Dumb... Huh? Episode 3 - Tealy and the Crew
The announcement had gone out in the group chat at 11 PM on a Sunday.
"DURR!! EPISODE 3 TOMORROW!! NEW CONSTENSTANS!!"
Tealy had stared at the word "constenstans" for a long time.
Not contestants. Not even close to contestants. Constenstans. A word that did not exist in any language and yet communicated its meaning perfectly because DumbDird had absolute confidence in its spelling and that confidence was somehow load-bearing.
Dird had reacted with 👍
Blara had posted chips.
Tealy had put his phone down and gone to sleep because there was nothing else to do.
The new addition to the set was unveiled in the cold open.
Beric had filmed it properly this time, a slow dramatic pan starting at the base of the catapult and tilting up, and there, tied to the launch arm at the precise trajectory point where a launched contestant would achieve maximum velocity, was a large thumbs up emoji balloon.
Not a small balloon. A large one. Sized specifically so that a launched person would make full contact with it at speed before continuing their arc over the back wall.
It floated there with the benign cheerfulness of something that did not know what it was about to be involved in.
"Durr," said DumbDird in the cold open, gesturing at it with both arms like a game show host presenting a car, "if you get catapulted. You also hit the balloon."
He nodded once.
"Durr, that's the update."
The camera held on the balloon for three full seconds.
Beric had put a gentle spotlight on it.
It looked incredible.
The constenstans had assembled backstage with varying degrees of enthusiasm and self-awareness.
Greeny had arrived early, which was the kind of thing Greeny did. He was organized. He was prepared. He was, in the way that all of Tealy's immediate family apparently were, smart — the composed, methodical kind of smart that looked at a situation, assessed it completely, and then made a reasonable decision about how to proceed. He had looked at the catapult, looked at the balloon, done some brief mental geometry, and decided he was going to win.
He did not say this out loud. He didn't need to.
SuperDumbDird had arrived wearing a shirt that said DUMB on it, which was either extraordinary preparation or a coincidence so perfect it looped back around to being extraordinary preparation. He was vibrating with excitement in the particular way that people vibrate when they don't fully understand what they're excited about but are committed to the feeling regardless.
"DURR, I'VE BEEN PRACTICING," SuperDumbDird announced to the room.
"Practicing what," Tealy said.
"DURR, SAYING DUMB."
A silence.
"You've been practicing saying the word dumb."
"DURR, YEAH, I SAID IT LIKE A HUNDRED TIMES THIS MORNING."
"In preparation for saying it once."
"DURR, YOU GOTTA WARM UP, TALLY."
Tealy looked at DumbDird.
DumbDird shrugged with the expression of someone who found this completely reasonable.
And then there was the CleaningBot.
Greeny had brought it.
It stood approximately four feet tall, white, with a chassis that suggested its designers had been thinking about floors and surfaces and absolutely nothing else when they built it. It had small functional arms. It had wheels. It had, bolted somewhat awkwardly to its upper section in what was clearly a retrofit, a speaker and a small screen that served as a face.
It was a cleaning robot. It cleaned things. That was what it did. That was what it had been built to do. Every decision made in its design and construction had been oriented around the singular task of cleaning surfaces.
"Why is it here," Tealy said.
"Durr, Greeny brought it," said DumbDird, with the open, accepting energy of someone for whom this required no further explanation.
"I know Greeny brought it. Why did Greeny bring it."
"It has conversational AI," Greeny said, in the patient tone of someone who had already thought about this more than anyone else in the room. "Experimental. I wanted to see how it handles unpredictable social situations."
Everyone looked at the CleaningBot.
The CleaningBot's screen displayed a small neutral expression.
"Durr, hello!" said DumbDird to the CleaningBot.
"Hello," said the CleaningBot, in a voice that was pleasant and measured and about fifteen percent too confident for a robot whose entire purpose was Swiffering. "I am ready to clean any surfaces you need addressed today."
"Durr, there are no surfaces to clean right now."
A brief pause.
"I can wait," said the CleaningBot.
Tealy looked at Greeny.
Greeny looked at the CleaningBot with the expression of a scientist watching an experiment proceed in a direction that was neither expected nor entirely unwelcome.
Round One: SuperDumbDird.
SuperDumbDird strode to the podium with the confidence of someone who had said the word "dumb" one hundred times that morning and felt ready.
DumbDird faced his cousin across the podium.
The lights held steady. The balloon floated gently above the catapult. The sequined jacket caught the spotlight perfectly.
"Huh?" said DumbDird.
"DUMB!" said SuperDumbDird, approximately four tenths of a second early.
The rules had not specifically addressed being early.
DumbDird blinked.
SuperDumbDird blinked back.
"Durr," said DumbDird slowly, "you were a little early, cousin."
"DURR, I WAS WARMED UP."
"Durr, I know, but—"
"DURR, I SAID IT THOUGH."
DumbDird considered this with genuine judicial seriousness, which was not a mode he entered often and which the camera caught beautifully in a slow zoom that was a Beric decision of real quality.
"Durr," DumbDird said finally, "half a taco."
A half taco arrived from offstage. Nobody questioned the logistics of this.
