It’s constant. Especially this time of year. You’ll be watching basketball with your friends. It’s near the end of the game. It’s 66-62. The leading team’s point guard slashes into the lane and kicks out to an open shooter in the corner. He takes the three. It tickles the nylon, doesn’t even touch iron, delivers that perfect ‘swish’ sound effect that you could put in a stock sound effect library for the NBA 2K audio engineers to include in the next game. It’s a dagger shot, nearly puts the game out of reach for the team trailing. Somebody’s going on, somebody’s on the bus home. It’s a turning point in the tournament, the beginning moment that leads to worst moment of the losing players’ careers and potentially the start of the sorts of tournament runs that get in the CBS highlight packages forever.
From somewhere in the corner of the room, you hear the word. “Nice.” The score says 69, which is a sexual position in which two people engage one another orally at the same time. This was, at one point, maybe the early 1990s, genuinely funny to people. Bill and Ted used it. But later on it became played out and not funny. In the mid-2010s, it became ‘ironically’ funny to imitate the people who thought it was funny and go “Nice” whenever you see a 69. I don’t know where we stand now.
I will say that a properly deployed 69 is still funny. For example, when Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson ended up judging the NFL’s “Best Catch” Competition at the Pro Bowl, he masterfully acknowledged the absurdity of his presence before following it up with a well-deployed score of 69, lampshading what we expect out of Pete Davidson nowadays. But it is played out. Comedy is built upon the subversion of expectations, and 69, the number of sex, and its number-of-marijuana cousin, 420, and its number-of-the-beast cousin, 666, surprise nobody anymore. They have slipped into obligatory comedy status alongside funny commercials and meme formats. Continue reading