So that's why he had people like Robbie, Anthony Bourdain, and Selena Gomez explain the basics. McKay, when he made his movie, aimed to flip that with the understanding that people could grok the economics-if it was provided in the right form. Also, the elite language of banking made it hard for average Americans to keep up, so they ignored it altogether.

When the housing market-the market that Michael Burry (Christian Bale) shorted in McKay’s movie-crashed in 2008, it happened while America was absorbed in Britney Spears, Facebook, and iPhones. The point was to make people pay attention to the thing they’d been ignoring (a volatile market built out of subprime mortgages) by having it recounted by the thing that had been distracting them (celebrity). That scene wasn't about finding a glitzy way to do some exposition. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. The whole thing has been manic, to say the least. So did Twitter’s new favorite commentator, Dionne Warwick, and, inexplicably, Ja Rule. On Thursday, Robinhood and TD Ameritrade, two services often used by retail investors, restricted trading on GME (and other stocks) after its price shot toward $500 per share. There were similar efforts to rally around the stocks for the AMC theater chain and Dogecoin. The hedge funds trying to short America’s beloved mall video game retailer were the villains Redditors and others buying GME stock to drive up the price and “squeeze” the short, were the heroes. Suddenly everyone was talking about “stonks.” GameStop went viral, a narrative emerged.

One of the big drivers of the fight over GameStop’s stock price has been the fact that retail investors-individual investors, not institutions-on the subreddit WallStreetBets have turned GME (the company’s stock ticker symbol) into a meme. Considering that the entire GameStop fiasco revolves around stock traders on Reddit trying to stick it to the hedge funds shorting the brick-and-mortar video game retailer, the implied analogy between this week’s reality and the movie (which was also based on real life) could not have been more apt. The gag was good he was basically a floating head on the body of Margot Robbie recreating the scene in Adam McKay’s 2015 film The Big Short where the actress describes mortgage bonds and how to “short” them. Producers on The Daily Show, apparently, thought it would be the best way to explain the GameStop drama that has consumed the financial-and extremely online-world. Wednesday night, Trevor Noah hit the bubble bath.

The big short online