CouplaBeers Is So Right
Why the viral SNL skit understands addiction and bad habits better than the medical establishment.
Post summary
Did you see Saturday Night Live’s viral CouplaBeers skit?
Oddly enough, it gets so much right about addiction and bad habits.
In fact, it provides a more helpful view than that of the medical establishment.
You’ll learn:
What CouplaBeers gets right about addiction and bad habits.
How bad habits and addiction start—and when they go bad.
What the medical establishment gets wrong.
A better way to view addiction and bad habits.
How to stop a bad habit.
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Audio/Podcast edition
The Post
On Saturday, comedian Shane Gillis starred in what’s being called “the best SNL skit in 20 years.”
In it, Gillis advertises a new medication that helps when life hits a low point. Watch it:
Ever heard the line “It’s funny because it’s true”?
CouplaBeers gets more right about addiction and bad habits than millions of dollars of neuroscience research has.
Today we’re unpacking why the skit is so spot on. It can help us understand why addiction and bad habits happen in the first place—and what we’ve gotten wrong about them.
We’ll also explain a better way to think about bad habits and what actually helps us stop them.
How bad habits and addiction start
At the beginning of the skit, Gillis explains, “A few months ago, anxiety and depression were ruining my life.” He struggled at work, as a father, and as a husband.
Then he talked to his doctor about CouplaBeers, “a revolutionary medicine that treats anxiety and depression fast.” Within minutes of drinking CouplaBeers, Gillis finds his ideal self:
He’s more confident around his co-workers.
He’s more relaxed and loving around his son.
He’s nicer to his wife.
“The way it works is simple,” Gillis says. “CouplaBeers quickly turns a cloudy, rainy day into a sunny one.”
When a good thing goes bad …
Over the course of the skit, however, Gillis’ use of CouplaBeers starts to cause problems:
He begins misbehaving at work.
He becomes tired after drinking too much (which then leads him to pitch another medication, “aLilBump,” to ramp back up).
He gets in a fight with the umpire at his kid’s baseball game.
The skit ends with Gillis—in his boxers with a CouplaBeers in hand—walking into the living room where his family is staging an intervention.
Gillis says, “And if you miss a dose of CouplaBeers, don’t worry. You won’t. Brother, you will never miss a dose. It’s kind of the only thing you’ll remember after a while, is to take it.”
I emailed Dr. Sally Satel to get her take on this. Sally is a psychiatrist, lecturer at Yale University School of Medicine, and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She’s one of the most forward-thinking minds in addiction and has spent years working with people with substance use disorders in the trenches—from inner-city DC to Appalachian towns racked by the opioid epidemic.
Here’s what she wrote to me:
(The skit is) very funny and clever! And realistic. The vast majority of people consume alcohol responsibly, but for the subset who are chronically stressed, anxious, or unhappy, alcohol (and drugs) do a very good job of "medicating" those problems. At first. But when use is persistent, it can evolve into a habit and then a compulsion that harms the user and those around him—a sequence in the skit that the audience seemed to appreciate.
For Gillis, CouplaBeers relieves his discomfort and solves his problems in the short term—but the long-term problems it creates pile up to the point that his family has to stage an intervention.
Most people can gamble, drink, or scroll social media and get a benefit from it but not experience long-term problems. But some people will use those behaviors as a quick escape from underlying problems—e.g. boredom, depression, anxiety, trauma, etc—which often leads them to overdo the behavior, causing its own set of problems.
We even see this trajectory in historical trends of addiction. Most addiction epidemics occur in places with a large population dealing with underlying issues. For example:
The United States’ opioid epidemic hit the Midwest and Appalachia hardest. These areas were once manufacturing hubs, but outsourcing left many jobless and hopeless. Opioids were abundantly available on the street. Use, in turn, boomed to comfort people from the dark horizon.
Morphine production spiked during the Civil War to treat injured soldiers. But after the war, rates of opioid abuse were significantly higher in the South among whites. Among Southern blacks, meanwhile, rates of opioid abuse plummeted. One group was defeated, another freed.