Where this was said
The Towel Story: Class, Wealth, and Sarah Silverman's Pool
At 17:51 · chapter starts 15:30
Sean Hayes tries to retell a joke from Robby's special, gets baited into mangling it, and eventually Robby takes over: the towel revelation happened at Sarah Silverman's house. For Robby, a towel was simply built into the house — she had never encountered the concept of buying new ones. Silverman announcing 'we just got new towels for the pool' was a genuinely alien experience. The story becomes a jumping-off point for a broader riff: Robby had already been horrified to discover via Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee that Silverman lived in an apartment, not a house, which seemed to Robby like a failure of dreams. When Silverman finally bought a house, Robby felt vindicated. Jason Bateman intercepts to explain that actually, new towels are bad — they need 20 washes to become properly thirsty — which Robby finds both ridiculous and entirely right for a man of Jason's level.
Robby Hoffman had never heard of 'new towels.' A towel, in her world, was built with the house. When Sarah Silverman announced she'd bought new pool towels, it was a class-gap revelation.
At a rich person's house you orbit a gargantuan kitchen island and can't touch the fridge. At a broke person's apartment there's Doritos, whiskey, and you can spill freely — and nobody cares.
