"Two stops after I got on, these two unbelievable short people got on, and the way they were looking at me, I could tell. They wanted to bite my ankles!"
About this Quote
McKinney’s joke lands because it weaponizes a petty, everyday paranoia and dresses it up as a monster movie. The setup is aggressively mundane: public transit, a couple stops, strangers getting on. Then he escalates with “unbelievable short people,” a phrase that’s doing double duty. It’s a comedic exaggeration (so short it strains credibility) and a social tell: the speaker is already sorting people into categories, primed to overread their “look.”
“I could tell” is the hinge. It’s the classic self-authorizing line of someone about to reveal more about themselves than their target. The punchline, “They wanted to bite my ankles,” converts height difference into predation, turning shortness into a cartoon threat. It’s funny because it’s disproportionate, because it’s specific (ankles, not just “attack me”), and because it satirizes the ego of feeling targeted in a space where everyone is mostly just trying to get through the ride.
The subtext is a send-up of casual othering: the way people narrate public life as if it’s a stage where they’re the main character and everyone else is either audience or villain. McKinney leans into the childishness of the fear, which gives the bit plausible deniability: he’s not arguing a thesis about bodies; he’s exposing the absurd mental gymnastics behind snap judgments. The context that matters is stand-up’s tradition of making discomfort legible through exaggeration: the laugh is less “short people are scary” than “listen to how ridiculous my brain sounds when it decides it’s under siege.”
“I could tell” is the hinge. It’s the classic self-authorizing line of someone about to reveal more about themselves than their target. The punchline, “They wanted to bite my ankles,” converts height difference into predation, turning shortness into a cartoon threat. It’s funny because it’s disproportionate, because it’s specific (ankles, not just “attack me”), and because it satirizes the ego of feeling targeted in a space where everyone is mostly just trying to get through the ride.
The subtext is a send-up of casual othering: the way people narrate public life as if it’s a stage where they’re the main character and everyone else is either audience or villain. McKinney leans into the childishness of the fear, which gives the bit plausible deniability: he’s not arguing a thesis about bodies; he’s exposing the absurd mental gymnastics behind snap judgments. The context that matters is stand-up’s tradition of making discomfort legible through exaggeration: the laugh is less “short people are scary” than “listen to how ridiculous my brain sounds when it decides it’s under siege.”
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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