Batman Told Me to Eat My Vegetables

The whole premise is a rubber Batman mask and a willingness to commit to the bit indefinitely. Blake Wilson—BatDad—films himself being a father, except he does it in the mask, narrating the experience in Batman’s voice. Reminding his kids to put their shoes away. Asking his wife what she needs from the store. Tucking someone in. The gravelly, theatrical, Gotham-soaked voice applied to close your mouth when you’re chewing is the joke, repeated across hundreds of six-second Vine clips without ever running dry.

The reason it works past the first obvious laugh is the commitment. Wilson never breaks. The mask doesn’t come off. Batman does not acknowledge that Batman is doing a load of laundry. The mundane and the absurd coexist without friction, and somehow that’s funnier than any punchline. There’s a Buster Keaton quality to it—the impassive face, or in this case the rubber mask, confronting domestic reality with complete equanimity.

His wife is the unsung anchor of all of it. She appears in clip after clip absorbing the mask, the voice, and the camera pointed at her face with an expression that migrates between barely suppressed laughter and the particular patience of someone who made a specific choice and still thinks it was the right one. Their marriage is the actual content. The mask is just the format.

Vine—six-second looping video, dead and gone now—was exactly right for this. BatDad didn’t need more time. The joke landed in under six seconds or it didn’t, and Wilson seemed to understand instinctively that brevity was the whole engine. Every clip ends before you’ve decided whether you want more. That’s the technique. The compilations on YouTube work, but you feel the edit—the rhythm breaks, the jokes pile up and blur. In its original format, six seconds at a time, it was close to perfect. I’ve watched a lot of it and I still don’t know whether BatDad is the best dad in the world or whether the mask is just how he survives the whole enterprise. Possibly both.