Only one category of television allows for the natural progression from a black and white scene of containers spilling from a kitchen cabinet to a wide-smiling white lady nodding gleefully at a neatly packed stack of Tupperware. That category is the infomercial. And I love the infomercial.

If you’ve ever sat down with a bowl of popcorn that suddenly defies gravity and spilled on the floor or smelled a box of food that had wavy green lines floating from it or scrubbed fruitlessly at the walls of a bathtub only to throw your dilapidated sponge down in a fit of disgusted overreaction, you may be in an infomercial.

No one is innocent of the crime of sitting through an entire three-minute-long, late-night dash of infomercialism, and we’ve all stared at humans doing things that humans would never do just to think, “Damn, maybe I do need that aerodynamic space age technology clip for my open chip bags.” And we’re 18 or older now, so we can even call within the next 58 seconds and they’ll include a whole truckload of magic mops for FREE. Just pay additional shipping and handling.

The infomercial employs a more advanced manipulation technique than its more traditional daytime commercial counterparts. Because they’re longer, they can better illustrate the problem they’re creating (spoiler: the problem doesn’t exist) in order to sell you the product you don’t need. How many times have you been lying on the couch under a blanket and thought, “Man, if only this thing had sleeves for my arms so I could eat my cheesy fries!”? Zero times, but after five minutes of having Snuggies crammed down your throat, you’ll suddenly have phantom memories of taking a pair of scissors to your favorite fleece so you can be warm and eat pasta at the same time.

There’s a special kind of brilliance behind the infomercial, and if you can pinpoint the nonexistent problem it’s trying to convince you of, you can really sit back and enjoy the comedy.