Dave Chappelle’s ‘Home Improvement’ Episode Contains an Accidental Meta-Joke
Tim Allen’s classic ‘90s sitcom/anti-drug psyop Home Improvement is now available on Netflix for everyone to… “enjoy” feels like the wrong word.
The show’s new streaming availability has at least been leading some viewers to make new discoveries concerning the show, and not just because we can now freeze frame any scene we like to try and catch a glimmer of co-star Patricia Heaton’s deep resentment of her wildly overpaid TV husband.
Someone has just discovered a hilarious meta-joke within the show — but it was almost certainly a complete accident.
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In the Season Four episode “Talk to Me,” Allen was joined by guest stars Dave Chappelle and Jim Breuer, forming the perfect trifecta of comedians who currently specialize in promoting garbage opinions. The pre-fame Dave and Jim played, well, “Dave” and “Jim,” two Tool Time audience members who are having relationship problems and end up being invited in front of the cameras, and given relationship counseling by America’s favorite accident-prone misogynist.
As we’ve mentioned before, the duo’s four-minute appearance was such a hit with network executives that they fast-tracked a Home Improvement spin-off all about these two random characters, and also the state of race relations in the country. Buddies, which perhaps not coincidentally came out one year after Friends debuted, starred Chappelle and a guy who was definitely not Jim Breuer. That’s because Breuer was fired at some point during the production of the pilot. Of the 12 episodes that were produced, only five aired before ABC killed the show.
As one viral TikTok video recently pointed out, Chappelle and Breuer’s Home Improvement episode is notable for non-Buddies reasons: It was the 20th episode of the fourth season. Get it? 420?
@redrighthandarts
This seems like the kind of hilarious extratextual gag you’d find in a show like Community or Arrested Development, because Chappelle and Breuer, of course, starred in the stoner comedy Half Baked.
This isn’t the first time that someone has made this connection either. The trivia section of the episode’s IMDb page notes that it “was released in Season 4 and the episode is number 20. 420 is a reference to cannabis culture and Half Baked is a stoner comedy film.”
The only problem is, Half Baked came out in 1998, three years after the episode aired, meaning that the episode number was really just a total coincidence.
Perhaps this shouldn’t be all that surprising, considering that Home Improvement wasn’t exactly known for its subtle humor. It was more of a “let’s laugh at a guy falling off a construction site into an outhouse” kind of show.
