The Waitress' Name is Mary. Here's My Theory

[opqz]

Hello, I’m Ré Iro, a qualified IASIP fan since I was a pre-teen. I’ve fully binged the show 7 times now and seen sporadic episodes in-between these binges. I believe that the scene where Mac and the Waitress are looking through Dennis’ sex tapes in season 4 episode 4, “Mac’s Banging the Waitress”, gives us enough evidence to reasonably infer that the waitress’ name is Mary.

Disclaimer: In this analyzation, I will not be looking at evidence from other episodes, but I will of course take into consideration any counter evidence or supporting evidence for this theory. If you have any other evidence, points, counterpoints, edits to my theory, or theories of your own, I urge you to comment them. Also, I apologize for the poor image quality; Hulu wouldn’t let me screenshot for obvious pirating reasons. In terms of the key, I will be numbering the short paragraph segments for better reference. I will also use notes labelled as sentences in parentheses, but these notes are still apart of the theory itself. Lastly, I will use the picture uploader for my image sources so you all can reference my sources without having to watch Hulu ads.

I’ve been thinking this theory for a long time now, I just wanted to finally give time to the question. I worked for a pitiful amount of hours on this theory, and it would mean a lot if you at least skimmed it to understand my points. Lastly, for anyone concerned for my sanity, I’m autistic. This is the type of stuff I was born to do.

Why Mary?

Initially with this theory, I set out looking for the name Elizabeth based on a hunch I had about the actors name. I attributed the name Elizabeth to her portrayer, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, due to the nature of naming characters on the show, which is a very common trope in It’s Always Sunny. Rob named his character Mac after his last name, Sweet Dee was named after one of Rob’s friend’s girlfriends, and Charlie and Artemis were named directly after the actors. Glenn only picked the name Dennis to distance himself from the character. However, (spoiler alert), as the theory concludes itself, the letter “M” stood out. This made it evident by the end of my research that I wanted to base my thesis around the name Mary, following the trope of naming characters directly after the actor.

Drawer Dimensions

[1] In this scene, Mac and the Waitress are filing through Dennis’ sex tapes searching for Dennis and the Waitress’ sex tape. Mac opens the drawer on the right, and the Waitress opens the drawer on the left. In the next shot, we can infer that the tapes are organized in a loose alphabetical order. It is known that Mac has a knowledge of Dennis’ sex tape drawers, as referenced in “Charlie Rules the World”. This leads him to instantly go for the drawer on the right, knowing to look in the lower half of the sex tapes to find the starting letter “W”.

[2] By the shutter of the tapes when Mac opens the drawer fast, one might infer that the columns of tapes would end with “Vivian” or “Wendy”, but the tape lying down in the back of the leftmost column in the right drawer, (the tape before the one that appears to read “Solala”), disproves this. Standard VHS tape dimensions are approximately 7.4” longways, 4.0” tall, and 1.0” deep. It is easy to infer that the row of tapes before the final tape lying down is 10”, which makes sense when visually comparing it to the lengths of the characters’ arms. This means that including the 10 1-inch-thick tapes and the tape lying flat, the minimum depth of the drawers is 14”, which is technically enough to contain 14 tapes. (Note: I’m also going to add 1 inch of leeway because there is minor spacing between the tapes in each column. In addition, the tape in the back would need more than 0 inches to fall.) Keep in mind that this 15” and 14-tape measurement is in terms of minimums; there could definitely be more tapes farther in the drawer, and any other proof to the depth of the drawers would likely be relative and hard to properly scale.

Number of Tapes

[3] Counting the tapes in these drawers, we can estimate that Dennis would put around 14 tapes per total column, and 4 columns total. This can be inferred by the shot covering a full side view of the left drawer, and also by rightfully assuming that the drawers are the same size. This evidence along with not being able to see the last (at-least) 2 tapes in each column in Mac’s drawer other than the left-most one results in the equation 11+(12→14)*3). This gives us a minimum of 47 tapes in Mac’s drawer, and a known visual maximum of 53. Therefore, it would be reasonable to infer a median of 50 tapes in the right drawer.

[4] The left drawer is harder to analyze, but in the column closest to Mac, there is a maximum of 9 tapes and 8 full tapes in sight, which gives us an estimate of almost 9 inches in this view. Breaking it down column-by-column, we see a pretty definite 5 in the first one, assuming that the yellow object blocks the column through to the back of the drawer. The second column shows 7 tapes, but definitely has room for 8. Finally, the third column shows 8 tapes, but definitely has room for 9. Assuming that there are disorganized tapes back there, I’m gonna guess an average of 3 tapes behind what we can see for those rightmost 3 columns. This would place each column at 5, 10, 11, and 12 tapes, respectively, totaling a non-full drawer that includes 38 tapes. (Note: To be clear, this number could theoretically be as high as 51 and as low as 29 tapes in the left drawer; I’m only really guessing based on evening out the number of tapes in the drawer.)

Percentages of Named Tapes

[5] In total, this probability gives us 88 total tapes in the final number estimate. (Note: We also see another wide-shot of the open drawers a couple seconds later in the scene, but the fuzziness of the camera quality does not allow us to infer much more concrete evidence viewable inside the drawers. The only point this proves is that there is more tapes in the left drawer than what the side shot shows, which rules out the possibility of only 29 tapes in the left drawer, which is a point that this estimate already accounts for.) My strategy from here will be to analyze average U.S. girl name alphabetic frequency and cross-reference it with the tapes to find out what starting letter the Waitress is looking at in her drawer.

