Take 60 Seconds And Enjoy Mike Milligan’s Terrific ‘Jabberwocky’ Scene From ‘Fargo’

The sixth episode of Fargo‘s second season featured a bunch of memorable moments. Examples include a) the drunken lawyer played by Nick Offerman rampaging around the police station while ranting about jackboots and tyranny, and b) Simone Gerhardt specifically requesting that a murder be attached to the message “Kiss my grits.” (Fargo is a good show.) But the most memorable was probably Kansas City mobster Mike Milligan reciting the entirety of the Lewis Carroll poem “Jabberwocky” as he and his crew prepared for battle.

“Jabberwocky,” if you are/were not familiar, is a famous nonsense poem contained in Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Here’s the basic background, via Wikipedia:

In an early scene in which she first encounters the chess piece characters White King and White Queen, Alice finds a book written in a seemingly unintelligible language. Realizing that she is travelling through an inverted world, she recognizes that the verses on the pages are written in mirror-writing. She holds a mirror to one of the poems, and reads the reflected verse of “Jabberwocky.” She finds the nonsense verse as puzzling as the odd land she has passed into, later revealed as a dreamscape.

“Puzzling” is a fair description, as the poem is littered with phrases like “Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch!,” all of which makes the fact that it was recited on the show by a murderous criminal on his way to shoot up his enemy’s house all the more delightful. Couple that with Bokeem Woodbine’s delivery and it made for some truly great television.

My favorite part of all this, as I discussed in my recap yesterday, was that in order to deliver the poem off the top of his head like this, Mike Milligan had to actually sit down and memorize it at some point. This, to be clear, is fascinating.

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