Food: A Love Story (24 page)

One of my favorite parts of a visit to a grocery store is the free samples. “Ooh, free sausage.” Unfortunately, there is always that awkward moment after you consume a free sample. Before you get the sample, you usually act like you are considering buying the product. “Well, this would be good for a party (
eat sample
). Nah. Well, gotta go!”

Checking out at a grocery store can also be an awkward experience. The checkout person gets such a window into your personal life. I imagine they are judging me for everything I am buying. “Should you really be eating that? No wonder you’re buying this Ex-Lax.” The total amount of the receipt seems to get higher and higher every time I check out at the grocery store even though I feel like I’m buying less food. It’s also become necessary for us all to be members of these grocery store clubs.

CASHIER:
Are you a member of our club?

ME:
Um, I’m just getting hot dogs.

CASHIER:
That’ll be four thousand dollars … or you can join our club.

ME:
Um, I can’t come to a lot of meetings, but I guess I’ll join.

CASHIER:
It’s really convenient. Fill out this personal information for the next ten minutes.

I used to feel uncomfortable when the cashier would bag my groceries. Talk about feeling lazy. “Hey, thanks for putting my groceries in my bag. I could help, but I’ll just watch. Yeah, I’m pretty exhausted from picking that stuff out. You want to come home and watch me eat them? I’m looking for a friend.” I now realize that the only thing more uncomfortable than someone bagging my groceries has to be bagging my
own
groceries at a self-service checkout. As I ring up my purchases I always think,
When is this shift going to be over?
Sometimes I’ll ask myself,
Hey, me, you want paper or plastic?
(sings)
El-vi-RA!

HOT POCKETS: A BLESSING AND A CURSE

Okay, let’s talk about the eight-hundred-pound stuffed pastry in the room. If you don’t know what a Hot Pocket is, all I can say is, congratulations or welcome to North America. If you are a resident of North America and don’t know what a Hot Pocket is, I can only assume you are so rich you haven’t gone grocery shopping for ten years or you have such a healthy and constructive lifestyle that you only shop at farmers’ markets and don’t watch television. Then again, you could also be another Unabomber.

There is nothing unique or innovative about the Hot Pocket concept. It is fundamentally just meat with a pastry-like cover. This is nothing new. I remember initially looking at the Hot Pocket product I saw in commercials and thinking,
Well, that’s just a calzone
. I imagined all the South Americans exclaiming, “Hey! That’s our empanada!” And the Jamaicans insisting, “No, that’s our meat pie!” It seems like every culture has
a version of the thing we Americans have come to call a Hot Pocket. While these other countries’ dishes seem like real food with some special kind of history, the American version seems like a cheap imitation. The Hot Pocket is sort of a symbol of the way we eat in America. The early development of the Hot Pocket appears to have begun with the TV dinner, the hominid of the Hot Pocket evolutionary chain. In the middle of the last century, our lives got busier, and we got lazier in our food-preparation habits. In the 1950s, the TV dinner made it possible for us to conveniently eat in front of our television. The microwave made it possible for us to make the TV dinner faster so we could watch more television. The Hot Pocket made it possible for us to eat something from the microwave without a fork while we watch television. I imagine intravenous food streaming from the television is about a decade away.

It’s almost embarrassing when I contemplate the impact Hot Pockets has had on my life. It truly has been a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that so many people relate so much to the series of jokes I wrote about this relatively simple microwavable food item that it changed my career, and a curse in that I certainly don’t need more people yelling “Hot Pocket” at me in the airport. I’m never sure how I’m supposed to respond. “Uh, thanks?” Once I was on CNN speaking seriously about the good work that the Bob Woodruff Foundation does on behalf of veterans and, unbeknownst to me at the time, on the bottom of the screen I was identified as Jim “Hot Pocket” Gaffigan. I have no doubt that if an obituary were to be written about me at this point in my life, I would be remembered as the Hot Pocket comedian. Whether I like it or not, Hot Pockets changed my life. I might not be doing stand-up in theaters or writing this book if in the late ’90s I didn’t find the commercials for Hot Pockets so ridiculous.

No, I did not sanction this.

What seems like a hundred years ago, I was doing a spot at Caroline’s Comedy Club in New York City. It was a showcase in which typically five or six comedians go up and do fifteen-minute sets of stand-up. It was a great opportunity to mix in new stuff with tried-and-true material while performing at a prestigious club. I had recently thought of a couple of jokes about a new product I had been seeing advertised a lot on television. The product was Hot Pockets. I thought the name was hilarious. Hot Pocket sounded like a euphemism for a sexual disorder.

