It’s a shame that there are still people who believe blindly that there is no humor or innovative formats on American television anymore. We live in an audiovisual moment in which ‘The rehearsals’, ‘How to with John Wilson’, ‘Documentary Now’, ‘The Eric Andre show’ or this ‘I think you should leave’ have coexisted: denying reality and the state of form of the current comedy is, simply, sample of closed-mindedness and not wanting to open up to formats that, more and more, close in on themselves and are coffee for the most coffee-loving. And the third season of the one created by Tim Robinson is very loaded.
The absurd of the unpredictable
The best thing about each sketch of ‘I think you should leave (with Tim Robinson)’ is that it has an absolutely unpredictable development, partly due to the mania of its protagonist for denying the public a final punch, a phrase or a moment that closes all the madness. It is not necessary: the sketches of the Netflix program are pure approach, a river that does not stop flowing, a descent into madness in which the least thing is that it ends satisfactorily. This program does not want to be the friend of a sleepy public: its oddity in both tone and form seeks an audience to play along with it. And luckily, it seems to exist.
It is a miracle that this series has had three seasons on a Netflix accustomed to cutting everything that does not give them immediate benefits. Tim Robinson is a cult comedian who has more to do with Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim than with Jerry Seinfeld: his sketches go beyond the attempt at cheap virality and focus on stretching out the initial idea as much as possible with twists and turns within twists. If you go in, you’ll probably end up with a tummy ache from laughing so much. If not, I am not going to deceive you: you are facing the biggest tedium of your life.
The brilliance of ‘I think you should leave’ comes from its apparent simplicity. Each sketch begins in a common place (a ‘Lifetime’ reality show, a party, a work meeting, ordering fast food) and gradually twists until it covers that common place of hysteria, abnormality and comedy, as if it were a mass that could not stop swallowing the routine and normality. Tim Robinson’s characters never want to appear normal: they are that part of our heads that says to us, “What if I do exactly what I know best not to do?” The result, brilliant.
The comedy formula
It is true that in this third season, to ‘I think you should leave’ you begin to see the seams. It’s not that it’s a real problem: in just six fifteen-minute episodes each one doesn’t give time to get tired or reflect, especially when we’re receiving constant stimuli. But the format of most skits, based on “A weird guy becomes obsessed with exactly one stupid thing and no one around him understands anything” It begins to be, a bit, the routine from which he intends to escape.
That does not mean, of course, so that each gag is measured to the millimeter, from the pig with the Nixon mask to the bachelor who signs up for a reality show to flirt on a zip line or the worst possible first date told in the most inappropriate place in the world. Robinson has timed the skits with precision and knows exactly how long they should be, where to cut them, and which one to put next. The result is a hilarious cocktail shaker that falls short of the heights of greatness. of its first two installments but it is still an oasis for lovers of different humor.
Even in his crudest and most obvious skits, Robinson always manages to subvert your expectations even with what you already expected as a fan. Not in vain The Lonely Island, one of the most important and influential comedy groups of the 21st century, are the executive producers of the program in a season where it is closer than ever to “hit or miss”, with glorious minutes (the door of security for dogs, the Jazz Singing Conductor) and others that never quite take off. It is irregular, yes, but it is still an essential piece to understand what some have come to call the posthumor.
Getting away from the shabby style (And that TikTok anticipated a decade before) of ‘Tim and Eric Awesome Show! Good Job!’ or the most elegant of ‘Key & Peele’, Tim Robinson throws himself into an absurd humor that can cause some rejection at first (depending on how used to unconventional comedy we are) but in the end it washes over you like a tide. It’s taken us two years to get more ‘I think you should leave’ and we may never get new episodes again, but it doesn’t matter: its mere existence in a streaming like Netflix is already a stroke of luck from which we all benefit and whose influence will be seen throughout the coming years. Time to time.
In Espinof | It only lasts 6 hours and is one of the best comedies of all time: a politically incorrect sitcom that brings out the most cynical and hilarious part of Monty Python.