Food Network’s Large Adult Son and famously bombastic celebrity chef Guy Fieri has a tendency to exclaim about “Flavortown” when impressed by an ingredient or dish. His mannerisms and presentation have become, in recent years, the subject of some ironic online attention. Last year, ironic online news outlet VICE sat Fieri down for an interview and asked, point-blank, about the nature (and location) of Flavortown. The presumably improvised response he gave is brilliantly entertaining, a testament to just how in on the bit this man is. The quote eventually made its way over to comedy advice podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me, where oldest brother Justin McElroy read it and riffed on it with middlest and youngest brothers Travis and Griffin. What ensued was a series of increasingly complex goofs about the Deep Flavortown Lore than culminated in a movie pitch fit for IMAX, or maybe one of those 4-D theaters where you can smell things like at Hershey Park.

But what makes such a strange, niche concept so funny? The answer is something that goes beyond traditional staples of public speaking — an element called metanarrative.

The question that founds this speech seems to take Fieri by surprise — he’s being asked to add narrative to something that doesn’t deserve nor need it. Flavortown isn’t a place that exists, it’s just a goofy thing he decided to yell once. Clearly there’s no space for any expansion there, and yet the comedic situation demands expanding. Take this excerpt, for example:

“What would be the airline in Flavortown? Sausage Airlines? It just doesn’t stop.”

This is the point where Fieri realizes he’s opened a creative space, and this is the point where it’s clear he understands metanarrative. Metanarrative is the name for the practice of extrapolating an expansive and often absurd narrative information from something intentionally devoid of it. It’s a long-form comedic technique that I, at least, enjoy immensely — see, for example, Polygon’s 2016 series Car Boys, in which two hosts play an extremely straightforward and highly technical driving simulator and end up building, based on visual glitches and errors in the game, an extensive and multi-faceted psychological horror narrative featuring multiple characters and several main conflicts.

We live in a time where capitalism has shoehorned every movie into a “cinematic universe”, where nearly no fiction is allowed to stand on the free market unsupported by at least one half-hearted sequel and maybe a streaming-service-exclusive prestige show. Everything we make must be everything we buy — Star Wars novels, backpacks, cars, podcasts becoming TV shows becoming movies and then books and then podcasts again as we try our best to navigate, like hungry earthworms, the great compost pile that is American culture. Countless, endless remakes and reboots and adaptations of the most absurd and obscure works — Emojis are a movie, movies are card games and card games are TV. In this mind-bending churn of our collective creative bankruptcy, why shouldn’t a chef’s throwaway catchphrase become an epic PG-13 fantasy-drama trilogy starring the man himself?

At the same time, when something artistically solid appears on the scene, its intentional ambiguity is so often trampled by internet culture’s need to factualize and understand as if it were history every tiny piece of a film, TV show, book, et cetera. As a culture we’ve come to consume all fiction as some kind of puzzle to be solved or riddle to be answered, urgently unsatisfied — perhaps due to the real world being a place of such uncertainty and unease — to simply not know whether Kurt Russell was the titular Thing or what the last third of 2001: A Space Odyssey is even about, regardless of the artist’s intent.

Taking this aggravating practice to the absolute extreme by ironically applying it to insignificant, intentionally narrative-less things will frequently build absurd, sprawling networks of improvisation. With complete freedom to extrapolate, as we see here in the aftermath of Fieri’s deposition, things tend to get weird fast.

Let’s return to the content of the quote. Fieri opens by establishing, for anyone somehow unfamiliar, his whole character appeal in the opening sentence:

“I once said on camera, ‘That pizza looks like a manhole cover in Flavortown’.”

That’s a wild thing to qualify about a pizza. But it also pries open the Flavortown metanarrative just wide enough for the rest of the building he does here to work. It’s important to remember that Flavortown isn’t a place or even a solidified concept before this point. It’s a joke, a thing Fieri references when appraising the powerful taste of a hot dog with macaroni and cheese on it or a ghost-pepper-infused buffalo wing. Flavortown is an element of Fieri’s famously zealous camera performance, something Guy Fieri the character invented; not Guy Fieri the man.

And yet, always the showman, Fieri understands what his audience is trying to get here: the metanarrative. This quote resembles Fieri’s food style itself — a powerful and rewarding blend of substance and presentation.

“Willy Wonka had a chocolate stream, you know? So it’s taking these iconic food items, these iconic food moments, and giving them a home. They all live in Flavortown. […] I have people walk up to me and say, ‘Hey, I’m a citizen of Flavortown.’ I have people that want to pledge to be a city council member of Flavortown or the mechanic. It doesn’t stop.”

Is this collective tendency to latch onto and assign meaning to the meaningless an emergent quality of human psychology, some vestige of our primate pattern-recognition? Is it a bit we’re all in on because it’s funny? That’s more difficult to ascribe. I think it’s likely that we’re just sharing in the joy of building a metanarrative from nothing — or, in this case, from the confusing catchphrase of a celebrity chef, who may himself be in on the bit.