Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Decipher Hidden Meanings of ‘Frasier’ Theme Song
The gang on The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast doesn’t mind mixing it up with listeners, especially when it comes to the mysteries of sitcom theme songs. Akiva Schaffer read one such musing last week from a loyal fan of the podcast: “Hi guys, big Frasier fan here. Part of the Crane Train. What part is sadder — the tossed salad or the scrambled eggs? Something to think about.” (For the record, neither is sadder than the live version below.)
The question made Andy Samberg philosophical: “I always imagine the scrambled eggs were left in the pan. It’s like the amount that didn’t get eaten.”
“Right,” agreed Jorma Taccone. “You’re too depressed to eat it.”
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“They’re lonely and cold,” Samberg continued. “Whereas the tossed salads… I mean, they’re tossed. They’re exciting. They’re living their best.”
It’s always raining in Seattle, noted Taccone, who imagined rain out the window as the salad and eggs do their thing. Samberg pictured the camera panning from the forlorn scrambled eggs to the rain-streaked pane.
“He does say, ‘Baby, I hear the blues a-callin’,” said Schaffer, “so there is a sadness.”
But which food is sadder?
Taccone calls it a tie, picturing Frasier staring down at both menu items with despair. “I picture him just looking at what he’s created, looking down at his food like, I can’t eat either. I’m too fucking depressed.”
Schaffer got metaphorical. Maybe the “tossed salad and scrambled eggs” aren’t food after all. As a radio therapist, was “tossed salad and scrambled eggs” just Frasier’s callously poetic way of describing the brains of his listeners?
A week later, Jorma’s sister-in-law Emily (she’s the girl who “acted like she’s never seen a 10 before” in the “Lazy Sunday” video and a Frasier superfan) left a voicemail co-signing Schaffer’s analysis. “You guys were really, really close to figuring out the meaning of the tossed salad and scrambled eggs,” she confirmed. “It is a metaphor for the callers on Frasier’s radio show. They’re both mixed up — tossed salad, scrambled eggs — they’re things you can’t undo. It represents the problems that he has to solve.”
Then why not just have Kelsey Grammer sing lyrics about the clinically depressed? “Apparently, they didn’t want to explicitly talk about psychiatry in the theme song,” according to Emily. “So that’s why they did it as a metaphor.”
“Wow, that was so helpful,” said Meyers, eyes opened to a new comedy reality. “It just felt like a giant key turning in a lock.” In fact, why wasn’t “You can’t untoss a salad” an expression that people use in daily life? It works!
Schaffer had the lyrics figured out from the get-go, but he had a confession about his breakdown from the previous week: “I was just making that up on the fly.”
