http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoSCb78oUL4
Fascinated by Mitt Romney’s chimerical trip to Wawa? My pal Ryan Petzar breaks it down, for no apparent reason, and with timecode.
0:15: Mitt, with one hand on his hip and sleeves rolled up in a way specifically designed to appeal to people who’ve graduated college but haven’t been able to actually earn enough money in their lives to make that degree really worthwhile, asks “Where do you get your hoagies here? Do you get them at Wawas? Is that where you get ’em?” This is hilarious not only because he knows that’s the answer, because it was fucking publicized he’d be going to a Wawa, but because he says it with the same exact cadence that Jay Leno does while setting up an awful monologue joke: “So have you heard that, uh, have you heard that OCTO-mom is, uh… she’s filming an adult movie?” Basically, Mitt Romney is the Jay Leno of politics: he’s awful, but some old white people decided they didn’t hate him as much as their other options.
0:23: Having clearly established that everybody knows he’s talking about Wawa, the fucking place where one-in-three people in the audience bought their coffee or gas that morning, he proceeds to ask if anybody has ever been “a place called Wawas.” I mean, that’s how you qualify things when I talk about Philly to my friends back home: “They’ve got this place called Condom Kingdom, right? Yeah! In big letters! That’s what it’s actually called!”
0:25: Some people in the crowd cheer because they’re at a political rally for Not-The-Black-Guy and that’s what they’re supposed to do. Some people groan because, holy fuck, Mitt is going off notes.
0:28: Mitt, confused by the audience reaction that is not the usual ‘wild applause’ he gets at his carefully scripted events, tries to backtrack and forgets how to use his mouth to make words: “Some people don’t la… I’m sorry… I know it’s a vig state divided.” While being a factually correct statement, yes, the state is big (I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt here.) and it is divided both geographically by mountains and a river, he’s in an area that’s pretty much not at all divided. When you’re in NE PA if you say anything bad about Wawa, you get stabbed. I know this because they didn’t have Wawas where I grew up so I preferred Central PA’s Rutter’s Farm Stores.
0:30: Mitt realizes he’s already fucked. He’s passing the mic from hand to hand and gesticulating with his free hand. If you imagine him being in water up to his chest, it looks exactly like he’s treading water.
0:32: “I was in Wawas. I went in to order a sandwich.” This is funny on it’s own, not so much because he either makes the name possessive or plural, but because as an android, everybody knows he has no need to eat.
0:35: “You press the little (pantomimes pressing a button) touch-tone keypad…” Okay, the obvious joke here is that he’s severely out of touch by using the largely-antiquated term ‘touch-tone’ and Wawa’s screens don’t even have keys. But the best part of this is how fucking novel the idea seems to him. He’s completely unable to mask the absolute childlike wonder in his voice. “So these people go in, and they have a screen? There’s no menu? How do I know what the specials are? Where does it tell you the market price for the lobster? Shouldn’t the waiter handle all this for them?”
0:38: Here’s a really underrated part of this video. For a split second, Sir Mittington turns into Fatherhood-era Bill Cosby with his rapid-fire explanation of how you order a hoagie at Wawa. “You just touch this, and you know (waving hand), the sandwich comes (???) and you putch this, touch this, touch this, go pay the cashier… there’s your sandwich!”
0:42: Mitt inhales DEEPLY into the mic.
0:43: “It,” he exclaims, referring to the act of ordering a sandwich at Wawa, “is amazing!”
Look, I’ll give Mitt one thing: that is exactly how I acted when I ordered a sandwich at Wawa (technically it was a Sheetz, the Central/Western PA version of Wawa, but it’s the same principle). But the thing is, I was five-motherfucking-years old. And even at five I was able to verbalized the experience better than he did.
Courtesy of Wawa Inc. / AP
Photo of the first Wawa store, April 16, 1964 in Folsom, Pa., a Delaware County dairy store chain named for the Lenape Indian word for Canada goose.