This family chaos is just what we needed
The show: BBC World News Skype interview The moment: The giddy interruption
Have you bookmarked this one? Dr. Robert E. Kelly, an American who’s an associate professor of international relations at Pusan National University in South Korea, is in his home office talking via Skype to the BBC. The news is serious: South Korea’s president has been ousted.
“Scandals happen all the time,” Kelly says. “The question is, how do democracies respond?”
His office door flies open. A child in a yellow sweater struts in, elbows rocking, a strut for the ages.
“I think one of your children’s just walked in,” the interviewer says. Without looking, Kelly reaches back and stiffarms the kid, who calmly peels what looks like string cheese.
Then a baby in a squeaky walker wheels in. Followed immediately by Kelly’s wife, who skids through the doorway, grabs each kid by the wrist and hauls them out, knocking books to the floor.
Kelly’s eyes close briefly, but he keeps talking, as does the interviewer, British to his core. Finally Mrs. Kelly, on her hands and knees, reaches up and pulls the door shut.
Of course this thing immediately went viral. It’s 40 seconds of joy. There’s the interruption in three acts. There’s dad, Buster Keaton-calm. There’s the strongarm, the string cheese, the squeaking, the skid. Any one of those things would have made it Internet gold.
But it’s also a perfect metaphor for this moment, when every day brings us news crazier than we could imagine. A dose of ordinary family chaos — simultaneously mirroring our mood, yet grounding us — is just what we needed.
The video can be seen on YouTube. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop-culture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.