According to Day, he was inspired by the Woody Allen mockumentary “Sweet and Lowdown,” which stars Sean Penn as an alcoholic jazz musician who falls in love with a mute laundress. Early in the film, Penn’s character comes down on a big sparkling moon, which became Charlie’s big yellow sun. Day explained:
“Descending on a sun. I stole that from ‘Sweet and Lowdown,’ where Sean Penn descends on a moon and has a great sequence where, you know, he wants to, he’s making this big deal about he’s gonna descend on this moon and then gets like, he’s really proud of it and then a stagehand comes by and he’s like, ‘That’s a hell of drop, man could break his neck,’ you know, and then he gets nervous and his descend is so like — but I was watching that because I couldn’t remember if we, if I did drop down or if I didn’t.”
Bluestone and McElhenney assured Day that he did drop a little bit, but that they cut away too fast for anyone to really catch much of it. Apparently Day had to be strapped to the sun rig for the final “Nightman Cometh” song, which meant that in order to step off of it he had to be unstrapped, necessitating a cut. That makes the joke a tiny bit harder to recognize, since Penn’s descent is a total disaster, but it’s still funny anyway. After all, who wouldn’t laugh at the director of a play suddenly appearing on a big cardboard sun to propose to a woman that loathes him? Maybe in season 17, Charlie and the Waitress will get mental subtitles a la “Annie Hall”…