Funny / BIGTOP BURGER

Season 1

Stove

• Steve's Cloudcuckoolander tendencies while dealing with the customer are good for a laugh.

Elk

• In the extended cut, the radio station Steve listens to while driving only plays Weird Al 24/7.
  Steve, satisfied: Hmf. As you should.
  • The fact that during this segment, Steve somehow holds a burger in his mouth the way some people might hold a toothpick or a piece of straw.
  • The fact that the Weird Al song in question is actually Ian self-parodying the show's theme song with a polka version called "Cup," which he released in full on his secondary music channel. He even does a surprisingly good impression of Weird Al.
• What kickstarts the plot: Steve sees an elk just minding its business on the side of the road. The noise he makes when he sees it can only be described as an excited squeal.
• As Steve holds onto the elk's antlers for dear life, it shakes him around with a cowbell sound effect.
• Penny cheers on Steve in his efforts, much to Tim's exasperation.
• Steve proceeds to falcon punch the elk in spectacular anime fashion. Not that the elk minds. At all.
• Apparently one of Steve's challenges for the elk is a game of poker.
• With Steve buried up to his neck in the dirt, it's up to Billie to save him. She just vaguely shoos it away with a stick.

Kid

• When Penny finds Steve in the driver's cab, he's somehow grown much bigger than normal. When she asks what happened, he only pleads with her not to call the fire department.
  • He then admits he smoked a Juul, which did "unthinkable things to [his] mind and body."
  • Steve's "Juul" is just a grey stock Blender cylinder.
• Billie, a bit creeped out, asks Penny for help serving a kid customer out front. Somehow, this turns out to be a tiny Steve in a child's sailor suit.
  Tiny Steve: Helloooooo, Missus Clown! May I have a bowl of soup?
  • He proceeds to shrink down to nothing, still saying "Hellooooooooooo..." until he vanishes.
• After another (non-Steve) customer arrives and orders a burger, Penny goes to check with Tim that they still serve them "despite it all". When he turns around to face her, she discovers him to be Steve, with Tim's clothes and color palette. Steve manages to wheeze out "A pleasure to meet you, my name's TOM!", before Tim appears from the front of the truck and a terrified-looking Steve teleports Tim's hat, glasses and apron back to their proper owner. He then teleports away himself. Tim and Penny's only response to this is to calmly agree that Steve has "a weird vibe."

Zomburger

• Almost everything Cesare says is completely insane.
  Cesare: Oh, you wanna roughhouse, huh? Wanna take some sucker shots at my banana cage? Wanna take some sucker shots at my banana cage, BilBO?! Well, let's tango!
• Zomburger manages to eject Steve from the driver's cab with a cannonball—he bounces on the asphalt for a moment like a chew toy.
• Steve manages to keep up with the two speeding food trucks by Naruto running with a serene and clownly smile on his face.
  • Cesare is more annoyed than surprised or angry at this.
  • He remains exasperated as Steve pulls out a katana that's longer than the clown is tall.
  Cesare: Oh, you would pull some horse piss like this.
• The Zomburger truck somehow floats away with the crew inside once Steve cuts it in half.

Season 2

Expo

• Cesare referring to their van as a "Butch mechanism" as he complains about not being able to find a place to park.
• Steve's Performance Anxiety is onscreen for the first time. All he can say when greeting the FTX mascot is "W-we sell... rocks."
  • Freeze-Frame Bonus: there are times in Season 1 where you can see the menu written out clearly on the side of the truck. Rocks are actually on it.
• At one point, Cesare irritably tells his crew that if they don't look as dead as him, he'll stick out, "Like a horseshoe crab in a freshwater environment," which is followed by a still image of a real horseshoe crab and deer standing in a river, accompanied by a Scare Chord.
• Someone is selling guitars at the food truck expo, and Tim bewilderedly says guitars aren't food. Too bad Steve already took a bite out of one, and seems genuinely disturbed at this revelation.

Backpack

• Frances tells the Bigtop crew they will rue the day—Conrad then follows up saying Zomburger "will also rue". Frances has to gently tell him he's wrong.
  Frances: Ideally, we have nothing to rue.
• Cesare enters the scene yelling Steve's name over and over again as he slowly approaches the Bigtop Burger truck.
  • The honk Steve makes as he hides behind Penny kind of sounds like "What's up??"
• Cesare gently patting Steve's head and calling him "baby".
• Cesare describes himself as "an old backpack vendor"—when Conrad asks him just how old he is, quietly tells him never to ask that.
• Doctor explains/demonstrates that his acting voice is much different than his normal speaking voice...despite both voices sounding exactly the same.
  • The closed captions note "(it's the same voice)". While it's there for a practical reason — the people who most need closed captions wouldn't be able to hear the lines, after all — it comes off as a dry enough comment to feel like the captions annoyedly agreeing with Frances.
• Cesare yells unreasonably loudly at his employees for fraternising with Bigtop Burger, then proceeds to run towards them extremely slowly while a cartoonish "running" sound effect plays.
  Cesare: Don't listen to- don't listen to a word they say, they're all theatre majors. They don't know shit, besides puppets and [beat] ...viewpointing.
• Cesare's speech about how he just wants to gift his dear pal Steve a backpack.
  • Per Word of God, the script only called for the lines about being ancient, and peaceful. The rest is all hilarious improv.

Panel

• The episode ends on a shot of a very squashed-looking Steve struggling under the weight of the backpack and squeaking "Help...!" in a tiny voice.

Down

• Billie starts to chew Cesare out for burdening Steve with yet another gift, until he shows what the third gift is: a giant cowboy hat. Billie immediately gets just as enamored with it as Tim was with the lunchbox.

Up

• While most of the episode is played seriously, Cesare still manages to slip in a moment of silliness with his entrance; he kickflips a skateboard across the screen (complete with an offscreen announcement of same) before calmly walking into the frame.
• When Cesare says his "thousand years are UP", his voice gains an echo on the last word and his body becomes almost gummy-bear-like for a few frames.
  • Could also count as a sort of self-aware Title Drop for the episode. Knowing Cesare, it's more than possible.
• Cesare offhandedly saying that before he came across Steve, he had his eye on Andy Serkis as a potential "freak" like Steve that he would need to capture. Even funnier is the reasoning for why he had to change tack: Serkis was "too tricky to catch".
• The sheer level of Disproportionate Retribution in the sequence of events that led to Steve coming to Earth: He froze up while performing as Old Deuteronomy in a performance of Cats, which led to him being banished by being fired out of a cannon into deep space.
• After being shot into space, Steve flies past a startled Steve Brule and Yoda, from the Worthikids shorts "SPACE" and "Palpatine's Journey" respectively.
• A Tiktaalik sees Steve flying in from outer space and tells his friend to make a wish, before being obliterated in the impact moments later.
• The season 2 compilation reveals that Tim was the first person Steve met, and he gave Steve burger money. Fans were quick to point out this meant that Tim likely saw a seemingly homeless man in clown makeup dig himself out of the ground, then decided working for him at a food truck was a good idea.

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