A Single Instruction, Annotated
The New Yorker’s humor column “Shouts & Murmurs” recently ran a piece formatted as a pet-sitting guide – except the subject being watched over is a human adult named Blythe. The author, preparing to leave town, leaves behind a set of instructions for whoever will be looking after his girlfriend in his absence. The result is the kind of deadpan domestic comedy that lands hardest when it commits completely to the bit.
Only one instruction survives in the published excerpt: keep water available to Blythe at all times, but don’t panic if she refuses it. Her reason, as recorded in the document, is that hydration is “a conspiracy invented by Gatorade.”
What the Joke Is Actually Doing
The humor here operates on a very specific kind of domestic familiarity – the kind where a partner’s eccentricities become so well-known that they require formal documentation for third-party consumption. The format of a pet care sheet, applied to a grown woman, is not cruel so much as it is affectionate in the most absurdist possible register. Blythe is not being diminished. She is being catalogued, lovingly, as someone whose relationship to basic wellness advice is principled opposition.
The Gatorade conspiracy line is where the piece earns its keep. It is a specific belief – not “I don’t like water” or “I forget to drink” but an active, named culprit behind the hydration myth. This is the comedic logic of someone who has thought about this, or at least decided they have. It takes the mundane nag of “drink more water” and turns it into a geopolitical stance.
The instruction to not “freak out” is doing equal work. It suggests a history – presumably the author has witnessed other people (or himself) overreacting to Blythe’s water abstinence, and has learned that alarm is not the appropriate response. There is institutional knowledge packed into that phrase. This is not a first draft. This is a document revised by experience.
The Format as Punchline
Humor built around bureaucratic forms – instructions, waivers, onboarding documents, care guides – has a long comedic history because the gap between the format’s implied seriousness and the actual content is where the joke lives. Applying a pet-sitter’s checklist to a human girlfriend takes that gap and makes it the entire premise.
What makes this variation work is the clinical patience of the narrator. He is not mocking Blythe. He is simply transmitting information, the way you would tell someone a dog tends to bark at the mail but settles down after ten minutes. The affection is in the specificity – he knows exactly what she believes and why, and he is preparing someone else to handle it without a scene.
Why This Kind of Humor Travels
The Gatorade conspiracy, as a belief, is recognizable in type even if not always in content. Most people in long-term relationships have a partner with at least one deeply held, entirely unfounded conviction about how the body works, what food does, or which commonly accepted medical advice is actually corporate propaganda. Blythe’s position just happens to be funny because it is both specific and slightly unhinged in the most harmless possible way.
There is also something in the piece’s structure that mirrors how people actually talk about their partners to others. “Don’t worry about it, she just doesn’t drink water, she thinks it’s a Gatorade thing” is a sentence that sounds completely normal when delivered between friends. Transcribed into a formal document, it becomes comedy without changing a word.
The “Shouts & Murmurs” format, which the New Yorker has run for decades, tends to reward this kind of one-joke architecture – where the premise is clear in the first line and the rest is just tightening the screw. A care guide for a conspiracy-minded, water-averse woman named Blythe sets the screwhead perfectly. Every additional instruction, however mundane, would arrive already pre-loaded with the question: what else does she reject on principle?
That question is, of course, the entire point. The excerpt surfaces only one instruction and one belief, but the comedy expands because the reader immediately begins imagining the rest of the document – the warnings about sleep schedules, the footnotes about food, the asterisked clarifications that begin “this sounds alarming but is fine.” Blythe, as constructed in a single paragraph, becomes fully inhabitable as a comic character.
The last word in that single instruction still belongs to Gatorade, which did not respond to being named as the architect of a global hydration myth.