GRANDPA TO TEENAGER:
Look, Bobby, sometimes when fellas don’t go on dates, they develop what’s called a Hot Pocket. It doesn’t mean you’re bad. It just means you need a girlfriend. I used to have Hot Pockets all the time, and then I met your grandmother.

I thought the commercial was even more preposterous. It showed an overly happy mother pulling something out of a microwave
that looked like a McDonald’s apple pie and handing it to her overly happy son. Then there was this equally absurd, enthusiastic, two-word jingle: “Hot Pockets!” The commercial felt more like a
Saturday Night Live
parody than an actual commercial. I was simultaneously annoyed, amused, and intrigued. Who in their right mind would buy this product? I cobbled together a couple of jokes and did them that night on the stage at Caroline’s. They got a couple of laughs in front of the late-night audience of local New Yorkers. Nothing remarkable. Nothing memorable. When I got offstage I approached my friend and host for the evening, Vic Henley. “That Hot Pocket stuff is funny,” Vic exclaimed. I said, “Thanks,” thinking he was just being nice, but then Vic repeated, “No, it’s funny.” Encouragement from another comedian you respect is really all most comedians are looking for when they are starting out. Rather than tossing aside the few observations, I began to gather more jokes on this odd product, Hot Pockets.

I think I got lucky with the timing of my Hot Pockets jokes. I got to them before other comedians realized the absurdity of the product. I certainly didn’t expect Hot Pockets to gain the popularity it did. In hindsight, the success of Hot Pockets is perfectly logical. When I was a teenager, everyone ate frozen burritos that were heated up in a microwave. Usually the tortilla of the burrito tasted like cardboard, but it was easy to make. Hot Pockets were the next logical step. Something anyone could easily cook in the microwave that was edible. Well, kind of.

I actually buy Hot Pockets. I go into grocery stores, head to the freezer section, and think,
Yeah, I’ll get these
. I’ve never eaten a Hot Pocket and then afterward thought,
I’m glad I ate that
. I always think,
I’m gonna die! I paid for that? Did I eat it or rub it on my face? My back hurts. Owwww! Wait, my watch stopped!
Hot Pockets should have a warning on the package.

People sometimes ask if the Hot Pockets people have sued me or contacted me. The answer is no. I think the good people at Nestlé know Hot Pockets are not being paired with champagne. You rarely see Hot Pockets on a menu when you go out to dinner. “Let’s see … I will have the Caesar salad and the Hot Pocket.” You will never overhear the following conversation in a fine-dining establishment.

WAITER:
Today’s specials. We have Chilean sea bass, which is sautéed in a lemon beurre blanc, and we have a Hot Pocket that is cooked in a dirty microwave. And that comes with a side of Pepto.

PATRON:
Is your Hot Pocket cold in the middle?

WAITER:
It’s frozen. But it can be served boiling-lava hot.

PATRON:
Will it burn my mouth?

WAITER:
It will destroy your mouth. Everything will taste like rubber for a month.

PATRON:
Oh, I’ll get the Hot Pocket.

Hot Pockets have not been in the public consciousness for that long. I saw a winner on
The Price Is Right
win a lifetime supply of Hot Pockets, which I’m pretty sure is technically a death sentence. Now Hot Pockets are part of our culture.
When they came out, I never imagined there would be over forty different flavors of Hot Pockets with new products being introduced on what seems to be a daily basis. Given the innumerable varieties of Hot Pockets available, people could play a game of Hot Pocket roulette in which a variety of Hot Pocket flavors are taken out of the packaging and placed in a freezer. Then the roulette participant can randomly choose a frozen Hot Pocket from the freezer. They have no idea what flavor or variety they will get until that first scorching bite. Actually, that wouldn’t really be a fun game because no one would ever be sure which flavor of Hot Pocket they had chosen, given that they all pretty much taste the same.

A question linking me and Hot Pockets on
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

At times it feels like Hot Pockets are in the news more often than the latest tabloid starlet. Recently a large recall of Hot
Pockets was instituted because they were found to contain “unsound meat.” To many of us who eat Hot Pockets, this was neither shocking nor newsworthy. I remember thinking,
I guess next they are going to tell us smoking is bad for us.
Mostly Hot Pockets are in the news for what humans do to a Hot Pocket or for a Hot Pocket. There was an almost biblical story of a teen who stabbed his older brother over a Hot Pocket in South Bend. There was another one about a college student at the University of Notre Dame who broke into a health spa and ate Hot Pockets. I’m less shocked that this behavior took place in my home state of Indiana and more surprised that a health spa was selling Hot Pockets. “After your therapeutic massage, may I interest you in our Hot Pocket cleanse?”