Happy Birthday, Salad Fingers

The 14th of July is a very special date. It has witnessed the births of such notable individuals as David Mitchell (comedian), Ingmar Bergman, Taboo from The Black Eyed Peas, and me. It's Bastille Day in France, the 14 July Revolution in Iraq, and the date Billy the Kid was shot and killed by Pat Garrett. It's also when the first episode of Salad Fingers came out, 14 years ago.

Salad Fingers, for those who don't know, is a British flash animation series about a thin green dude who looks like a wrecked cucumber. He lives in a shack alone in a universe that doesn't appear to contain anybody else, with finger puppets for friends. He has no ears, no nose and no ability to distinguish between living creatures and objects. When British comedian David Firth uploaded Salad Fingers 1: Spoons to Newgrounds in 2004, it rapidly went viral before "going viral" was a thing, and now nobody over the age of 25 can make a tea without a disturbed little voice in the back of their head going "the feeling of rust against my salad fingers is almost orgasmic".

You'd be hard pressed to find another 110 seconds of animation to have a similar impact on popular consciousness. Some people thought it was fascinating, others found it absolutely terrifying. Either way, Salad Fingers remains one of the bleakest comedies to ever come out of the UK – which is quite a feat, considering it belongs to the era that also produced Monkey Dust.

In honour of the 14th anniversary of one of Britain's strangest cartoons, I spoke to creator David Firth about the power of suggestion, the internet and dreams. Plus, we asked actual Salad Fingers who he wants to win Love Island.

VICE: What do you remember about the first episode of Salad Fingers going up?
David Firth: I think when I first put it up I was disappointed with the initial reaction. It was on Newgrounds, and I felt it was as good as a lot of the other stuff on there, but it had quite a low rating. People didn't really understand it and I was getting a bit frustrated. Then, suddenly, it got put on the homepage by one of the moderators and the opinion instantly switched from "this is weird" to "this is cool" in a matter of hours. I was blown away by the amount of people who started watching it. After putting stuff out there for five years and getting 100 or 200 views, and suddenly it's that every ten minutes… it was insane.

The Newgrounds and Weebls Stuff era was such a unique time for animated comedy. How would you characterise that time, based on your experience of it?
There was just new stuff all the time – fresh, original ideas. People were being shocking, but there was no negativity about it. Being shocking wasn’t being racist or being nasty back then, it was just being a bit weird and dark and seeing how far you could push something. It was a lot of fun.

Salad Fingers arrived around the dawn of social media, before memes became a defined concept and everyone just passed around the Tub Girl link in chain emails. How do you think that time for the internet had an effect on animation and comedy?
Newgrounds felt futuristic because no other website that I knew of had a feature where you could comment and it would appear instantly – unless it was a Forum or a Guestbook, but there was never a video site where you could do that. Also, you could just post stuff straight to the site without anyone having to approve it, which was a really different system to before. Usually you'd have to email someone and ask if they'd put something on their website, and then they'd watch it and say no. There was no embedding either, so you had to send people links, and I don’t think anyone had Myspace or anything in 2004 either… So [Newgrounds] was the first time I’d ever seen everything happening in real time on a website. It’s very down to earth, Newgrounds. It’s just a small group of people, it’s very non-corporate, they don’t censor things. It’s great.

Do you remember the first positive comments you started seeing about it?
I’m one of those people who just reads the negative ones. Ten people could say something good and one person says something negative and I’m getting annoyed. But mainly I was surprised that people were actually scared by it, because it’s not supposed to be scary.

Why do you think it scares people?
I think it’s the unanswered questions and the lack of context, which is something I didn’t have any intention of clearing up. I mean, the first episode is kind of silly. Nothing really dark happens in it, it’s all suggested.

Not to shatter the mystery or anything, but as far as the birth of Salad Fingers goes, what was the vague concept you had in mind at the beginning?
I just drew some sketches of a guy – I found them recently as well, they’re not very good – and settled on what I'd done because it was very simple. It was just a round circle with two big eyes, and I was like, 'That's good enough. Also, he should probably have long fingers.' I didn’t really think it out. It was just at a time when I didn’t expect anything to come of anything that I’d done, so I didn’t put much thought into it. I was talking to [co-creator] Christian Webb online that night, saying, "Oh, I'm going to make a cartoon of Salad Fingers," and suggesting that he does all this weird stuff. I think I was ready to make it really disgusting and dark, but it was Christian’s idea that he didn’t actually do it; it just seemed like he would.

Salad Fingers is obviously very visual, but the audio is what carries it. The dialogue, the way he talks, all the horrible wet-mouth sounds – plus the episodes were subtitled. Did you see it more as a written project than an animation?
I put the subtitles in originally because I just didn’t want people to mishear and assume he was saying other things. I wanted there to be no question about what he said, and I kept them in because people weren’t asking me what he was talking about. I don’t know if I thought about it too much though….

If there were to be a live action adaptation of Salad Fingers, who would play him?
I’m not really a live action actor, but I don’t think anyone could do the voice and me be happy with it unless it was me. Maybe someone quite old, like the Gandalf guy from The Lord of the Rings. Although, Salad Fingers is actually very visually similar to the Smeagol character in a way. He’s kind of green with big eyes. I tend to think that older actors would be more suited to my work.

He does have a very ancient feeling about him, as a character. It’s hard to place him in a specific time or place.
In some of the YouTube videos where they analyse Salad Fingers, they’ve pinpointed it down to around 1939, based on all the technology that he’s got and the references he’s making. But that was never intended. There’s a whole scene on YouTube of analysing works, and it’s kind of cool that they do mine.

