Cute Couple Alert: Untitled Goose Game and “Misbehavin'” from The Righteous Gemstones

Paste’s editorial staff has been obsessed with precisely two things over the last few weeks: Untitled Goose Game and the song “Misbehavin’” from The Righteous Gemstones. If you’ve seen any of us here write about anything else recently, rest assured that this work was forced upon us in order to keep the traffic flowing—otherwise we just would’ve been either pulling goose pranks on some videogame fellas, or watching Walton Goggins and Jennifer Nettles clog their way through our official Fall jam. They are two unique, perfect works of art, and thanks to a Twitter user named @darianlo, we now know that they go perfectly together.

Here is a good tweet:

Untitled Goose Game and the Righteous Gemstones song were destined to come out at the same time pic.twitter.com/jza2jFQKLu

— darian (@darianlo) September 30, 2019

Untitled Goose Game memes are everywhere. They’ve been honkin’ around all willy-nilly like the damn goose itself, breaking our stuff and getting in our way every time we open up a social media app. Meanwhile the “Misbehavin’” clip is like a virus that won’t work it’s way out of the Paste office—albeit a really good virus that only brings joy and mirth into the world. (Somehow the official HBO YouTube clip only has like 400K views after two-plus weeks, which makes no damn sense, given how much chatter we’ve seen about it in the general internet, but then who knows how popular anything actually is these days.) So combining the two is guaranteed to get our attention, even if only for however long it takes to write up this post.

These two very different pieces of art both resonate with us today for one simple reason: they represent pure, innocent mischief. It’s hard to find fun in people misbehaving in the real world today, because we live in a time of real villains practicing real evil. In a world that seems to be falling apart, that seems fatally corrupt at every level and full of liars and frauds acting in bad faith to undermine everything in the hope of their own profit, the kind of harmless mischief celebrated in both Untitled Goose Game and “Misbehvain’” offer both relief and the warm embrace of younger, simpler times. Or maybe they’re just funny.