Bill Hader helped write the best joke about Kanye West
If anybody needs a reminder, Kanye West is on a bit of a personal slide. If by “personal slide” you mean “losing billions of dollars because of his anti-semitic remarks”, then yeah, he’s sliding a bit. But lost in the shuffle, admittedly because it’s less important than victimising Jewish people, is the realisation that Ye still doesn’t get the South Park fish sticks joke.
In case you missed it, the 2009 South Park episode ‘Fishsticks’ concerns a joke that everyone in the world gets except Kanye West. However, because of his massive ego, Kanye refuses to hear anybody explain the joke to him. Ironically enough, Cartman claims that he defeated an entire army of “Jewbots” as well, making it a strange revisit in light of West’s recent comments. In the end, West believes that it is his fate to become a gay fish since he enjoys “fish sticks”.
West was initially receptive to the joke, but later interviews started to uncannily mirror the episode when West couldn’t fully explain the punchline and what it meant. He’s responded in song, on the tracks ‘Gorgeous’, ‘Life of the Party’, and Watch the Throne’s ‘Made in America’, so it’s clear that West is still preoccupied with deciphering the enigma that is “fish sticks”.
The original South Park joke is credited to creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, but another famous comedian helped create the punchline: Bill Hader. Hader was a creative consultant and producer on South Park when ‘Fishsticks’ originally aired, and when he sat down with The New Yorker in 2014, he explained the impetus behind the joke.
“The first episode I worked on with them was this one with Kanye West called ‘Fishsticks’,” Hader revealed. “They have these retreats, South Park retreats, and you get to stay in a nice hotel, and then you wake up in the morning, you go to a suite, and you just talk about South Park ideas… That’s where we came up with ‘Fishsticks’ because we were watching these salmon go up a thing, and then Matt was like, ‘What if one of them was just on an Evel Knievel bike?'”
That initial idea blossomed into the ‘Fishstick’ joke, but only because Hader claims that he initially misheard “fish dick” as “fish stick”. “Trey turned around and was like, ‘Has anyone ever made that joke?'” Hader says. “He got really excited. And he’s like, ‘Who can be someone who doesn’t have a sense of humour that we can make fun of? Who’s the one person in the world who won’t have a sense of humour?’ And in unison, we were like, ‘Kanye West!”
Check out Hader discussing ‘Fishsticks’ down below.