What’s the strangest interpretation you’ve ever heard of Salad Fingers?
There’s another video I’ve got called "Men From Up the Stairs", [which I did as a pisstake because] people were over-analysing my work. I put loads of stupid hidden meanings, and if you found the hidden meaning it would be something completely ridiculous. So everyone would be saying, "This is what it means," but I was moderating the comments so none of the actual meanings were left, so people were still guessing. But then people would make absolutely ridiculous suggestions and I’d leave those ones there as a red herring.There was one about how it was symbolising the birth of man, and how we use religion, and all this stuff I’d never even contemplated. So I pinned that one. It was so wrong.

That must be an interesting part of the whole thing. Like you said, Salad Fingers is mostly full of suggestion, and he’s sort of an unreliable narrator in that you can’t trust a single thing he’s saying – and because of that, people are so desperate to get concrete answers and get rid of the question mark.
Yeah! I don’t know why they want to get rid of the question! I haven’t got rid of the question! I’m just as in the dark as they are sometimes. If I think of something and I don’t know why I’ve thought of it and I put it in, I have the same questions. I don’t then go back and go, 'Oh, that doesn’t make sense,' because that’s the very reason it’s in there. If I wasn’t in the dark and I had a big plan, I don’t think the whole thing would be as good; I think it would be hinting towards something that maybe wasn’t as good as the mystery that surrounds it.

Do you think, in TV and comedy now, there's more of a slant towards having answers to things and not being content with the mystery?
I used to love The Ring, the original one. It had so many questions when it finished, and that's what made it scary. Then they made Ring 0 and Ring 2 and cleared them all up, and it lost it. That’s an example of when giving the answer ruins the mystery.

How much time do you usually spend on Salad Fingers episodes?
There's always a battle between, 'Is it good enough, or is it too good?' It could look almost real, if I spent countless hours over every scene, making every tiny little detail as high quality as possible. But there’s a point where you just say, "It's good enough," and maybe while I’ve been working on the latest episode I haven’t been saying that enough. I got a bit obsessed with all the shadows and reflections, and I forgot that the first episode only took me one day and one night to finish, and this one has taken me six months so far. Also, the first one’s always gonna be the most popular one, and it's only one minute long and it took me one day. But again, I don’t want to get halfway through something and then all of a sudden start cutting corners. There’s a lot of battles going on in my head of how it should come across. I recently had to spend three or four days repeating the same lines for the 11th episode… and then I recorded them all again because, listening back, he didn’t sound weak or pathetic enough. My voice has got slightly lower since I did the first one, so it’s a real strain to get it back to that height again.

Do you see it having an ending, of sorts?
It’s not going to end, I don’t think. I’ve got this big book full of ideas – I’ve been writing them since 2005, and some of the ideas I’ve only just started to use. They’re nearly 15 years old now and I’ve written so many more since. I don’t think it’s ever going to run out. If I was given a series, on TV or Netflix or something, and I got to make all the ideas in a short space of time, maybe I’d run out and I’d have to write some more. But at the rate I’m going I don’t think it’ll ever run out.

I read that you take a lot of your ideas from dreams. Is that right?
Yeah. When I wake up in the morning and I’ve had some weird dream, I’ll try and write it down. It’s usually just words or a phrase that’s been in my dream. I don’t know where they’ve come from, but it feels like skipping past the conscious part of your brain back to the subconscious and taking things straight from there. I think there’s something really pure about that. Even if the idea doesn’t seem that good, it’s more about, 'Why did that come to me?' But more than that, I try to take the structure of the dream as inspiration for how a story unfolds. It has a broken continuity in that way. That’s something that keeps me interested.

Have you ruined spoons for yourself?
I don’t think about it too much… Luckily, you don’t see many rusty spoons. They don’t tend to rust too easily unless they’re old, so it’s not something I come across every day. I think I put a spoon in every episode, though, just to keep a running theme going, but the spoon doesn’t mean anything. It was just a half-hearted suggestion by my friend Christian. He was like, "Maybe just a spoon, or something?" And I was like, "Yeah, that’ll do: spoon."

Can I ask Salad Fingers a few questions?
Yeah, let me just leave the room.

Happy birthday, Salad Fingers.
Salad Fingers: Hello.

How are you going to celebrate?
There’ll be a grand ball. But I’m sure to forget the address.

What’s your birthday wish this year?
I’d like to find a new tree. I’m going to be thirty-twelve and a half moon's young.

What are you going to do with the tree?
I’m going to name it Stewart.

How’s Hubert Cumberdale?
… We don’t speak about him in these parts anymore. He’s been a very naughty boy.

Why, what’s he done?
I banished him to the toy box for pleasuring himself with a dirty stick.

What have you been up to since his birthday? Do you remember his birthday party ?
I don’t remember that, I’m sorry. I think you’re thinking of somebody else.

Do you like Fatbergs?
I don’t like any bergs. They’re stinking flappy clap… clap… flappers that swoop down to steal my treasured possessions. I think they should be banished to the mountains.

What do your fingers make of Theresa May?
I once saw a man on a hill in the distance, and he was carrying a stick, and I thought, 'Not by my bum whiskers,' and so I walked over to him, but he’d long gone by the time I’d stewed up a broth. That’s what I think.

Do you think the world’s going to end?
It already has. That’s why we must save all of our burps and dirty trumpies in safe places, so that God can count them.

Who do you want to win Love Island?
I think we all will. Love will win in the end, because before the great beast comes to collect my carcass I'll say, "I found true love once, I ate some biscuits and had a cup of tea."

Nice.

@emmaggarland

David Firth is currently working on Salad Fingers 11. A feature-length DVD of his work called Umbilical World comes out soon. You can find all of David's work on his YouTube channel.