The Fastest Exit from IKEA on Record

IKEA is a relationship stress test, and not the one everyone talks about. Not the assembly—the hours before that, the walking tour through 40,000 square meters of bedroom mock-ups and kitchen islands, the moment somewhere around the RÅSKOG section where one of you wants to stop and look at something and the other is already calculating the fastest route to the exit. Most couples come out of IKEA slightly worse for wear. Some don’t come out at all.

Simon Gilmore had a solution: puns. He and his girlfriend Donna had just moved in together, couldn’t avoid the IKEA run, and he came prepared—he’d memorized enough product names to sustain a continuous stream of increasingly terrible wordplay for the entire visit. BILLY. LACK. FLINTAN. KNAPPA. The names are practically writing the jokes themselves, and Gilmore commits to every single one without mercy.

His video is essentially three minutes of watching Donna’s face process the situation she’s in. It’s a very specific expression—the face of someone who chose this, is now living with the consequences, and finds it funnier than she wants to admit. They were out of IKEA in record time, which is either the point or a happy side effect, and which honestly sounds like a reasonably functional relationship to me.