pair of contestants. The game is simple enough it seems, with contestants choosing a certain dollar amount on the board, being asked a very simple trivia question, and winning the corresponding money. But if you choose the wrong square then, “Uh oh! It’s a Chunky!”

Chunky, much like the Whammy on “Press Your Luck,” is a red monster who “gobbles up your points.” But instead of being a simple cartoon like the Whammy, the Chunky is a big dumb red mascot thing who comes out from back stage and...

...well, we aren’t really sure what Chunky does. Neither is Chunky. He hasn’t figured out what his deal is. He’s supposed to gobble up points but instead he just wrecks a guy’s shirt and tries to break his laptop. The host of the show couldn’t be more furious, telling Chunky that “we just gotta figure out what your deal is” and chiding that “[The Chunky] had all summer to think of it!”

This is any (non-sketch comedy based) off-season Ole Miss football content. Every season, you hear that players have gotten stronger, that the team is really coming together and rallying behind each other, that certain freshmen are pushing upperclassmen, and that those players who are switching positions or in between some roles are really starting to figure it out.

They did have all summer to figure out what it is that they do, and we can only hope we aren’t angered or disappointed in the results.

9. Nachos

A man is on a first date at a TexMex place, splitting a plate of nachos with an attractive young woman and really hitting it off. But she’s doing something that upsets him greatly; she is eating all of the fully-loaded nachos, and he is just getting chips with a little bit of cheese and maybe a small hunk of meat on them and that’s it. He feels entitled to something more out of this shared plate of nachos, so he approaches the waiter and asks him to tell his date that the restaurant has a rule about sharing nachos, namely that one person cannot hog all of the fully-loaded chips with all the meat and stuff.

Oddly, the waiter complies with this request and tells the woman that she’s breaking the rules against eating all the fully-loaded nachos. She sniffs out this bullshit almost immediately and calls her date out on it. “Did you ask him to come over here and say that?” The waiter capitulates and admits to participating in the ruse, but her date won’t relent. “What the hell are you talking about?!” he reacts, and claims he actually went to the waiter to complain about the air conditioning, then he said he wanted to complain about the nacho rule itself (despite the waiter admitting that no such rule even exists), then claims to have total ignorance of the entire situation that he just created. The date is ruined.

So, in short, someone was upset that they weren’t getting what they wanted, they complained to someone with no real authority, that person then tried to exercise that authority before backing off and admitting that there aren’t really any rules here and that the entire situation was contrived and arbitrary. Yep, this is Ole Miss’ relationship with the NCAA!

8. River Mountain High

A televised teen drama appears just as most of them do, with students played by far-too-attractive-to-be-normal actors engaging in melodramatic gossip in front of their lockers in between classes. Just as the drama heats up between two such students, they’re interrupted by their high school principal, who informs them that they’re late to class and need to get out of the hallway. The conversation then shifts rather quickly to a certain plastic knob the principal has in the middle of his shirt. The students ask him about it, and he explains that his shirt is a TC Tugger by TC Topps, and as such it has a dope tugging knob on it that allows you to pull on your shirt without wrecking your shirt or hurting your hands. You see, because when you’re wearing a shirt all day, it can kinda get trapped or bunched up on your belly and you gotta sometimes pull on it a little to get it back where it’s supposed to be, and doing that all the time totally ruins your shirts (or so they say), which is the problem that TC Topps has fixed with their tugging knob. Thank you for asking about the shirt, and thank you for thinking it’s cool.

This is what watching SEC football on CBS is like, because no matter how hard you try to pay attention to the actual football on the broadcast, you cannot help but avoid a hellscape of advertisements for shit you don’t need like ATVs or new episodes of “Young Sheldon.”

7. Laser Spine Specialists

This is an excellent sketch that’s hard to peg, unless you go a layer or two deep. It’s a fake commercial for a local spinal surgeon, offering that famous “two inch incision” surgery you might have seen on TV to, I dunno, yank out a herniated disc or something. Like most all commercials for a medical procedure (a weird phrase to type!) there’s pictures of newly refreshed and happy people relieved from the outcome of the surgery. A man can play tennis again now that his nagging back is hurting! A woman can go back to tending her garden! Another man is excited that he can now fight his wife’s new husband, Danny Krouse.

