Culture

A Fond Look Back At ‘Too Many Cooks’, The Weirdest Thing On The Internet

It's been five years since Adult Swim's iconic sketch first cursed us.

by Patrick Lenton  29 October 2019
Too Many Cooks Adult Swim

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Too many cooks? Too many cooks. Too many cooks! Tooooo many coooooooks.

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There’s only two kinds of people in the world — people who can safely say the phrase “Too many cooks” without breaking out into a hot existential sweat accompanied by pained laughter, and the rest of us.

‘Too Many Cooks’ is an iconic and blighted sketch by Adult Swim, which asks the question,”what if the opening credits of a classic TV sitcom never ended, and was also cursed and horrible?” The premise is easy — the longer you sit through the sketch, the more twisted and broken the world it promises becomes.

We can watch it now.

Let’s Talk About The Sketch Forever

It’s a sketch that lulls you with the pop sensibilities of a classic TV jingle, and all the tropes and recognisable joy of the shows you watched growing up. It’s a sketch that weaponises your own mania.

This sketch is not a chucklefest — the gags are not free and easy. Theres a couple of goofs that are fine, such as naming one of the many child stars as Gwydion Lashlee-Walton — that’s exactly the kind of name one of those kids would have. That’s true! They’re very good at identifying the inherent absurdities in this show.

However, the sketch is more CURSED and WEIRD than truly funny. You’ll be howling with laughter by the end, but the howling will be unhinged. You won’t feel great.

The first hint, the very first hint, of what the humour of this sketch entails is when you get to the end of the average sitcom opening, the music pauses… and instead of the show starting, it just comes in with another banal verse of the song. This is what happens.

The Sketch Continues

There’s more of the same. But we start seeing some glitches in the logic. Suddenly there’s a man-sized cat named Smarf, but before we can really take him in, we’ve moved on, with all the relentless optimism and energy of primetime television.

By the end of the second beat, we have Smarf shooting rainbows, we have an egregiously topless teen, we have implied polyamory — but there’s still so much more. The sketch would not be very funny on its own — we must continue.

By the third beat, we’ve even changed genre, with the camera panning into a cop drama. It’s still Too Many Cooks, but this time the lyrics are insterspersed with lines like “this city’s like a pressure cooker turned up to high!”

It’s here when things are getting really unhinged. We see the first glimpse of the menacing, Twin Peaks style bearded man looming in the background of shots. We get the first laugh out loud absurdity — Matthew Kody Foster playing the role of “Coat”, hanging on the hatrack, smiling.

We then move into a GI Joe style cartoon, and you think “aha, this is the gag”. They’re gonna parody a certain era of TV. I get this now.

And to a certain extent you’re right. But in many ways, you’re more wrong than ever before.

Murder

You see, the sketch continues parodying other TV types. We get what looks like the beginning of a West Wing style show, then a kinda Dynasty type vehicle. But instead of focusing on these new characters, we watch them get murdered by the aforementioned sinister man.

The sketch is turning on itself, killing its own premise.

It’s almost like the comedic premise is battling to maintain itself — we pause on the title card of Katie Adkins (yet another teen girl, in a show populated by 1000 teen girls) and the murderer moves through the scene while everything else is frozen. The music starts to distort.

We’re not even halfway through the sketch.

Katie Adkins runs through the paused sitcom, through the back of the set for the hypothetical ‘Too Many Cooks’. Is the gag now that it’s gone super meta?

Sorta.

Too Many Cooks

If you’ve made it through to nine minutes in, you and the sketch have achieved a kind of cursed synergy.

Everything is distorted and broken, the rules and reality of the world broken down. All you can hear is that goddamn, CURSED theme song. You can hear screaming.

On its own this would not be funny. But after 10 minutes of watching this, looking for meaning, this is screamingly funny. Stupendously hilarious. Upsettingly boring. Meaninglessly potent. Gigantically pointless.

The music finally ends. The sketch rounds itself out. The first and only line of dialogue is heard.

“Honey, I’m hom-” but it’s cut off, and is replaced with “To be continued”.

You finish watching the sketch. You close your laptop. You begin to work again.

And guess what — you start singing “too many cooks” without realising it, without joy.

And that’s why this sketch is so funny.