Why is this Funny? "Open Wide For Some Soccer!"

* I’m going to paywall the “Why is this Funny?” posts. But for a small investment you can get all my comedy tips, then use them against me, when you eventually take my job as a comedy writer.

The World Cup is very close, which means five weeks of extreme sleep deprivation, where I end up looking like the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth, staggering blindly around my house, clutching my bloodshot eyeballs, and biting the heads off any creatures that get too close.1

With most matches in the US (provided Trump doesn’t go full Bane in The Dark Knight Rises on one of his own stadiums), there’s no way I can think of soccer in the USA without my brain going straight to The Simpsons’ scene, “Open Wide for Some Soccer!”2

The brilliant parody ad opens the Season 9 Episode, The Cartridge Family, and begins with Hank Williams Jnr roasting a soccer a ball on a barbecue, and growling in a deep southern accent, “Open Wide for Some Soccer!” He then stabs the burning ball, thrusts it at the camera, where it explodes like a grenade. What follows is 47 seconds of one of the funniest and sharpest parodies The Simpsons ever did.