[5] Rafferty's lyrics are a dismissive tale of a music industry cocktail party (the clowns and jokers would be all the music executives and hangers on), written and performed as a parody of Bob Dylan's style; the vocal impression, subject, and styling were so similar, listeners have wrongly attributed the song to Dylan since its release.

Their performance is intercut with shots of Egan, miming to a vocal track by Rafferty (who had by then left the band), at a small banquet table with a number of garishly dressed and made-up supper guests.

These include an actual clown, a bespectacled bowler-hatted gent devouring spaghetti and a lavishly dressed woman eating cream cakes and grapes.

The clown, who has difficulty eating a plastic chicken, continually squeezes Egan out whenever he tries to take food from the table.

[31][32] The song is used in Quentin Tarantino's 1992 debut film Reservoir Dogs, during the scene in which the character Mr. Blonde (played by Michael Madsen) taunts and tortures bound policeman Marvin Nash (Kirk Baltz) while singing and dancing to the song.

[33] In an interview with Rolling Stone, Tarantino recalled:[34] That was one of those things where I thought [the song] would work really well, and [during] auditions, I told the actors that I wanted them to do the torture scene, and I'm gonna use "Stuck in the Middle with You", but they could pick anything they wanted, they didn't have to use that song.

The first time somebody actually did the torture scene to that song, the guy didn't even have a great audition, but it was like watching the movie.