They hate the cans! Stay away from the cans!

“They hate the cans! Stay away from the cans!” is Tim Wilkinson’s shouted reference to a comic scene from The Jerk, an absurd burst of recognition and laughter amid gunfire at the crash site. Its significance lies in the sharp contrast between the film’s image of bullet holes appearing in oil cans and the danger unfolding around the men, where rounds were punching through an aircraft’s tail boom.

The Movie Reference

Crouched behind panels, Wilkinson and Fales watched as intense gunfire ripped one hole after another through the tail boom. The sight reminded Wilkinson of Steve Martin’s character in The Jerk, who fails to realize that villains are shooting at him and reacts with surprise as holes appear in a row of oil cans. Wilkinson shouted the character’s line: “They hate the cans! Stay away from the cans!” The reference turned the repeated impacts into a moment of recognition, without changing the danger of the scene.

Laughter Under Fire

Both men laughed. The response is brief, but the timing gives the line its force: the joke emerged while they were crouched under cover and watching gunfire strike the aircraft. The cans belong to the movie, not the crash site; the humor comes from matching the tail boom’s successive bullet holes to the film’s absurd image.

Return to the Recovery Effort

The laughter did not end the work. After patching up several more men—the wounded crash survivors, Dowdy, and his fellow crew chief—Wilkinson crawled back up into the cockpit from underneath. He looked again for a way to pull Cliff Wolcott’s body down and out, but there was none. The comic line thus occupies a short interval within a scene that returns to injury, death, and the limits of what Wilkinson could recover.