SuperDumbDird accepted it with the dignity of a man who had trained hard and deserved more but would take what he got.
"DURR, I'M PRACTICING NEXT TIME," he announced, to a room that did not have the heart to tell him he'd been practicing all morning.
Round Two: Greeny.
Greeny approached the podium the way he approached everything, which was directly and without unnecessary theater. He stood. He waited. He was still in the way that people who are very good at waiting are still.
DumbDird looked at him.
The silence began.
Greeny waited with the patience of a person who had calculated that patience was the correct variable to optimize.
The silence stretched.
"Huh?" said DumbDird.
"Dumb," said Greeny.
Exactly on time. Not early like SuperDumbDird. Not late like Beric. Not flat like Blara, not effortful like Dird. Just correct, in the simple clean way that correct things are correct.
The taco arrived. Greeny caught it, nodded once, and walked back.
Tealy watched his brother from the sideline with an expression that was approximately sixty percent pride and forty percent the specific irritation of having a competent sibling.
"First try," Tealy said.
Greeny glanced at him. "Was there any question?"
Tealy looked at the ceiling.
Round Three: The CleaningBot.
This had not been on the original lineup. DumbDird had added it this morning, in the same energy in which DumbDird added most things to his life, which was enthusiasm first and logistics never.
The CleaningBot rolled to the podium.
It could not reach the podium. The podium was the wrong height for a four-foot cleaning robot with small arms.
Beric, from offstage, slid a small platform over without being asked. The CleaningBot rolled onto it. Its screen displayed a politely neutral expression.
"Durr, okay!" said DumbDird. "Same rules! I say Huh, you say Dumb before I say it, you get a taco!"
"Understood," said the CleaningBot, in its pleasant measured voice. "I am ready. Also I notice the floor near the catapult has some scuff marks I could address later."
"Durr, great, but first—"
"I am ready," said the CleaningBot again.
DumbDird faced it.
The silence began.
The CleaningBot waited.
DumbDird waited.
The balloon floated.
"Huh?" said DumbDird.
The CleaningBot said nothing.
The room waited.
The CleaningBot continued to say nothing.
Five seconds passed.
Seven seconds.
"Durr," said DumbDird quietly, "you okay?"
The CleaningBot's screen flickered once.
Ten seconds after DumbDird had said "Huh?", the CleaningBot said, in its full pleasant confident voice:
"Dumb."
And then, into the complete silence of a room watching a cleaning robot be ten seconds late to a game show, it produced a laugh.
An annoying laugh.
The kind of laugh that a committee of engineers had decided sounded friendly and which had landed somewhere adjacent to friendly in a way that made everyone in the room make a face. It was too long. It was too even. It was the laugh of something that had learned what laughing was from a description of laughing.
"Heh heh heh heh heh," said the CleaningBot.
"Oh no," said Greeny quietly. Not alarmed. Just noting.
The catapult launched.
The CleaningBot left the platform at significant speed, screen still displaying its neutral expression, pleasant voice beginning a sentence that the room never heard the end of because it cleared the balloon — making full contact, the thumbs up emoji spinning wildly on impact — and then continued over the back wall with a trajectory that Beric tracked on camera two with the focus of a professional.
There was a sound from beyond the wall.
It was not the sound of a person landing.
It was a different sound. A complicated sound. A sound that suggested a structural event had occurred.
Then, one by one, ten Swiffers came flying back over the wall and landed on the stage.
Just the Swiffers. Clean, intact, functional Swiffers, landing in a loose spread across the floor like the aftermath of something that defied engineering.
The room was completely silent.
The balloon, which had drifted back to its resting position, floated gently above the catapult.
The ten Swiffers lay on the stage.
Greeny looked at where the CleaningBot had been. Looked at the Swiffers. Looked at DumbDird. Returned to the Swiffers.
"Hm," said Greeny.
"Durr," said DumbDird.
"I didn't expect that specific outcome," Greeny said, in the careful tone of a scientist updating a hypothesis.
"Durr, ten Swiffers, though."
"Yes," said Greeny. "Ten."
"Durr, the floor's going to be really clean after this."
Greeny looked at his brother. Looked at the Swiffers. And in a moment that Beric caught in a clean medium shot that would become, arguably, the best single image the show had ever produced, he slowly, quietly, picked up one of the Swiffers.
"It did say it could address the scuff marks," Greeny said.
"DURR—"
"By the catapult."
"DURR, YEAH—"
"I'll do it," Greeny said, and began sweeping.
The episode ran fifty-one minutes.
Beric had included slow motion on the CleaningBot's catapult arc, which showed the balloon contact in extraordinary detail, the thumbs up emoji spinning, the CleaningBot's screen still displaying its neutral expression at full velocity.
He had also included the laugh.
The full ten seconds of it, isolated, with the sound mixed slightly louder than everything else.
It was deeply, profoundly annoying in a way that was also completely perfect and Tealy watched it three times.
The post-credits scene was Greeny sweeping the stage with one of the Swiffers in complete silence while DumbDird watched with his hands clasped, nodding slowly, like a foreman surveying completed work.
