I feel like this is a shout-out to the (awesome) Danish satire radio program "Chris and the Chocolate Factory"...
For those of you non-Danes, the concept of the sketches is very very simple. Chris is a lazy factory worker (though it's never made clear what it is Chris exactly does at the factory). Every morning, Chris is late to work, often awoken by his boss, Mike, by a phone call. Chris then makes up wild excuses for why he is late or why he thinks he should stay home for the day. Excuses that includes "A fox have eaten all of my clothes" and "Someone parked a crane outside my front door." and even "I'm actually dead, and calling you from my coffin." A block of burning cheese would fit right up Chris' alley.
@potatoe4life Well, not really, but I get the idea.
Beetle Bailey is probably even lazier than Chris of the aforementioned radio sketches, but I feel that Beetle is way more cunning in terms of planning his schemes to avoid chores. Chris more makes things up on the fly, and his boss never believes any of it.
As for the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, there is very little in common. Mind you, Chris and the Chocolate Factory is a series of very short, typically no more than 2 minutes long, sketches. The wild excuses are quite fantastic to listen to, but they are not, unlike Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, an art piece of what fantasy can create. Rather, they are quite feeble attempts at making excuses for not getting to work. Basically, Chris could have been working at any type of factory (or office for that matter), without it changing the sketches.
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