At least a dozen times a day, usually before lunch, often before coffee, and occasionally before we’ve even located our pants, we all arrive at the same internal refrain. It is less a thought and more a quiet existential diagnosis, a meditation, and a spiritual truth whispered through clenched teeth: “I’m surrounded by assholes.”
Some among us, the bold and the doomed, even dare to vocalize it into steering wheels, into pillows, and into the labyrinthine indifference of the workplace Slack channel or group email chain. There is a moment, usually around 3:11 p.m., when someone refills the office coffee pot with decaf “as a joke,” or the person in front of you at the ATM appears to be discovering banking for the very first time, and you cannot help yourself. The cry escapes: morons, idiots, dingbats, assholes, the whole lot of them.
It’s a phrase so universal it may as well be stitched into our DNA between “must drink water” and “avoid people who say ‘no offense.’” Modern life is crowded, caffeinated, and inexplicably Wi-Fi-dependent, and seems designed to trigger this small daily hysteria. Entire industries have capitalized on it. T-shirts, bumper stickers, novelty socks, mugs emblazoned with declarations of exasperation, each one a small public service announcement stating, “I tried patience once; it didn’t take.”
It’s the secret handshake of modern adulthood with this passing acknowledgment between strangers who make eye contact for 0.4 seconds in a grocery store aisle and think: Ah. Another one of us. Another survivor.
But before all the merchandise and memes, and before the phrase became summer barbecue Americana, Mel Brooks distilled it into the purest form ever put on film. If philosophical monks spent a lifetime trying to articulate the human condition, Brooks captured it in forty seconds.
I’m speaking, of course, of the holiest of comedic relics, the “I’m surrounded by assholes” scene in Spaceballs. It’s today’s Favorite Scene of the Day, and arguably the Favorite Scene of Any Day You Need Comfort and Strength.
Now, Spaceballs is a film so dense with quotable absurdity that one could reasonably nominate the entire movie on grounds of artistic integrity. But this scene, this specific, this incandescent moment of Rick Moranis’ despair is its Rosetta Stone. It captures with pinpoint accuracy the indignation of someone who believes they are the last sane person aboard a ship staffed entirely by men whose collective competence could not power a turtle-shaped night-light.
The setup is deceptively simple. Princess Vespa and her droid, Dot Matrix, are trying to escape in their absurdly luxurious Mercedes-Benz spaceship (a detail reminding us that in the Brooksian universe, even cosmic fugitives have leasing options). Enter Spaceball 1, which, true to bureaucratic form, attempts to intimidate them by firing lasers wildly and inaccurately, like a frat boy encountering a Nerf gun for the first time.
Dark Helmet, ever the overachiever in the villain category, panics. No, not because his men are firing, but because he fears they’ll accidentally vaporize the princess before he acquires the vital combination to Planet Druidia’s air-shield. He storms through the bridge, surveying the ship’s personnel with the energy of a middle manager discovering that everyone on the team has labeled the shared spreadsheet “Final_v27_REAL_FINAL_THIS_ONE.xlsx.”
It is then, after much chaos, the laser misfires, and the confident incompetence of the Spaceball crew, that he learns the truth. There are an alarming number of his subordinates who share the surname “Asshole.”
And then comes the line. Delivered with the exhausted fury of a man who has realized that his destiny is tethered to these people, forever. “I knew it. I’m surrounded by assholes.”
There it is. It is the cinematic articulation of the very thought we have twelve, fifteen, maybe fifty times a day. A line that, like all great comedy, holds up a mirror not just to the absurdity of life, but to our particular role in it. Because, and this is the uncomfortable, necessary truth, every so often, if we angle that mirror just right, we notice something else. Occasionally, tragically, hilariously… we are the asshole.
At least once a week or twice during the holidays.
Mel Brooks understood this long before the rest of us. He knew that comedy isn’t just about mocking the fools around us. It’s about recognizing our own slot in the great celestial lineup of buffoons. His genius wasn’t just capturing the joke, but it was capturing the universality of it.
The scene ends, as all great moments should, with Dark Helmet shouting, “Keep firing, assholes!” And they do, missing every shot, naturally, proving that in Brooks’s universe, as in ours, the chaos continues regardless of who is in charge, and maybe a small wink to the inaccuracy of Stormtroopers.
So the next time the familiar thought rises at the office, in traffic, on the subway, or in a movie theater where someone unwraps candy with the precision of a nuclear engineer, remember that you are part of a grand tradition. Mel Brooks immortalized it for us. He gave shape to our exasperation and gave it comedic dignity. We may be surrounded by fools. We may be surrounded by assholes. But at least we can laugh.
