It may not be the nicest restaurant in the world, but there’s something special about going to Olive Garden with a couple friends and splitting a big plate of lasagna wings. Or sharing an order of the Gluten Classico with your spouse. Heck, sometimes it’s fun to just get a table for one and dig in on the unlimited stick. All that and more can be found at the Olive Garden, home of the pasta nachos, which are guaranteed to be warm and defeated.
Okay. All of that is, admittedly, gibberish. But not so far off from what one might expect to encounter on the Olive Garden menu. These fantastical, fake dishes come to us from New York-based comedian Keaton Patti, who, in the above tweet, claims to have fed a bot 1,000 hours of Olive Garden commercials until it regurgitated its own jumbled version of an advertisement, complete with surreal stage directions. It even includes a more despondent, existential tagline for the restaurant: “Olive Garden. When you’re here, you’re here.”
The “I fed a bot 1,000 hours of X and it produced Y” conceit is a popular one on Twitter these days, and Patti has had a lot of success with it. He’s previously poked fun at the Saw film franchise, the Solo trailer, and even Fox News. But it’s pretty clear that the joke conceit is just that, a conceit. No one is actually feeding 1,000 hours of anything to a bot, because 1) these scripts are too purposefully comedic and 2) that’s not how bots work. There’s an ongoing debate in certain corners of Twitter about whether this joke format is legitimate or if the “this was written by a bot” setup gives the audience permission to lower their bar for comedy and enjoy poorly written jokes that normally wouldn’t get laughs. It also has the potential to diminish legitimately bot-assisted comedy like the stuff coming out of Botnik Studios.
But, at the end of the day, a goof is a goof. No matter how the script was written, people seem to get a kick out of the bizarre world it establishes. As for us, we’re just trying to get our hands on that secret soup.
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