Do You Want To Touch Dieter's Monkey? Hint: NO, You Don’t

Remember that accident involving a truck full of lab monkeys the other day? It seems that a good Samaritan who stopped to help is now sick. As the Instapundit said “It sounds like every sci-fi virus film ever made.” But let’s not start another wild conspiracy theory that will turn out to be true in 6 months. It’s probably nothing.

It’s probably just me and my slow-moving COVID brain, but every time I see anything about this monkey story all I can think about is Michael Myers and the Sprockets.

Sprockets was a recurring comedy sketch from the NBC television series Saturday Night Live, created by and starring comedian Mike Myers as a fictional West German television talk show. The sketch parodied German art culture in the 1980s…The sketch parodied German stereotypes, especially those pertaining to German seriousness, efficiency, and precision…Myers played “Dieter”, a bored, disaffected West German expressionist and minimalist who interviewed celebrities in whom he was demonstrably barely interested, and then invariably sought to bring the discussion around to his “limited” monkey, Klaus, seated on a platform atop a miniature column.

The repeating skit always included Myers creepy Dieter character asking his guest “do you want to touch my monkey?”

For the record: the correct answer then, and now, is a definitive “no.”

Eventually Dieter would grow weary of his guest and announce, “your story has become tiresome, now is the time we dance.” The line was supposedly based on a waiter Myers encounter while a struggling comic in Toronto. As the story goes, he would go to a cheap restaurant where all he could afford was a hot dog so that’s what he ordered every time from the waiter, Dieter.  Meyers thought Dieter’s, character could be exploited for comic gold at some point so he kept going back and ordering a hot dog. Eventually Dieter told him “your order has become tedious.” And now you know the rest of the story.

Now isn’t that better than any actual news you’re likely to encounter today?

If SNL had stuck to corny, stupid spoofs of modern culture – which is limitless these days – it might still be funny. And have an audience.