About a year ago, I had a heart surgery. Spoiler alert: I didn’t die. The thing about heart surgery is that it’s not so much the surgery itself, it’s the recovery. That means lots of time sitting around in bed.
When you spend a lot of time doing nothing, eventually your mind wanders and when my mind wanders, I think of ideas. Ideas for bits. Some of these bits are good, some are bad. Some are just the briefest of fleeting thoughts. Some not even that. But some are quite elaborate.
Sometimes I spend days just thinking of ways to add to these bits, to build a whole world around them. This is a story about that kind of bit. But, it’s important to keep in mind, I am not saying this guarantees that the bit will beg good. Not at all. Just that it’s a product of obsession, boredom and maybe working the painkillers and adrenaline out of my system.
“H-A-T-T-O-G-O”
I am a big fan of Chappell Roan. I think she is one of the most exciting new artists of the last twenty years or so. I love her music, but I also love who she is as an artist. I love when catchy pop songs bely their subversive message.
Around the time that I was recovering, her song, “H-O-T-T=O=G-O” was everywhere. It’s not my favorite or hers, but it is a very solid tune and it weaseled its way into my brain and sparked an idea for a bit.
What if it wasn’t an original song, but rather a Weird Al-style takeoff of a song that already existed? And this song was a jingle for a hat store that offered what they thought was a novel approach to buying a hat, but in actuality, was standard practice for the hat industry as a whole? Hilarious, right?!
Well, I certainly thought so, as I lied down in my hospital bed. That’s why I spent so much time dictating notes into my iPhone.
The crux of the bit is that instead of “Hot-to-go,” the original song was “Hat-to-go.” Because the chief advertising point for this particular hat store was that unlike all the other hat stores that existed, this hat store had all sorts of hats available to buy and wear the same day. You know, because you usually had to order a hat and then wait five to six weeks for your hat to come in.
That’s how hat stores work, right? “Hat stores” are a real thing that exist, right? What do you mean, “not anymore?” What do you mean, “everybody just goes to Lids in the mall now?”” Shut up and stop trying to ruin my bit!
Dictating away, I imagined all sorts of hilarious places this bit could go. Maybe even Ms. Roan herself would have to weigh in on the phony controversy! I really thought this.
I had a whole backstory about the owners and the founding of the store, which had been in existence for over seventy-five years or something, but it actually didn’t make it any funnier.
I went so far as to look into buying the domain name for hattogo.com. Don’t bother clicking on that, thankfully, I came to my senses before my wife gave me back my credit card.
So you see where this is going: I got better and started to see that maybe this whole thing wasn’t going to set the comedy world on fire the way I initially thought it would. But I kept it in my back pocket of my mind pants, especially the jingle, which I change the words to each time I hear the actual song.
“H-A-T-T-O-G-O
You can wear a hat to go!”