I watched my Daddy make sausage. It was ugly. I thought, "We gotta eat THAT?!?!" If he was alive today I would have the stove ready!!!
Making Sausage Is Ugly: A Defense of Not Watching
There is an old saying, attributed variously to Otto von Bismarck and to a hundred anonymous cynics, that laws are like sausages: it is better not to see them being made. The proverb has since been stretched to cover everything from legislation to literature, and it survives because it is true. Making sausage is ugly. The process involves grinding, casing, curing, and a great deal of unglamorous labor, and none of it resembles the neat little links that arrive on your plate. The same is true of almost everything worth having. And that is precisely why watching the process is not fun it is, in fact, frequently hilarious in its horror, which is a very particular kind of not-fun.
Let us begin with the literal sausage, because the metaphor deserves its due. A sausage is a triumph of human ingenuity over the question "what do we do with this?" The answer, historically, was: grind it, salt it, stuff it into something, and hope for the best. The result is delicious. The process is a symphony of viscera. There is the grinder, which turns recognizable muscle into a pink extrusion of dubious origin. There is the casing, which is exactly what you fear it is. There is the moment when the novice sausage-maker realizes that the mixture must be kept ice-cold or it will become a biological incident, and that his hands are, at present, the opposite of ice-cold. Watching this, one does not think "how fascinating." One thinks "I will never eat again," followed shortly by "I will eat again in about twenty minutes."
This is the first reason the sausage factory is not fun to watch: it is revolting in a way that is also, unavoidably, comic. The revulsion is real the squelch, the pink, the intestinal casing but it is also absurd. Human beings have built entire civilizations around pretending that food does not come from bodies, and the sausage factory is where that pretense goes to die. Watching it is like watching a magician explain the trick: the wonder drains out and is replaced by a slightly nauseated admiration for the plumbing. It is funny the way a whoopee cushion is funny low, bodily, and a little shameful. But funny is not the same as fun. A whoopee cushion is funny once. A sausage factory is funny for about ninety seconds, after which it is simply a smell you cannot leave.
The deeper problem is that the sausage factory is a stand-in for every process we prefer to consume in its finished form. Consider legislation. A bill is a clean thing on paper: a title, some sections, a signature. Its manufacture involves committee markups at eleven at night, amendments attached by people who have not read them, logrolling, horse-trading, and the occasional paragraph inserted because someone's cousin needed a favor. Watching this is not fun. It is, however, darkly hilarious, because the gap between the dignity of the finished law and the grubbiness of its gestation is so wide that the mind staggers. The humor here is the humor of disillusionment the same joke as the sausage, told with more paperwork.
Consider art. A novel arrives as a bound object with a cover and a blurb. Its manufacture involves years of false starts, discarded drafts, self-doubt, and a manuscript that at one point contained a character named "Brenda (fix later)." Consider a marriage, a career, a child, a sourdough starter. Each is lovely in its finished form and each, in process, involves mess, repetition, and moments that no one would film voluntarily. The sausage factory is not special. It is simply honest about what all factories look like.
And here is where the humor curdles into something sharper. The reason we say "don't watch the sausage being made" is not that the process is secret. It is that the process is *revealing*. It reveals that the finished product is a construction, that the neatness is imposed, that the magic is labor. This is funny in the way that seeing a wizard behind a curtain is funny—but it is also destabilizing. The joke is on us, for having believed in the sausage. The laughter is the laughter of people who have just realized they have been enjoying something they did not understand. It is not a joyful laugh. It is the laugh of the audience at a magic show when the dove turns out to be a pigeon with a bad dye job.
Now, one might object: surely some processes are fun to watch. Cooking shows are enormously popular. *How It's Made* ran for decades. There is a whole genre of television devoted to watching things be manufactured. But look closely at what those shows actually do. They sanitize. The cooking show omits the butchering. How It's Made shows the extruder but not the smell. The genre works precisely because it edits the ugliness out it gives you the idea of the process without the process. Watching the real thing, unedited, is a different experience entirely. It is the difference between watching a cooking show and standing in a commercial kitchen at the dinner rush. One is entertainment. The other is a job.
This is the crux of the matter. The sausage factory is not fun to watch because it is work, and work, watched from the outside, is tedious at best and grotesque at worst. The humor we extract from it is a defensive humor, a way of managing our discomfort. We laugh at the grinder because the alternative is to think too hard about what we ate for breakfast. We laugh at the committee markup because the alternative is to think too hard about how laws are made. The laughter is real, but it is not the laughter of enjoyment. It is the laughter of the person who has just seen the man behind the curtain and is trying, desperately, to make a joke of it.
So the proverb is right, but for a reason it does not quite state. It is not that the sausage-making is shameful, though it often is. It is that the sausage-making is ordinary grinding, mixing, stuffing, repeating and ordinary labor, exposed, is never entertaining for long. It is funny in flashes, in the way that a slip on a banana peel is funny. But a slip on a banana peel, repeated for eight hours, is just a person falling down. The sausage factory is the banana peel at scale: a hundred small indignities, each briefly amusing, collectively exhausting.
And yet. There is a case for watching anyway, and it is not a fun case. Watching the sausage being made is how you learn that sausage is made which matters if you care about what you are eating, or what your government is passing, or what your favorite novel cost its author. The ugliness is information. The humor is a coping mechanism. The trick is to laugh, learn, and then get out of the factory before the smell settles into your clothes. Making sausage is ugly. Watching it is not fun. But knowing it is, occasionally, necessary and the joke, in the end, is that we keep pretending otherwise.
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