The hilarious Patti Harrison appears in three sketches over two seasons and is constantly surprising in the way she twists banal lines into ecstatically weird shapes.
He stocks the show with guest players-Sam Richardson, Tim Heidecker, John Early, Kate Berlant-who share a similar sense of chaotic repartee. His consonants are crisp and his vowels are blatty. He seems to calibrate each line reading to its funniest possible sound he’ll shriek random words in an otherwise quiet sentence (“I didn’t DO this!”) or swallow his words in the back of his throat like a bullfrog. Would it be going too far to say that the show, in that sense, is a bit Shakespearean? All I know is that it’s as fun to repeat Robinson’s sui-generis expressions (“Sloppy steaks,” “triples of the Nova”) as it is to say “thou lily-liver’d boy” or “rump-fed ronyon.” As a performer, Robinson has, above all things, a good ear. At its most absurdist extremes, “I Think You Should Leave” seems to invent entirely new ways of speaking. Robinson and his castmates sometimes utter sentences that don’t quite make grammatical sense (“You sure about that’s not why?” “Where be your nutcracker?” “What the hell is that’s going on out there?”), and the broken syntax makes those lines extra fun to roll around inside one’s mouth. In Season 1, the Robinson character, derailing a baby-shower planning session, delivers the tongue twister “fifty black slicked-back hair wigs.” In Season 2, he says the phrase “Calico cut pants dot com,” a pleasing cacophony of hard “C” sounds, in a sketch about a Web site that helps men provide a cover story for when they accidentally pee a little bit on their pants. Robinson’s comedy gets stuck in your head, like pop hooks, because he makes a strange kind of music with language, bending it with his own idiosyncratic phrasing and goofy alliteration. “I Think You Should Leave” is the only show I know that is infectious in this way. Nothing lifts my serotonin faster, for example, than a Season 1 sketch in which the Robinson character crashes a hot-dog-shaped car into a clothing store and then, standing in the rubble wearing a hot-dog costume, declares, “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.”īut, more than that, I rewatch the show so that I can later repeat it for pleasure, like a teen-ager playing the same song over and over in her bedroom so that she can belt it in the car with her friends.
#Baby you should be here how to#
I must have seen them all fifty times at this point, in part because Robinson (a former “S.N.L.” cast member and one of the creators of the sweet and strange Comedy Central sitcom “Detroiters”) and his co-creator Zach Kanin (a former “S.N.L.” writer and New Yorker cartoonist) know how to craft an impeccable sight gag. Episodes clock in at only around fifteen minutes each-you can inhale both seasons in just over three hours-giving them a snacky, propulsive feel. The show, whose first season aired in 2019, invites, and even demands, re-watching, re-mixing, and rote memorization. But many devoted viewers of “I Think You Should Leave” communicate the same way. To the outside observer, the exchange would have been totally incomprehensible. I yelled back, “I DIDN’T FUCKING DO THIS!” (from a sketch about a cable show, called “Coffin Flop,” that captures corpses falling out of shoddy caskets). By way of greeting me, Josh said, “I’m worried that the baby thinks people can’t change!” (from a sketch in which a baby judges a man for his past life as an obnoxious frat bro). When we saw each other face to face, we kept the stream of gibberish going, this time out loud.
A little game developed between Josh and me: one of us would send an out-of-context quotation from a sketch, and the other would immediately type back a following line-“I hate bald boys!” “Every time I see them, I think I’m back in the pants”-or a totally different line from a different scene. It was the first time in a while that we had seen each other in person, but we’d been texting back and forth for weeks, ever since the second season of Tim Robinson’s zany sketch-comedy show “I Think You Should Leave” landed on Netflix, in early July. The other night, I ran into my old friend, the comedian and writer Josh Gondelman.
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