April 2024: Taco Bell and Pneumonia
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Normally I keep the month-in-a-life stuff up here in the free section and cram the local yokel comedy complaints and Taco Bell Updates below the paid line, as if gossip about people you don’t know and food you know too well is the type of show you gotta pay to see. This time I’m flipping things because I have more to say about Taco Bell, Comedy, and Taco Bell Comedy than anything that happened to me this month. Below the paid line you’ll find less important stories from April like how I almost died from pneumonia.
When poopinatwork told me local hot sauce brand Secret Aardvark was guest-starring on the Taco Bell menu with their Secret Aardvark Nacho Fries (French fries covered in Taco Bell smegma and slathered in a cream of ranch mixed with hot sauce) I felt the same surprise joy I did when watching Curb Your Enthusiasm and seeing a comedian friendly pop into a scene. Is that? Hey! No way! Like with the comic, I DMed my enthusiastic congrats to Secret Aardvark. Well deserved.
I picked up my local hero nacho fries on the way home from a spot and, in a moment of personal growth, recognized that this meal is too messy for in-car dining. Instead I smuggled the bag inside my home, tip toed passed my sleeping wife, went into a room, shut the door, and feasted quietly but with great passion. This dish, which comes in a plastic dish, is right down the uprights for garbage food innovation appreciators. I found it validating that Taco Bell and Secret Aardvark see value in fusing hot sauce with ranch. I’ve long advocated for the normalization of ranch mixing. I like to mix ranch with different types of hot sauces myself, or mix it with ketchup, or mix it with mustard. Sometimes, after a long day, I squirt it in a big bowl and just sip it straight.
I couldn’t throw the bag in the garbage because it might wake my wife so I hid it in a corner overnight. In the morning it was filled with ants. Ants everywhere. Everyone loves Secret Aardvark Nacho Fries, available at Taco Bell for a limited time only.
There’s a type of Taco Bell joke I want to kill forever. It’s the one about how it gives you diarrhea. I’ve felt this way for years but it only came to mind recently when I heard a comic tell a version of this joke that was unique and original and made me and a room full of people laugh. A great reminder that whenever anyone is calling a type of joke bad or hack that doesn’t mean truly funny, unique, not at all hack versions are impossible. (If you catch me with a uniquely you joke about the dentist or airplane food or whatever I will in fact have a comedy crush on you forever.) What it does mean is that generally a lot of hack minds like to use the hack version of the joke to entertain other hack minds. (Also, just a note here that I have committed many hack crimes and will commit more in the future. I am not innocent. If anything I’m a hack jail house snitch.)
First of all, Taco Bell does not give people diarrhea. I would not have the problem with compulsively eating this food if after the first time I Lived Más, way back in my formative years, after I sunk my teeth into the fleshy belly of that bean burrito like a horny vulture, I then had to run to the bathroom and squirt the place up. Taco Bell exists and is popular, which would not be true if mass shits were happening. Then there’s the cracked racist foundation to the joke. Why are there no McDonald’s or Wendy’s gives you the runs jokes? Why did hack society settle on Taco Bell, of all options? See? This joke sucks.
This is a simple call to action, next time you hear the Taco Bell joke in the wild, feign concern and ask the moron if Taco Bell actually did that to them. They’ll say no. Then act confused about why they would say that it did. They’ll feel dumb and will be less likely to do it again. And we will have progressed as a society, thanks to your social heroics.
How I was healed by Pneumonia
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