



If you’re not watching Better Call Saul, then you’ve probably found the number of people posting “#squatcobbler” on their Facebook walls and Twitter feeds for the past couple of days to be a bit confusing.

I’m not giving away anything by posting this bust-a-gut funny clip from the second episode of the 2016 season of the Breaking Bad prequel. This is not a spoiler and involves a minor character who we’re unlikely to see again. It’s also one of the funniest fucking things I have seen in… ages.

The set-up is simple. Even if you’re not watching the show—and you should be—it’s easy to explain:

Jimmy McGill AKA “Saul Goodman” (Bob Odenkirk) gets a call from “private investigator” Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) asking if he’s still “morally flexible”? Obviously he still is because we then cut to the inside of a police station where Jimmy/Saul is representing Mike’s idiot former client (Mark Proksch), an amateur drug dealer in way over his head in a messy situation who stupidly called the police to report a robbery and then acted all nervous and shifty, arousing their suspicions and potentially compromising Mike. The cops have also found an obvious stash hole in his house and so have called the man in for further questioning.





Mark Proksch will probably be remembered for the rest of his career as the “Squat Cobbler.” There are far worse things to be known for, obviously.

When we join the scene, Jimmy has asked his client to give him a moment alone with the detectives. That’s all you really need to know.

If this doesn’t become one of the most famous comedy scenes since something from This is Spinal Tap, I don’t know what ever would… It’s an instant classic.

The scene following this one has another character—Jimmy’s lawyer girlfriend—telling him that if she’d have had a million years to come up with the whopper he laid on the cops—and which they seemed to believe without much trouble—she couldn’t have done it.

To my mind, this scene is almost like one of those things that you couldn’t make up (as Jimmy himself explains, convincingly, to the detectives). My suspicion is that this is based on something that actually happened, a real-life anecdote. It’s got what you might call “the ring of truth” to it—almost too funny to make up, if you take my point.

Watch these three minutes of absolute comic perfection. When the officers turned around to look at the “Cobbler” I lost it. No liquids before hitting “play” or your laptop or keyboard will be a goner.