Even fictional people have to eat. Sometimes food reveals what we should know about a character, sometimes it’s a pleasant pause in the action, sometimes it’s a crucial staging platform for exposition, and sometimes, if this turkey tastes half as good as it looks, we’re all in for a very big treat. Food Fiction is an ongoing feature that looks at some of the most memorable foods in the history of storytelling.
In a display of dominance, vengeful score-settling, control, contempt, threat, capacity for selfish inhumanity, lack of concern for consequences, and a suggestion of the depravity to which he is willing to sink, a corrupt guard pisses in the Thanksgiving gravy at a women’s prison. The gravy is intended to dress up the low-cost, leftover trimmings from a turkey factory—“a bag of turkey assholes,” as one inmate says. That’s the best Red, the Russian cook, can do. In her words, “The whole meal has to come in at a $1.05 a prisoner; taxpayers don’t give a shit if it’s a holiday.” The Thanksgiving feast in the first season of Orange Is The New Black goes beyond being a mockery: It’s a damn shame, as Red throws out the pee-poisoned gravy and doesn’t serve it. Meanwhile, Piper has been thrown in solitary confinement and served inedible Thanksgiving food in an attempt to break her spirit. It’s just another perversion of the Norman Rockwellian Thanksgiving tradition.
Tradition expects us to gather warmly together around a steaming, beautiful bird. That expectation is the perfect setup for a disappointing holiday, and the bird is an irresistible chance to demonstrate how far from perfect life is. There’s nothing like a symbol of forced merriment and the importance of appearing to be a normal family to bring out the best in a room full of screenwriters. Practically every episodic program has a take on the holidays and how the ceremonial turkey should appear, be presented, and be prepared.
What happens to the turkey is a gauge of how far off-track the holiday will get. And there are many possible methods to wreck a turkey. Cartoons probably take turkey abuse farther, faster, and weirder than any other medium. For example, characters can turn the turkey into a blowtorch riding on a skateboard until it rockets skyward and explodes, as in Regular Show.
Or there’s the option to get drunk on absinthe, agree as a family to become essentially a multi-person beard, and make the turkey central to a hallucinatory salute to My Neighbor Totoro, starring “Lance,” Bob’s doomed turkey companion (who is eventually shot “to death”) in a reliably inventive and nutty Bob’s Burgers Thanksgiving special.
And, of course, the dogs can get it. The loss-of-a-meal-to-a-dog trope is a quick, reliable way to get rid of a turkey for dramatic purposes, as happens in the the not-aging-well Mad About You Thanksgiving special, for example, where the animal handler can barely get the actor-dog to politely lick the clearly torn-apart-by-an-art-director bird. Fortunately, there exists a canonical dog-stealing-the-turkey moment that means no writer nor script doctor need type the words “dog eats turkey” into a script ever again. There can probably be no finer example of a canine-related turkey theft than the one that occurs in A Christmas Story.
“Sons of bichen—Bumpasses!” The sequence stands up to repeated viewings, like almost every sequence in A Christmas Story, thanks to the interplay between autobiographical essayist Jean Shepherd himself, as the narrator, who basically just comes out and tells us what’s going to happen to set expectations, followed by the merciless milking of the gag, topped off with a delightfully quotable performance. Presumably the whole moment should be undercut or even ruined by the going-to-make-you-laugh music, the clumsy direction (we never even really see the dogs grab the turkey itself), the dated look of the film, the predictability of it all, or the scenery-chewing acting of the late, great Darren McGavin. Almost all of those faults are present in the Mad About You dog-eats-turkey scene, in fact. And because the whole Shepherd movie is essentially an illustrated yarn, it’s more or less the cinematic accompaniment to one of his radio programs. There’s not even much of an attempt to show, rather than tell, that “it is well-known throughout the Midwest that the old man is a turkey junkie, a bonafide-golly turkicanis freak.” Yet somehow it’s a wonderful moment, the last word in the dog-stealing-turkey scenario, and the setup for one of the most uncomfortably racist gags in all of film (uncomfortable for many reasons but partly because the laughter within it is pretty infectious).