Rupert Jee (from the Hello Deli website)

Allow me to be frank, dear reader. I haven’t been doing much cooking lately. I could make excuses, but I won’t bore you with them, and truthfully, it probably has to do more with summer torpor than anything else. But don’t think that food has not been on my mind. You know what I have been doing a lot of lately? Scouring the internet for clips of Psychic Sandwich.

This weird obsession started a few weeks ago when I heard a very brief radio clip in which a guy talks about why he loves David Letterman. His argument, as I remember it, was something about how it was worth Dave looking bored and basically phoning it in a lot of the time because every once in a while you end up with a moment of pure comic genius. And then he referenced this bit, entitled “How Many Guys in Spider-Man Suits Can Fit into Jamba Juice?” It’s worth watching:

I really like this clip, but even as I watched it, somewhere in the back of my mind the words “Pyschic Sandwich” repeated like a mantra. I haven’t even watched The Late Show for decades, but those two words kept surfacing with the clarity of those chimes they ring in meditation class. For those of you who don’t remember, in the mid-90s, Dave had a repeating comedy bit in which he would send an “intuitive” named Deborah Lynn into the Hello Deli and, blindfolded, she would try to divine what kind of sandwich Rupert Jee had just prepared. Though she was earnest to the point of seeming borderline autistic, she never once guessed correctly. And twenty years later, the words Psychic Sandwich floated back to me through the mists of time.

Why the craving for the Psychic Sandwich? Just a short while after that first memory, I happened upon this article about the value of “dumb” in art and culture. According to Kenneth Goldsmith, you can have “smart smart” (think tanks, the Ivy League, five-star restaurants), you can have “dumb dumb” (racists, rednecks, football hooligans), but occasionally you fumble into a sweet spot that lies in between. The author calls Andy Warhol the king of this paradigm, but I think David Letterman could give Andy a run for his money. Psychic Sandwich is a taste test without the tasting, a meal without the satisfaction of consumption, the launch of the mundane sandwich into the realm of séances. No wonder my adolescent brain latched onto it. Teenagers are connoisseurs of the absurd, the weird, the fleeting moment, the smart within the dumb.

But here’s the heartbreak: even on the seemingly infinite expanse of the web, I cannot find any Psychic Sandwich clips. I can find references to the routine, but the actual video clips continue to slip through my fingers. Surely there is someone out there who can rectify this situation! Find me these videos (in some form that is not too hard to access), and I swear I will mail you a prize. Or I will shake off the summer torpor and cook you something, so that I have something legitimately food-related to post on the blog next week.

Until then, make yourself a sandwich and watch this clip, which might be even more smart dumb than Psychic Sandwich: