Somewhere in a King of Queens episode, between Doug raiding the fridge and Carrie rolling her eyes, a two-second musical sting fires off and nobody notices. Nobody, that is, except the one guy who paused the TV, grabbed a guitar, and went "wait, was that a tritone?" Reader, it was. The sitcom smuggled the devil's interval into a scene transition and thought we wouldn't catch it.
This clip is that lick, isolated and played on guitar: a bite-sized interlude built around the augmented fourth, the interval medieval monks literally called diabolus in musica. A few seconds of ear candy that's spicier than it has any right to be for background sitcom filler.
How the tritone lick works
A tritone is exactly what the name says: three whole tones stacked up, an augmented fourth (or its evil twin, the diminished fifth). Split an octave dead down the middle and that's where you land. That symmetry is the whole trick: the interval is so perfectly balanced that your ear can't tell which note is "home," so it just hangs there, unresolved and faintly menacing. That's why every horror soundtrack and half of Black Sabbath leans on it. This lick works because it dangles that tension and then nudges it somewhere, usually the tritone squeezing inward or outward by a half step into something consonant. Want the useful takeaway? Find any tritone on your fretboard, then resolve each note by a semitone in opposite directions. Congratulations, you've just played the guts of a dominant seventh, which is why this "spooky" interval is secretly the engine behind every jazz cadence ever written. If you want the theory behind the sound, start with what intervals actually are.
Honestly, discovering a diabolus in musica in a Kevin James sitcom is the most metal thing to happen to network television. Want the GuitarPro and PDF so you can annoy your own family with the devil's interval between commercial breaks? It's on my Patreon.