"I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Maybe not. Maybe not. Awesome. Awesome, awesome. You've got to make a joke. You know... legalize comedy! Legalize comedy! Come on, legalize it!"

What percentage of the Super Bowl audience did not understand — and had no hope of understanding — the bandaged faces of the male dancers in the halftime show?

I didn't even get that we were supposed to see the face coverings as bandages. We were just guessing. We thought of jock straps and covid masks and mummies. We never even hit on the correct answer — which I'm reading about this morning — which is the kind of bandages wrapped over a face that's been subjected to plastic surgery. And if you'd told me that was what I was supposed to see, I wouldn't have had any idea why that was the chosen costume for the ordinarily festive event. It's been a drearily medicalized year with the covid lockdown, so why would you attempt to entertain us using some other medical thing — plastic surgery? Why would you do that this year — or any year? 

Here's a news report from news.com.au:

The Weeknd has performed his highly anticipated Super Bowl halftime show for 2021, and unexpectedly, his face was completely normal, with no real plastic surgery in sight. The 30-year-old has been teasing fans with wild face prosthetics and bandages for weeks leading up to the performance and new album release.

Ugh! I guess if I'd been a fan of this guy, I might have noticed his PR antics, and then it would have been amusing that he hadn't had plastic surgery on his face, and it might also have been funny that the dancers were wearing the kind of bandages that he had previously worn to tease us. But for those of us who hadn't seen his pre-game teasing, it was just weird and confusing. I guess The Weeknd didn't care about reaching out to any new fans. It was just an inside joke. An inside joke about plastic surgery.