Here's a good trick: Get a job as a judge at the Olympics. Then, if some guy sets a world record, pretend that you didn't see it and go, "Okay, is everybody ready to start now?"

This line is in the style of Jack Handey’s absurdist “Deep Thoughts” humor, popularized through short, deadpan monologues associated with Saturday Night Live in the early 1990s. The “good trick” setup mimics the tone of a friendly tip or life hack, but the scenario escalates into a surreal abuse of authority: an Olympic judge simply ignores a world-record performance and restarts the event. The joke relies on the audience’s familiarity with the Olympics as a highly regulated, solemn arena where records are sacrosanct—making the casual, petty sabotage especially incongruous.

In Handey’s deadpan “Deep Thoughts” style, the joke imagines petty sabotage elevated to an “official” role. By becoming an Olympic judge—an emblem of fairness and authority—the speaker gains the power to erase achievement simply by refusing to acknowledge it. The humor comes from the absurd mismatch between the grandeur of a world record and the childishness of saying, in effect, “I didn’t see it, so it didn’t happen.” It satirizes how institutions can control reality through recognition and record-keeping, and how authority can be abused through plausible deniability. The line also plays on the fragility of fame: even extraordinary feats depend on witnesses and validation.