Ranking the Butterfield Diet
/The Brian Butterfield diet is a very funny sketch from The Peter Serafinowicz Show. I wanted to know what the objectively funniest options for Treat Day were, so I fired up Survey Monkey and asked the members of the Do By Friday Discord to rank all the items from the video. For some reason, thirteen people filled out the survey.
The results have been...increbidle
I averaged the results to get an average rank for each item (circles in the plot below). I've also shown individual responses (small squares). Note that better ranks are toward the right.
Results of an extremely scientific Butterfield Diet survey.
I've also grouped the items into arbitrary tiers based on their average rank. Let's go through them together.
C-Tier
C-Tier results
Most people ranked these items in the bottom half, but there's not a whole lot of difference between them.
21. Mystery meat - Kind of a cliched term
20. Artificial bacon - Kind of a thing that exists in the world
19. Chocolate quail’s eggs - A bit surprised to see this so low - maybe the term is too long?
18. Egg ‘n’ ham slabs - Also too long
17. Garlic pudding - I think referring to hummus as garlic pudding is pretty funny, but it’s a less quotable term
16. Sandwich casserole - Mild visual joke
15. 20 cheese omelette - Not that far from actual omelettes
14. Potato grids - I was surprised to see this as low as it is, but the masses have spoken.
B-Tier
B-Tier results
Definitely some clearer separation between the bottom and top of the list.
13. Birthday pie - Amusing word substitution
12. Pasta pillows - This is not a bad name for the thing
11. McFortune cookies - Delightfully unexpected branding
10. During-dinner mints - See, you don’t have to wait until afterwards
9. Pints o’ cream - It’s got a very pleasing rhythm
8. Discount foie gras - Fancy yet inexpensive. Couldn’t possibly be a bad idea. We’re now getting to items that received some #1 votes.
A-Tier
A-Tier results
These were all pretty close to each other. We are getting to some solid jokes here.
7. Pizza (pronounced “pih-zah”) - Pronouncing words incorrectly is fun. Interestingly, this was a pretty split vote, with five votes at 14 or below and five votes putting it in the top four.
6. Fluffy ruffs - Just fun to say. But no #1 votes.
5. Hoisin crispy owl - An absurd concept for a food, and an absurd phrase.
4. Quiches lorraine - I can’t explain why I (and others, apparently) love this one so much. Is it pluralizing the first word? This is a real food; this should not be as funny as it is.
3. Pork cylinders - Pork cylinders is extremely good, but I’m still surprised it took the #3 spot.
S-Tier
S-Tier results
These are both very good and well-loved, but I probably could have put #1 in its own SS-level tier.
2. Large macs - Substituting synonyms in proper names is just fun, you know. Pretty strong support overall, though a couple of monsters ranked it in the lower half.
1. Bonbonbonbons - By far the best one to say out loud. No one ranked it below #4. It got almost half of the #1 votes in the survey. The clear winner of the Brian Butterfield Diet.
Just look at them now
So far, I've ordered everything by average rank from the survey. But I also wondered how the different ranks were sequenced throughout the video.
Sequence of tiers in the video.
While not plotted here, note that there are non-food interjections in the video after "Large macs" and "McFortune cookies."
We start out strong with several A- and B-tier items. There's a stretch of lower-tier items apart from "Large macs" (which finishes a section). The second half starts pretty strong, hitting "bonbonbonbons" two-thirds of the way through the video. We then kind of fade out at the end. I think it's interesting that the two S-tier items are spaced so evenly through the video; there was definitely some thought put into the order here.
What did we learn?
Mostly what we already knew, which is that "bonbonbonbons" is the best. But it's nice to have it confirmed by science (note: not actually science).