Love Quote by Bruce McCulloch

McCulloch isn’t taking a swing at jokes; he’s taking a swing at the machinery of Joke-Work. The provocation lands because it flips the usual hierarchy: polished virtuosity (Robin Williams, the canonized improvisational god) gets demoted below the raw, unedited drama of a stranger just trying to make it through a shift. It’s a deliberately heretical comparison that tells you what kind of performer McCulloch is: less interested in punchlines than in people.

The subtext is a manifesto for a certain strain of alternative comedy, the kind that Kids in the Hall helped mainstream in the early ’90s. Their best sketches often weren’t about joke density; they were about specificity, discomfort, and character textures that felt observed rather than manufactured. McCulloch’s “waitress having a bad day” isn’t a quirky anecdote. It’s an argument that the most compulsively watchable thing is not “funny,” but “interesting” - a crackle of mood, contradiction, and social friction you can’t script without killing it.

Calling that waitress “more fun” also needles our complicity as spectators. We consume other people’s strain as entertainment all the time; comedy just makes the transaction polite. McCulloch prefers the impolite version, where the performance isn’t consensual and the stakes feel real. And by naming Robin Williams - a symbol of relentless, generous output - he spotlights how exhausting virtuosity can become when it’s too smooth. Sometimes the messiness is the point.