This man is also excited to be able to lift his adult son over his head, shouting “HE’S BEEN RUDE TO ME HIS WHOLE LIFE!” He also can finally confront a grifting record producer named Robbie Star who scams adults into thinking they’re going to be stars and charging them upwards of $10,000 to lay down a track in his studio. The commercial—which you forget is a commercial for spine surgery—devolves into an argument among two men and their record producer as to their star potential, their musical talents, and the producer’s abilities to crank out hit tracks. And, at the end of it, the grift is still on. Our story’s antagonist, even after realizing that his song “Moon River Rock” sucks and that his family hates his music, is seen in the studio dropping another version of the record. His own hubris makes it impossible to escape something he knows is not working out for him.

This is the Ole Miss football fan realizing the level of emotional trauma he/she has inflicted on him/herself after years of watching the Rebels. All of this is a bad idea and we know it, and for some reason we fail to see any way out of it.

6. Traffic

A man has a bumper sticker that says “Honk if You’re Horny” on it. Surely people will recognize this as being a tongue-in-cheek gesture, right? People won’t actually honk, will they?

In the word’s of Connor O’Malley’s character (who is so horny his stomach hurts), “WHAT DID YOU THINK WAS GOING TO HAPPEN?!”

5. Gift Receipt

The Gift Receipt is, at its core, a story about a birthday party for a man, Jacob, and its overlap with the human condition. Jacob starts off the sketch as a normal guy, surrounded by friends and family who are encouraging him to open the gifts they’ve bought him. He opens one from a friend—or more of an acquaintance—named Lev. It’s a wreath that “works great,” and Jacob says he likes it. Lev seems skeptical of this, and presses the issue by asking if he may eat the wreath’s gift receipt since Jacob likes it so much.

If Jacob like Lev’s gift, so the thinking goes, he won’t need the gift receipt. Lev could eat it and Jacob wouldn’t care at all.

So Lev does it it and, a few seconds later, he’s writhing around on the sofa, clutching his stomach and claiming Jacob must have not wiped properly the last time he pooped. In fact, Lev says Jacob “used too small a slice” of toilet paper after making a “sloppy mudpie.” Jacob then would have used his dirty hands to touch the gift receipt, which Lev then ate, thus making Lev sick.

So here’s Jacob, the guy who was earlier riding on cloud nine at his own birthday party, facing a totally bizarre and heinous accusation from a loud, dumb guy. But do his friends just accept how stupid Lev is and move on? No, they immediately turn on Jacob, eating another receipt that he hasn’t yet touched and discovering it doesn’t cause sickness. So Lev is right, and Jacob is wrong. Jacob lied about using too small a slice, and if he is willing to lie about that, the thinking goes, then he clearly is lying about how much he likes the gifts he’s been given. His friends get irate and storm out of the party, before Lev tells Jacob that no one likes him and that his house is ugly.

Does any of this sound familiar? Let’s say you’re a football a team that hasn’t been all that great for most of your existence. One day, your luck turns around. Everyone wants to talk to you. You’re featured on College Gameday and consistently ranked towards the top of most polls. Recruits want to be your friends. Katy Perry wants to jump from bar furniture in your town. Then one day, some loudmouth asshole who can’t handle your happiness starts screaming about how you’ve got shit all over your hands, and everyone immediately turns on you. That’s this story.

Never mind that in this particular case you do have shit all over your hands. Everyone has shit on their hands. Everyone. You’re just the one who couldn’t have shit hands and be happy.

4. Baby of the Year

To any rational, healthy-brained observer, beauty pageants are strange, out-of-touch vestiges of our more sexually repressed American past. Child beauty pageants, then, are an even more bizarre, if not disturbing or even offensive product of the same. But a baby beauty pageant, a “Baby of the Year” type of pageant? That’s so beyond the pale of all decency as to be outright funny. And it is funny, and strange, and completely inexplicable to anyone outside of the universe where such a thing is acceptable. In this sketch, we see the 100-somethingth iteration of this pageant, one that has fans and judges so diehard that one judge threatens to kill herself on live television if her favorite baby doesn’t win, and fans endlessly boo and harass Bart Harley Jarvis, “the bad boy of the competition” (again, this is a literal infant).

