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“The Story of Everest” is one of the most memorable sketches in the history of “Mr. Show,” with Jay Johnston playing an explorer named Thomas who has done the impossible and climbed Mount Everest. However, when he tries to tell the story to his family, he accidentally knocks over shelves of thimbles on the wall. Of course, the story can’t continue until he puts them all back up, and the rest of the sketch shows him continually trying and failing to get through the tale without making a mess of the place. To add insult to injury, his story is turned into a movie, but the film is about him falling down, not actually climbing Mount Everest. The bit is so well-loved that Vulture even did an oral history of the sketch, which was inspired by a real-life moment in Johnston’s life.
It’s the exhaustive, onerous commitment to falling over and over and over again that makes “The Story of Everest” work. Once the audience believes “he can’t possibly fall over again, can he?” he does. It’s a masterful, repetitive joke hit so hard that it goes from being funny, to annoying, to infuriating, and circles right back around to being hilarious again. Thomas’ misery is objectively hysterical, and thinking about how Johnston must have reacted to being arrested immediately inspires the visual of Thomas being kicked while he’s down. No, Jay Johnston, you do not get to tell us your brain worms-infested story about why you did what you did. You’ve fallen on your ass, we’re all laughing at you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
In the 2016 Vulture article, Bob Odenkirk declared that “Jay Johnston is America’s John Cleese.” Once again, Bob’s comedy is ahead of the curve in ways he could have never predicted.
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