The Half-Time Show.

I don’t usually watch the National (American) Football League Super BowlⓇ. I have watched it before. It’s possible that I’ll subject myself to the experience again one day. But I know for a fact that the game is divided into quarters, and after two quarters, they take an extended break. That’s half-time. It gives the audience a chance to stretch their legs, go to the restroom, buy snacks and memorabilia, that sort of thing. It also gives the players a chance to rest their legs, go to the restroom.

Not everyone has to pee at half-time. So to keep the rabble from getting restless, they have to throw a block of entertainment in the middle of the longer block of entertainment. They call this the Half-Time Show. It’s always an extended musical dance number, but that’s mostly for lack of creativity. It could be anything. They could go with a barbershop quartet. Or they could let 500 toddlers loose with sacks of flour, let them yuck it up.

There’s intrigue to the idea of a half-time show. In the middle of one live entertainment event, they need a rest, so they threw another one in there. And it underscores exactly how culturally void the main event is, in the process. Some years the half-time show overshadows the game itself.

There’s also a pre-game show, and then some post-game fare. The pre-game is mostly a bunch of boring talking over ever-fancier graphical displays of players, as everyone is waiting for the game to start, but they didn’t bother to book a musician. After, there’s some short wrap-up followed by a naked attempt by whichever network airs the game to try to get you to sign up to their newsletter.

Not the middle bit. They want you pumped! up! and revelling in the glory of sport and Americana. You need to be at peak patriotic performance to watch that second half. It has a motif of its own, that half-time show, best recalled by the film Idiocracy, which was basically filmed in Half-Time-Show-a-Vision to great effect.

Some years the half-time show is a bust. That’s fine. People get to complain about it. Or if they feel like controversy happened, they complain about it. Or if it was actually good, they complain about it in that other way that signifies enjoyment. About 80 percent of the purpose of the whole show, not just half-time, is to let people complain (or otherwise talk) about it. The other 20 percent is trying to sell you a truck that’s too big to drive on public roads, an inverse-clown-car, where you fit a square-block-sized-vehicle around just one person.

Non-allegorically, let’s imagine for a moment that a bunch of rich idiots decide the big game is too expensive. They want to cut costs. If they were rich enough or dumb enough or both, they might decide to drop the half-time show. They’d say a lot of meaningless things about it being a ploy by the music industry or that it’s full of corruption. Maybe they could convince the event planners to nix it. What would happen then?

It might go off the first year. But it wouldn’t take more than a year, with the people complaining, the value of advertising time dropping, the viewership falling for the second half, the public health crises and lack of opportunity to smooth feathers abroad, before they’d just have to put the half-time show right back where it belongs. These things serve purposes. They weren’t hatched as some plot to spread cheer and joy among the people. They keep the ball rolling when the ball ain’t rolling.

Anyway. The important thing to take away from all this is that the half-time show is a head trip. It’s literally there to distract you from the fact you’re now waiting around for the action to continue. It’s trying to keep you from noticing that you’re sitting in a crowded house (or bar or country club or space station, etc.) full of greasy food and drunk people (with their fancy sideburns and space helmets) who have gathered to watch a bunch of athletes injure each other for points in hopes of getting fancy-rings and a bunch of dough.

Also, again, to give you time to pee. They’ve done studies on the average party size compared to the number of bathrooms compared to the amount of booze and soda sold, all to figure out exactly how many minutes the whole hoopla-filled majesty must go so that everyone can make it back in time to take their places in front of the giant rectangle of sports.

It’s utilitarian, but also a completely insane moment of time when a majority of the country needs to forget exactly what they’ve signed up for, where they are, that they have to get up in the morning, that they’ve got bills and tariffs to pay, taxes to do. The fact that the block appears in the middle of a larger block of similarly-minded distraction makes it all the more demented.

So if you happen to go bathroom during the half-time show next Sunday, bask in the knowledge that you’re peeing during the biggest, most expensive television presentation, during the finest song-and-dance numbers that society apparently thinks it can offer.