[6] While it will be difficult to subtract all the tapes that are labelled without first names, we can easily subtract the unnamed tapes in the right drawer. (Note: I’m going to remark here that the tapes themselves are not in actual alphabetical order, but rather a rough and slightly disorganized alphabetical order that I will still follow.) Assuming that the strange female names in Dennis’ drawer aren’t professions, we can rule out 18 names, these mostly consisting of different waitresses. That brings our total down to 70 total tapes across both drawers with actual names for labels. The low episode resolution made it difficult to read any labels in the left drawer, so I’m going to calculate based on the same percentage as the right drawer to distinguish the labels that are first names and those that are professions. In the estimated 50 tapes in the right drawer, 18 of them are labelled by the women’s professions, making this 36%. (Note: In reality, this could be as low as 0% and technically as high as 100%, and it could also be lower given that “waitress” is a very common profession for women in Dennis’ ideal age range.) Comparing the 36% to the estimate of total tapes in the left drawer, we can infer that 24 of the tapes are labelled with actual female names. This leaves us with a rough estimate of 60 total tapes across both drawers that are labelled with actual female names.

Letter Percentages

[7] According to this source, the first letter of approximately 51.2% of girl names range between A and J, (which would subsequently suggest that 48.8% of girl names start with the letters K-Z). This implies that, if following the national name average, Mac’s drawer, being that it carries 60% of the total number of tapes, should contain letters H-Z. However, we only see it vaguely carrying S-Z, which makes up only 14.63% of girl names. Even given that 36% of the tapes in Mac’s drawer are labelled by professions, this is a highly suspicious and integral to the theory. By this logic, one could propose a theory that the two drawers below the two that are opened also contain tapes, particularly the ones in letters A-J. This creates a second leg of the theory measuring only K-Z names that I will be addressing in paragraph 12, but for now, we will stick to the idea that this is a strange alphabetical coincidence and that all of Dennis’ tapes to the point of season 4 are in these top two drawers.

[8] In the shot over the Waitress’ line “my name doesn’t start with a W”, we see the waitress, after eye-scanning to find the correct column, looking through the third out of fourth column of tapes. The A-R category that hypothetically makes up the left drawer includes 85.38% of names. (Note: If this number seems one-hundredth off, it’s because the website’s data adds up to 100.01% due to presumed rounding issues. However, it’s close enough to 100 to validate this source.) To find this number, I multiplied each percentage by (100.01 / 85.38). Here are the numbers I got.

Attributing the Numbers to Names

[9] The percentage numbers of the A-R names above indicate the percent probability of each name’s starting letter’s frequency in the left drawer. Equating these to percentages of the estimated total of 24 tapes in the left drawer yields these numbers. This indicates that the letters (A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S) would have (4 1 1 1 3 0 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 1 0 1 0 1 2) tapes attributed to the names with those first letters respectively.

[10] (Note: All of this is relative, given that we see in Mac’s drawer that the alphabetical organization of the tapes is very rough.) This information allows us to illustrate a diagram showing how many names on each tape contain each respective letter. Column 1, with 4 named tapes, should include 4 A’s. Column 2, with a presumed 6 named tapes, should include 1 B, 1 C, 1 D, and 3 E’s. Column 3, also with a presumed 6 named tapes, should include 1 G, 1 H, 1 I, 1 J, 1 K, and 1 L. Finally, the more tightly-packed column 4, with a presumed 8 named tapes, should include 1 L, 2 M’s, 1 N, 1 P, 1 R, and 2 S’s.

Inferring By the Columns

[11] The drawer the Waitress goes for first is easily disputable, but is probably between the third and fourth column. She looks at the 4th column first, but we only see her hands skimming through the 3rd column. However, she had already been scanning the tapes for a few seconds while the camera showed Mac’s tapes before we see her using her hands to scan the 3rd column relatively fast, making it almost just as feasible that she could have been looking through the 4th column first. If she started looking at the top of the 4th column, it’s entirely reasonable to think that she could have started looking in the letter of her first name, noticed that the tapes were scattered, and continued looking in the next logical column. This clearly suggests that the Waitress could have started looking for the letter “M” when she first opened the drawer, since any name beginning with this letter was most likely placed in the fourth column.

[12] Another viable theory is the second leg of the theory, which assumes that the bottom two drawers could also reasonably be filled with Dennis’ other sex tapes. They are not opened in the scene, which leaves no visual queues as to the contents of these drawers, so the drawers could hypothetically have anywhere between 0 to 112 sex tapes total, with an unknown amount in each. For this reason, doing the same math as with the top two drawers would be basically inconclusive. However, assuming that the bottom two drawers contained all of the names A-J, then probability discloses that the top left drawer we see the Waitress going through would contain letters K-N, (despite the show then suggesting it would contain letters K-S), while the drawer on the right evidently contains S-Z. Either way, this would likely place the letter “M” in the third or fourth column of the left drawer.

Conclusion

Despite the amount of hypotheticals, estimations, educated guesses, inferences, and rounding, I believe that my evidence was clear and concrete enough to credit it to the same degree as any original theory about the Waitress’ real name thus far. My goal with this theory was to prove to my readers that, if the gang clearly refers to the Waitress and Nikki Potnick as two different people, and if Glenn outright says it’s not Nikki Potnick, then this is the next most provable and logical guess. I really hope this gets upvotes and views, and hopefully shared with Glenn, Rob, Charlie, and/or Mary. I will likely continue to edit this theory based on any reasonable guesses, ideas, or evidence left in the comments. Please share this, please upvote this, and thank you sincerely for putting your time into reading this.