It’s spooky season! And while a talking skeleton may be scary, is there anything more frightening than someone not getting the joke?

I have yet to watch this without tearing up with laughter. For a video that barely hits 60 seconds in length and has literally one (1) actual joke (one of the hoariest there is), there is so much craft at play here. Tom Schalk’s incredible voice work is a highlight, ratcheting up from slightly condescending but benign to peeved to livid to absolute incandescent rage, a Rumplestiltskin-esque tantrum at a person not knowing the secret word instead of knowing it. And Schalk uses crudity perfectly, not just in language but in technique. The goofy ANGERY edit breaks the video’s style at just the right moment and doesn’t linger, and the sheer ridiculousness of Skull Boy himself, a dumbass toy with the tag still on clearly being operated by a hand, belongs on that wonderful Puppet Peak, far away from the uncanny valley. It somehow works backwards — the hand smashing Skull Boy headfirst into a box is not controlling him, but has become the external implement of his incredulous bile. Instead of failing to approximate something real and leading to rejection, the puppet’s simplicity leads the viewer’s brain to work harder to buy into the conceit of a tiny skeleton comedian and to more willingly accept the reality of his fury and frustration.

Which is another way to describe exasperation, well-known as the most cinematic emotion. But the other factor here is Skull Boy’s audience/mark, the person who is needed for the bit to work and essential for its glorious failure. If this guy is acting he is the greatest thespian who ever lived, at the very least the greatest one captured on YouTube. What he nails is the irrepressible release of a person confronted with impotent exasperation, how you can’t not find someone’s self-induced rage funny. Because he’s just a guy, his corpsing in the face of boney threats doesn’t have the contemptible simper of the Fallon-esque actor who can’t keep a straight face during a routine despite being an alleged professional*. And while he may not be frightened by this Halloween creature, he’s clearly trying to disengage, backing away and looking down despite how that just drives Skull Boy into more of a frenzy. His bemusement feels real, and Skull Boy collides with that reality again and again.

This isn’t the same dynamic as something like “Who’s On First?” where Abbott’s straight man causes Costello’s comedic noncomprehension, because Costello is still playing a (very funny) part, his questions construct the bit itself. Here, the only attempts at an answer to Skull Boy’s question are the incredibly deadpanned “death,” which makes no fucking sense yet retains the barest, most tenuous connection to a skeleton to count as actual engagement with the would-be joke, and the at-least tangible if still nonsensical “bones.” Each further query just results in more all-encompassing denial. “WHY MUST YOU FAIL ME SO OFTEN!” Skull Boy rages, and from that repetitive failure it is not hard to imagine that Skull Boy is stuck in a Sisyphean Hell where he is doomed to almost but never accomplish his goal. Worse, his audience is laughing at everything but the one thing Skull Boy wants and needs him to laugh at, he is cursed to make others happy while never finding happiness himself. Maybe this is a scary movie after all.

*A closer comparison in the SNL realm would be how everyone involved can barely hold it together during Chris Farley’s belligerent galumphing in Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker – it’s the same kind of reaction to a clearly insane person who demands to be taken seriously and a lot more understandable in how the inability to reconcile this conflict results in laughter