Super Bowl Sunday: Jim Gaffigan on the pageantry and the gluttony

Well, it’s here: Super Bowl Sunday, America’s most American holiday. The food, the flyover, the halftime show – the spectacle of what Super Bowl Sunday has become makes perfect sense. 

America turned Jesus’ birthday into a shopping spree, Independence Day into a BBQ, and Memorial Day into a white sale, but somehow Super Bowl Sunday has become an exact reflection of who we are.

Today’s game will feature a mix of blood-pumping patriotism, violence, and pageantry dressed up in good ol’ gluttony and consumerism.

We will eat while we watch the game. Is there anything more American than eating while you watch other people be active, on television?

And unlike a Thanksgiving turkey or a Christmas fruitcake, today is about eating things we actually enjoy.  Nachos! Buffalo wings! Sub sandwiches! Pizza! Anything you want. This is America’s day!

It wouldn’t be Super Bowl Sunday without some incessant, unapologetic consumerism, the lifeblood of the American soul and economy. The commercials that air during the game will be not viewed as interruptions, but embraced as infotainment which we will immediately post about on social media, turning the country into an enormous involuntary focus group.

America needs this Super Bowl Sunday.  In my lifetime we’ve never been so divided. Not just two different sides – two different realities.  People that are right versus people that are right. 

We need a day to sit at home and root for a team. We haven’t had an opportunity to do that in, like, an hour.

     
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Story produced by Julie Kracov. Editor: Lauren Barnello.