And even when Tim plays people that are really frustrating, and passionate about all the wrong things, you somehow can still get behind him.” “It’s a show that’s grounded in the human experience. We’ve all responded to public humiliation with sheer, stupid self-defeating rage: What is Twitter, after all, but the hot-dog-shaped car we willingly climb into every day? “There’s a lot of doubling down going on in a widespread way,” notes codirector Alice Mathias. And there was an open space in the sketch world for something to really explode.”īut another reason for the breakthrough success of I Think You Should Leave, which has lately received year-end accolades and awards recognition, might just be Robinson’s #ItMe relatability. “What I Think You Should Leave does is ‘A to B to F.’ It’s a little off, but it’s not weird for the sake of being weird. “Everybody thinks the format of a sketch is ‘A to B to C,’” says Veep’s Sam Richardson, a longtime friend and collaborator. Like many of the segments on I Think You Should Leave, it’s the sort of clip you show to everyone you know, partly as an excuse to watch it again. Instead, it’s the most delightfully stupid four minutes of TV you’ll see all year. The “Chunky” sketch could have been yet another snoozy game-show parody. “Everybody thinks the format of a sketch is ‘A to B to C.’ What I Think You Should Leave does is ‘A to B to F.’ It’s a little off, but it’s not weird for the sake of being weird.” -Sam Richardson Then there’s Chunky, a large, lumbering game-show mascot who’s unsure of what to do with himself on stage, and reacts by breaking things and mauling a contestant (you can occasionally hear Chunky voicing his muffled frustrations from beneath a fuzzy red costume-a detail partly inspired, Robinson says, by his encounter with the Easter Bunny). Then again, it’s been years since we’ve had sketch characters as absurd and surprising as the ones found on I Think You Should Leave, like the guy who crashes his hot-dog-shaped car through a storefront window, and then angrily tries to deflect blame, all the while dressed in a hot dog costume. It’s been a while since an upstart comedy show earned this much pop-cultural momentum-the kind that inspires fans to create avatars and action figures, and prompts critics to rank every individual sketch. Halfway through our breakfast, Robinson excitedly shows me I Think You Should League Pass, an all-NBA account he’d just learned about that morning (and which has since grown to more than 20,000 followers). There are entire Twitter feeds that insert I Think You Should Leave into the worlds of, say, modern emo, or wrestling, or the Toronto Maple Leafs. Even if you’ve never watched Robinson’s show, you’ve seen his apoplectic creations-their eyes bulging with rage, or squinting in disbelief-being GIF’d, screenshotted, and memed online, where they’ve become stand-ins for our own perpetual exasperation. The response is in no small part due to Robinson’s performance-the more he contorts his blank-slate face to match his characters’ plight, the deeper and weirder the sketches become. Yet no comedy this year has embedded itself as deeply within viewers’ imaginations, not to mention their social feeds, as I Think You Should Leave, a show beloved by everyone from Conan O’Brien to Lin-Manuel Miranda to vocal mega- fan Wale (“funniest shyt ever”). I Think You Should Leave premiered on Netflix this spring, in the form of six brisk episodes, around 15 minutes each it was possible to watch the entire first season in roughly the same amount of time it takes to view a single episode of SNL. “People say in their brain, ‘If I keep talking, or keep doing this, maybe this goes away.’ And it never does. “Which is so true in life,” Robinson says. In the series’ very first sketch, a nice-enough fella tries to exit a job interview by pulling a door clearly meant to be pushed instead of admitting his mistake, he just keeps on stubbornly pulling anyway, splintering the door and the frame, and making the veins in his forehead pop out. But unlike that Easter Bunny, Robinson’s characters usually react by doubling down, or even tripling down, on their own bad instincts. On his endlessly loopable hit sketch series I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson, he often plays hapless schmoes who get stuck in unwinnable situations. Robinson tells me this story over breakfast one October morning in Burbank, California, and as he imitates the escalating desperation in the Easter Bunny’s voice- I’m just trying to go to my car-it’s hard not to imagine it’s actually Robinson trapped within the suit, searching in vain for a dignified escape. Check out The Ringer’s look back at the best and most notable of 2019
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