There’s singing, there’s a presentation from the babies’ pediatrician (named Dr. Skull), there’s an in memoriam segment, there’s passionate fan support, and a level of pomp and pageantry that is outright bizarre and ridiculous to anyone not initiated into this (thankfully fictional) subculture.

This is exactly what people who don’t watch college football think about people who do watch college football. Why do we all care so much? Why is there so much seemingly at stake here? What is with all the weird ritual and tradition? Are all of these people just walking around with totally broken brains and inexplicable priorities?

Yes, that is absolutely who we are.

3. Hot Dog Car

This is a short, sweet, brilliant sketch involving a Brooks Brothers store that has had its front door smashed in by a Volkswagen gussied up to look like a hot dog. As the customers and employees of the store scramble to find out just exactly who was driving this wayward hot dog sandwich car, a character dressed up as a hot dog emerges and immediately begins to lobby accusations at others and deny any culpability on his own part. Everyone sees pretty plainly through his ruse, but he is unwavering in maintaining his innocence, and even manages to elude the grasp of approaching law enforcement as he steals a few suits on his way out the door.

And, oh, how timely a metaphor this one is! This is absolutely other college football fans (hey, Mississippi State!) haughtily accusing other college football fans—Ole Miss fans, in particular—of cheering for a football program that has run afoul of the NCAA’s bylaws. C’mon, we all know that your favorite football program isn’t clean either, and your denying it in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary makes you look as silly as a man in a hot dog suit crashing his hot dog car.

2. Car Focus Group

A group of potential car buyers are at Ford’s corporate headquarters meeting to brainstorm potential ideas for a new car. They start listing features they’d like. “Bluetooth capabilities,” “comfy seats,” “satellite radio,” and other normal ideas are presented by the group to everyone’s agreement. But one member of the focus group has a very specific set of new car ideas he’d like to share, namely that the car have a “great steering wheel” that won’t fly out of the window while he’s driving, that it’s “stinky,” and that there’s not enough space inside of it for his mother-in-law.

These ideas are ridiculous, but when met with derision by Paul, a seemingly normal and well-liked member of the group, the man presenting the weird ideas fires back, insulting Paul for being a “teacher’s pet” and for loving his own mother-in-law. The group then quickly turns on Paul, insulting him, dabbing on him, flipping water bottles in his face and making him flinch (which means he has to marry his mother-in-law and, if he doesn’t do that, he is admitting to himself that he sucks). Paul is quickly devastated by this, and the guy with the weird ideas and insults quickly becomes the most popular member of the group.

This is #EggBowlTwitter. We’re all supposedly adults here, but that idea is quickly betrayed by our puerile behavior and juvenile jokes. Also, all we really want is for strangers to like us.

“Who is the most popular now, Paul?!”

1. The Day That Robert Palins Murdered Me

In a scene that’s pulled almost directly from “I Walk the Line,” a very skilled country musician and his band are in a recording studio and are let down by the record label producer who doesn’t like their gospel sound. The guitarist and singer, himself reminiscent of The Man in Black, takes initiative and begins to play something a bit more Western, strumming his guitar and singing a cowboy’s ballad about being shot dead by the dastardly Robert Palins. “Follow my lead, in G,” he says, under his breath, to his bassist and drummer, who are supposed to do exactly that. The singer has a plan here, and it’s to win the record producer over with something twangy and real of his own design.

His plan is rather quickly thwarted though by the bassist who does not at all realize that there’s actual design here. He thinks the singer’s just freestyling the whole thing, so he decides to do the same and begins singing about skeletons who come “from underground and all over,” skeletons who “have never seen as much food as this” because “underground, there’s half as much food as this,” and how they just want to pull your hair (up, but not out) in order to get another chance at life. Also, the bones (and worms) are their money, it’s like dollars to them.

He ruined the whole thing by riffing about nothing, but his forcefully sung lyrics about bones and hair and dollars are beautiful, hilarious, and emblematic of the chaos that makes Ole Miss football, and all of college football, worth watching.