One of my favorite YouTube treats is watching the BIGTOP BURGER series by Ian Worthington (aka Worthikids on YouTube). There’s no real schedule for releases, so it’s always a delightful surprise to see one of my YouTube notifications telling me there’s a new video to watch. And while I enjoy all of Worthikids’ animations, the slow-rolling BIGTOP BURGER series is my favorite. This YouTube show features Worthikid’s incredibly stylized art, expressive animation, made-to-order music, and combined visual and spoken humor, making the entire show an incredible feat given that he does everything but the voice acting himself (and he even does some of that himself). While the story might seem incredibly basic, perhaps even looking like a mere formality required to create a platform on which the jokes of Season 1 are built, the recently completed (and even more recently compiled) Season 2 reveals a slowly building narrative that has been foreshadowed from the very beginning. I won’t say much about it right now, because I think you should absolutely take thirty-two minutes out of your day to watch both seasons before coming back here (because there will absolutely be spoilers below this paragraph), but I was completely caught off guard by how well-crafted the narrative is now that we have more of it revealed to us.

The show embraces an absurd style of humor with a series of joke-centric initial episodes in Season 1 (a pattern that repeats in Season 2), using the framing of humor to get you to accept the basic premise of the series: there is a burger-based food truck called Bigtop Burger that is staffed by clowns. From there, we see the woes of operating a burger food truck, see some of the odd things the employees have to deal with as their boss (named Steve) behaves in an inscrutable manner, and how they all have to cope with a violent rivalry with another gimmicky food truck that prides itself on selling inedible food (while Bigtop Burger seems to sell burgers that are actually edible). The absurd humor runs throughout and the three employees of Bigtop Burger act as the audience surrogates, the newest among them especially so, as they either react to the absurdity they’re seeing, do their best to patiently navigate the absurd situations that pepper their work days, or do their best to support their boss as he tries to operate a business.

All of which is just Season 1! The entire over-the-top style of the show is called into question in the last segment of Season 1, when we see the workers at Bigtop Burger wrap up their day, washing the greasepaint off and leaving work as normal, non-clown humans, a fact that is remarked upon by their last customer of the day who exclaims that he thought they were real clowns, an assumption brushed away by one of the employees who says “Clowns aren’t real.” A fact imediately called into question by Steve’s appearanc–since he still bears the red hair, white skin, and face markings of a clown–and the follow-up comment from the most supportive and longest-running employee who says he’s never seen their boss out of costume.

Season 2, which still follows the absurd humor style of the Worthikids’ original works, is more plot centric, building up the story from the beginning with a setting and premise that hosts the entire season. We see the Bigtop Burger squad driving to a food truck expo (referred to as FTX) to learn about burger science and meet up with other food trucks at the first such expo that any of our characters (the Bigtop Burger clowns or their rivals who have an “undead/corpse” theme) have ever been to. This time, though, all of the absurdity and jokes are building to a central moment in the penultimate episode where the humorous nature of the show’s central absurdity is abandoned and replaced with more serious (but still absurd) plot development. I won’t say much beyond that, just in case you’ve managed to read to this point without watching the series, but it’s truly a wonderful moment where the scribbly, expressive animation style of the show is set aside for a cool, incredbily detailed action shot and absolutely an amazing payoff to the thus-far slow build of the plot. Finally, we see what it was all leading to. Then, in the final episode, we see just how much of the earlier portions of the show was foreshadowing and not just absurd humor that the general premise of the show allowed us to accept without question.

In terms of foreshadowing, payoff, and twist, this is perhaps the story that has caught me the most off-guard. I always enjoy a good twist and love foreshadowing, but my time studying and crafting narratives means I tend to spot it all as it comes and it is a rare bit of media that can slip something past me or impress me with how well it has crafted those pieces of the story. Not only did this check all of those boxes, but it caught me entirely by surprise without ever feeling unearned or like they’d decided to introduce something that came out of nowhere just to get points for a twist. It was one of those moments where, suddenly, everything made sense. And I say “surprise” earlier, but that’s not exactly what I mean. The sequence of events and what we learned about the universe was entirely in-character with the rest of the show and it made sense that things played out the way they did, but I was not expecting to find myself in the middle of a long-running and incredibly well-crafted narrative with a twist that caught me off guard not just because I didn’t see it coming, but because of how well advertised it was and how well camoflauged it was within what seemed like nonsense. The entire show has become one of those things I like to go back and rewatch so I can enjoy the full picture now that I’ve glimpsed it.

Another small point in its favor is that you can find other things in Worthikids’ library that seem to hint at the greater world being built, where clowns and undead seem to be locked in some kind of long-running conflict. It’s incredibly absurd, but in a way that takes itself seriously enough to be fun to watch without taking itself too seriously. It embraces its own premise, uses humor to bypass your disbelief, and then tells a story within the inherent absurdity without ever once pushing you to laugh or roll your eyes at the worldbuilding. BIGTOP BURGER is truly a wonderful watch and I suggest, if you enjoy it, that you take a little time to peruse the rest of Worthikids’ video collection since there’s a fun mixture of fan animations and original work that will easily fill a few hours with laughter and fun.