Look, I don’t know why I watched all of this. I don’t really care about John Mayer. I don’t think I’ve ever heard one of his songs in full. And I’m not exactly a huge fan of the chilli eating interview schtick either. But there’s something weirdly hypnotic and hilarious about this thing that made it impossible for me to turn off. I think it’s partly because Mayer himself just seems like an incredibly weird fucking dude. There’s something about him that I cannot put my finger on, something that makes watching this equal parts annoying and compelling. He refuses to smile, for one thing. This is a celebrity interview conducted while eating incredibly spicy food—it should be a light, frothy affair full of laughs. Nnnnnnope. Not on Mayer’s watch! There are more important tasks at hand. Delivering metaphors that just do not want to be delivered, for example. Or squeaking deadpan jokes in while making the listener question the boundary between ‘deadpan joke’ and ‘declarative sentence’. And, above all, maintaining that cold, black remove in your eyes that speaks of a Lovecraftian abyss of unfathomable self-regard. No time for smiles when you’re busy with all of that—let alone laughs! ‘Does anybody remember laughter’, Robert Plant ad-libbed that time when Led Zep played ‘Stairway To Heaven’. John Mayer does! He remembers it struggling underneath his colourfully tattooed arms, eyes slowly draining of life. He had surprised laughter in its sleep, throttling it to stillness over the course of an endless half-minute. Laughter struggled. Of course it did, it wanted to live. But Mayer had conviction. Laughter could not leave that room ever again. And then it was all over. It hadn’t gone perfectly. Some of laughter’s blood got on his new tie-dyed t-shirt. ‘Damn’, thought John Mayer to himself. He really liked that tie-dyed t-shirt. He thought that maybe one day he could have learned to love it even as much as he loved himself. ‘No time for that now, John Mayer’, said John Mayer to himself as he went to one of the many mirrors in the room. Eyes of infinite nothingness glinted back at him. ‘We have an interview to do.’ And he pulled a grey top over the blood-spattered tie-dye and off he went to meet Sean Evans.

Petr is a staff contributor. You can follow him on Twitter.