The Biggest Ball of Twine

Patton Oswalt, a bottle and a half of Scotch into the evening, walks host Derek Waters through what he calls the ball of twine civil war. In 1950 Darwin, Minnesota farmer Francis Johnson (Colin Hanks) rescues his hands' leftover baling twine and becomes fixated on winding a perfectly tight ball, accepting only sisal and refusing every other fiber. Down in Cawker City, Kansas, Frank Stoeber (Seth Green) hears about it and starts his own ball with no rules at all, letting anyone in town add to it, and a Guinness representative (Steve Agee) crowns the Kansas ball the biggest, sending Johnson into a rage. After Stoeber dies in 1974, Johnson spends years winding until Guinness returns and recognizes his ball with a carefully qualified title, so each town keeps its own claim. 'Weird Al' Yankovic's face peers out from the twine, while Oswalt loses his place, asks how drunk he is and closes with a tangled moral about trusting the spark you've lit.

Episode 3 of Drunk History's 2026 short-form revival on Comedy Central's YouTube channel. 'Weird Al' Yankovic, who appears as the ball of twine, recorded "The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota" in 1989 about Francis Johnson's ball in Darwin.