By Robert Scucci
| Published 8 hours ago

Every man on Earth has one ridiculous fantasy that he clings to because the possibility of it ever happening gives him something to live for. Dane Cook insists every guy wants to be involved in an elaborate heist. The Farrelly Brothers’ Hall Pass suggests every man wants to stay faithfully married to his wife, but would love to sleep with other women if only his better half would allow it.

Both of these scenarios are so far-fetched that they will probably never happen. If they do, you’re likely ending up in jail or divorce court, and for good reason.

The most egregious male fantasy, however, involves raining hate on a barista because all you want is a simple cup of black coffee and they refuse to sell it to you.

In this fantasy, which I call the coffee con, the conversation escalates until people either scream or come to blows because they just want coffee with a capital C. The barista is convinced they should try something new and refuses to take no for an answer.

Denis Leary famously ranted about how hard it is to get a cup of coffee flavored coffee. Tom Segura had a similar bit in his Completely Normal special, along with an epic showdown on his Netflix series Bad Thoughts. Sam Loudermilk leans into the same setup with his cashier, and even Dennis Reynolds from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has his moment trying to order a tea without any boba in it.

The result is always the same. A middle-aged dude complaining about how everything sucks now because he can’t get his bold-roasted cup of bean water.

The Coffee Con

The coffee con is the ultimate male fantasy, and I’m here to dismantle it because I am a black coffee drinker. Hot, iced, cold brew, it doesn’t matter. I have never once run into this problem.

I order my coffee. It’s poured into a cup. I pay the cashier. I leave and become a jittery mess.

I am a faulty organic machine that converts Frappuccinos into debilitating, clear-my-afternoon levels of digestive distress, so I avoid the fancy drinks at all costs even though they’re delicious. Not only has a barista never refused to sell me black coffee, the easiest beverage to make on the entire menu, the idea that they would is preposterous.

Having worked at an extremely busy convention center café, I never once stared cockeyed at somebody for wanting the simplest thing on the menu. Here’s a trade secret you may not know: baristas don’t work on commission.

It doesn’t matter if they’re pouring black coffee into a cup or juggling an espresso machine, blender, syrup pumps, and milk frother all at once. They make the same amount of money either way.

It’s simple math, and nowhere in their employee handbook does it say they have to act like this.

Denis Leary’s Straw Man Rant, And What’s Really At Play Here

Famous joke thief Denis Leary epically rants about the coffee con in his 1997 stand-up special, Lock ‘N Load. In the eight-minute bit that begins with “Is it impossible to get a cup of coffee-flavored coffee anymore in this country?”, he launches into everything wrong with the modern world.

I don’t think coffee is the primary focus of his rage.

Coffee is just the catalyst. If you read between the lines, there is something much sadder going on. He’s upset about the new guard pushing his generation toward irrelevance, one mochaccino, chocaccino, frappuccino, cappuccino, rapaccinio, and alpaccino at a time.

Leary’s true colors show during a side rant about his trip to 7-Eleven. He goes to great lengths describing the clerk as an over-tattooed, under-educated, tongue-pierced, dressed-like-a-gangster Gen X burnout who is somehow keeping him from his precious black coffee when he’s not huffing paint and drooling on himself. He mocks gang signs, makes a Wu-Tang reference that was already dated in 1997, and demolishes this fictional villain who is just trying to do his job.

The entire bit is a straw man argument. The 7-Eleven employee sounds like the biggest idiot on the planet when the far more likely explanation is that Leary filled his own cup with the wrong flavor, which finished with a hint of maple syrup, and was mad at himself because he forgot his grandpa glasses when looking at the self-serve carafes.

Is Denis Leary really mad about coffee? Or is he mad that the times are changing and blaming it on the youth he encounters?

Black coffee is a staple beverage at every café, truck stop, and diner in America. The only real change is that there are more ways to drink coffee now than ever before. Leary’s got the same energy as the crotchety university professor explaining to students that Vinyl LPs are “those big black things we used to listen to music on.” It’s the same attitude that criticizes kids for not learning cursive even though they had no say in how the curriculum was structured.

It’s Not The Kids’ Fault

Meanwhile, on planet Earth in the year 2026, you can walk into almost any café and order black coffee without pushback. I used to be a caffeine junkie back in college (I still am, but I used to be too!). It got so bad that, like a problem drinker, I strategically planned my day around entering different coffee shops at different times so I didn’t look like somebody who needed an intervention.

I knew when the shifts changed. Like a chain smoker lighting the next cigarette with the still-smoldering corpse of the previous one, I was mainlining offensive amounts of coffee into my body. Even then, the most egregious exchange I ever experienced was the barista asking one simple question: “Would you like room for milk?”

The more insidious problem that the coffee con reveals is that guys aged anywhere from 35 to death are afraid of how the times are changing. Their sacred preferences are being undermined by the next generation, waiting to take their place, and that scares the crap out of them. Or, as a 37-year-old, I should say, us.

Dennis Reynolds’ tea shop meltdown in “Dennis Takes a Mental Health Day” sums this up perfectly. He’s not angry because he can’t get a simple cup of herbal tea. He’s angry because the place doesn’t take cash, requires an app that tracks his consumption habits, and the employee standing in front of him can’t process the transaction without technological help because “the system won’t allow it.”

The fear of aging out is real, and everybody copes with it differently. Dennis is right to be distressed, but it’s not the tea place’s fault.

Men of a certain age distill that rage into the cup of coffee they want but assure you they can’t have anymore. In Loudermilk, when our hero runs into the same situation, he mocks the barista’s vocal fry. It’s hilarious because nobody should talk like that unless they have a medical condition. But it’s also telling because he’s not actually mad, he’s afraid.

Tom Segura takes it even further, going on a murder spree when too much milk is added to his iced coffee despite requesting light milk, resulting in a sequence of cinematic violence worthy of a John Wick movie. If anything, he’s riding the hate train against poor customer service, but coffee is still the fuel that keeps his anger firing on all cylinders. 

A False Equivalency At Play 

In all of these coffee con examples, front-line employees are belittled because their customer refuses to become a relic of the past. They just want good old-fashioned coffee, and nothing makes sense to them anymore.

They’re the Boomers who “don’t do email” and get replaced by three interns, and the Millennials who think AI is coming for their jobs, but refuse to learn the new tech, rendering them obsolete. It’s the same anxiety no matter how old you are, and the coffee con is the most distilled and aromatic way to express it.

But I assure you, and this is important, that the classics never die.

Thirty, forty, or even one hundred years from now, when society collapses for reasons of our own doing, you will still probably be able to get a cup of black coffee.

I promise you it’s going to be okay.