It was uploaded to the Netflix production portal, not YouTube, because the YouTube videos were down now, which DumbDird was still in a complicated emotional place about.
The message came in at 3:17 AM.
"dumb hu nn nn hujt. gaiuiti clIP'S dtrending"
Dird reacted with 👍
That was it. That was the entire event. It sat in the group chat like a artifact from another dimension, thirteen characters of which were not words and one fragment that was almost "clip's" if you tilted your head and were generous, and Dird had given it a thumbs up with the same energy he gave everything, which meant either he had also been asleep or he genuinely processed "gaiuiti clIP'S dtrending" as normal communication and responded accordingly.
Both options were somehow equally plausible.
Tealy woke up at 8 AM, picked up his phone, and saw the message.
He stared at it for a long time.
He was familiar with the sensation of having sent a message he didn't remember sending. This was a different and more specific experience, which was reading a message he didn't remember sending and having absolutely no framework for what it had been attempting to communicate.
"dumb hu nn nn hujt."
He could see the "dumb hu" at the beginning. That was probably Dumb...Huh? He had been thinking about the CleaningBot clip before bed. The "nn nn" was his face. The "hujt" was unknowable. A word from a language that existed only in the forty-five seconds between consciousness and sleep.
"gaiuiti clIP'S dtrending"
The capital IP in the middle of "clIP'S" suggested his finger had hit caps lock at exactly that moment and then released it, which meant he had been moving while typing, which meant he had been typing this from a position of active physical instability.
The apostrophe in clIP'S was, somehow, correct.
His unconscious brain had remembered the apostrophe.
He scrolled up to see the reactions.
Dird: 👍
DumbDird, who had apparently been awake at 3 AM or had woken up to the notification with the enthusiasm of a golden retriever hearing a wrapper crinkle:
"DURR TALLY!! CLIP IS TRENDING?!?! WHERE?!?"
"DURR TALLY"
"TALLY"
"TALLY WHERE IS IT TRENDING"
"DURR I CHECKED EVERYWHERE ITS NOT ON YOUTUBE ANYMORE"
"TALLY"
"durr tally are you okay"
The last message had come in at 4 AM, which meant DumbDird had spent forty-five minutes sending increasingly urgent messages into the void before eventually, apparently, arriving at genuine concern.
Tealy felt briefly terrible about this.
Then he scrolled further.
Blara had responded at 3:45 AM, which raised its own questions about what Blara was doing awake at 3:45 AM, with:
"what is gaiuiti"
Then, four minutes later, a photo of cheese. Night cheese. She had been awake at 3:45 AM eating cheese and had responded to the sleep message and then posted the cheese and gone back to whatever she was doing.
Beric had sent, at 7 AM, the most Beric response imaginable:
"dtrending has an interesting structure. Like drifting and trending combined. Is that intentional?"
It was not intentional. Tealy had been asleep. But he stared at "dtrending" for a moment and thought about it and honestly it wasn't bad.
SuperDumbDird had responded at some unknown hour with:
"DURR WHAT IS TRENDING"
And then, forty minutes later:
"DURR NEVERMIND I FOUND IT"
He had not found it. The show wasn't live. There was nothing to find. But SuperDumbDird had found something, somewhere, and had achieved a sense of closure about it, and Tealy decided not to disturb that.
Greeny had sent one message at 7:30 AM:
"You were asleep."
Not a question. A statement. Delivered with the calm forensic certainty of someone who had looked at "gaiuiti" and reached a conclusion in under three seconds.
Tealy typed into the group chat.
"I was asleep"
DumbDird responded instantly, which meant he'd been watching the chat since 4 AM with the dedication of a man who had not slept and was not going to sleep until this was resolved.
"DURR TALLY!! YOU'RE OKAY!! SO THE CLIP ISN'T TRENDING??"
Tealy looked at the ceiling.
"The show isn't live yet DumbDird. It can't trend."
"DURR OH"
A pause.
"DURR BUT IT COULD THOUGH"
"DURR LIKE EVENTUALLY"
"DURR WHEN IT'S LIVE TALLY THE LAUGH IS REALLY GOOD"
Dird reacted to this with 👍
Blara posted morning cheese. Different cheese than the night cheese. She had a system.
Greeny sent a follow-up message that Tealy read with the specific emotion of having a sibling who was right about everything.
"For what it's worth, 'gaiuiti clIP'S dtrending' is more coherent than most of what's in this chat."
Dird reacted with 👍
DumbDird sent three separate ads for Dumb...Huh? in a row, which was impressive given that the show still wasn't live and the YouTube videos were still down, meaning he was advertising something that currently existed in no accessible format to a group chat of nine people who had all been personally present at the filming.
Tealy stared at the three ads.
Then at Greeny's message.
Then at Dird's 👍 applied to the observation that sleep-gibberish was more coherent than the rest of the chat.
Then at the night cheese.
He put his phone down, got up, made himself breakfast, came back, and the chat had forty-one new notifications.
He did not open them.
He looked at "dumb hu nn nn hujt. gaiuiti clIP'S dtrending" one more time.
The apostrophe was still correct.
He was choosing to be proud of that.
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