"I was always shocked when I went to the doctor's office and they did my X-ray and didn't find that I had eight more ribs than I should have or that my blood was the color green"

Nicolas Cage uses medical imagery to dramatize the gap between inner identity and external verification. The X-ray, a symbol of objective truth, becomes a stage where he expects his private sense of radical difference to show up as anatomy: extra ribs, green blood. The punchline, that nothing unusual appears, captures the shock of learning that an unruly inner world can leave no trace on the body. It is a playful confession of alienation, dressed as science fiction.

The hyperbole functions as self-parody and self-mythologizing. By invoking absurdities, he nods to his public persona, eccentric, larger-than-life, almost otherworldly, while acknowledging the humbling fact of common biology. That tension is the engine of his artistry: an ordinary human vessel animated by excessive imagination. The line hints at a craving for permission to be extreme, as if a medical certificate of strangeness would justify transgression, risk, and flamboyance.

There is a whiff of imposter syndrome inverted. Instead of fearing he isn’t special enough, he half-expects the universe to confirm that he is literally other. When it doesn’t, he must locate otherness in craft and choice rather than in flesh. The doctor’s office represents institutions that flatten experience into images and numbers; the artist resists that flattening by insisting on inner spectacle. Extra ribs evoke biblical and anatomical myth; green blood conjures tabloid conspiracy and alien lore. He toys with pop-cultural fantasies to express an existential truth: feeling not-quite-earthbound in a world that keeps diagnosing you as normal.

The humor doesn’t negate the ache beneath it. It’s the joke of someone who has built a career on pushing intensity beyond realism, recognizing that the body remains stubbornly average. The resolution is quietly liberating: if the skeleton is standard issue, difference must be enacted, through performance, imagination, and a willingness to live as if the X-ray missed something essential.