Cuck My Life Into Pieces: The ‘Driving Off Listening To Papa Roach’ Meme Made A Cameo On ‘Yellowjackets’

Bear with me, this requires some backstory.

Back in March 2015, Justin Halpern, author of Sh*t My Dad Says, the showrunner for the animated Harley Quinn series and now an Emmy-losing writer/producer on Abbott Elementary, told a story on my podcast (the Frotcast) about hooking up with a girl in college who he thought was his girlfriend, only to be disabused of this notion when her real boyfriend showed up the following morning. As Halpern feigned sleep (“I figured no one would beat up an asleep guy”) he heard the boyfriend walk in, see him on the couch, and say “Oh nice. Real f*ckin’ nice,” through tears.

At which point the guy stormed back outside, jumped in his car (in my head Halpern originally said it was a Jeep Wrangler, but he claims now it was a lifted Tacoma), hit the ignition, and sped off as the sound of Papa Roach’s “Last Resort” blared through the open windows. (This was in San Diego, it helps paint the picture).

As a callback to this story (easiest to find at 3:21 of our Best of 2016 Frotcast), Halpern posted a Photoshopped NY Times article about Paul Ryan, inserting a fictional bit in which Ryan drives off listening to Papa Roach. That tweet went so viral (almost certainly because lots of people didn’t instantly recognize it as a fiction like Halpern’s followers would’ve) that it spawned write ups in Mashable and the Washington Post. Papa Roach even responded.

On April 23rd, 2017, HBO aired a Silicon Valley episode which had a scene in which the fictional dickhead billionaire Russ Hanneman, played brilliantly by Chris Diamantopoulos, drives off angrily to the sounds of Papa Roach’s “Last Resort.”

— Stephen Stallings (@stephenXcore) April 24, 2017

Buzzfeed turned that into a trend piece, explaining “how ‘Last Resort’ became the internet’s new favorite joke song.”

The Buzzfeed reporter spoke with Halpern and Papa Roach’s Jacoby Shaddix for the piece, but never mentioned Halpern’s original story from the Frotcast, which annoyed me plenty. Enough that I reached out to both sources at HBO and Papa Roach (journalism!) to confirm whether it was possible that an HBO writer could’ve heard the podcast before writing the joke into the show. Results were, as you might imagine, inconclusive.

And guess what Now it’s back. On the season two premiere of Yellowjackets, Jeff, played by Warren Kole, rocks out to “Last Resort” in his SUV. And this time, I would argue, the context is even more eerily similar to the original Frotcast story.