Robinson benefits from many star cameos, including a superb scene in an airplane in which Will Forte, satirizing a certain horror trope, plays an ominous, vaguely threatening older man who terrorizes his seatmate. “Tim and Eric” DNA shows up in the squishy sound design, the rapid-fire editing and throwback graphics as well as some of the casting, which mixes actors with people who look as if they had stumbled off the subway.
But its comedic aesthetic owes much less to Lonely Island’s slick musical parodies than to the gonzo grotesqueries of “ Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job” (Tim Heidecker, half of the team behind that Adult Swim hit, stars in one of the more conventionally funny sketches in “I Think You Should Leave,” playing the world’s most insufferable charades player). The show is produced by the comedy troupe the Lonely Island (one of its members, Andy Samberg, stars in an episode). Instead they get angry and stubborn, digging in and completely ignoring the message in the title, “I Think You Should Leave.” This may sound like a parody of emotional snowflakes, but Robinson isn’t out to mock his characters (the show actually makes you sympathize with them) so much as to summon humor in just how frustrating small embarrassments can feel.
He specializes in men completely unable to roll with the punches. In his new show, he returns to the theme of minor jokes causing major wounds with sketches in which a magician’s banter and a whoopee cushion prove to be nearly existential. Robinson made this seem real and ridiculous, poignant and preposterous. But his most affecting character was a melancholy worker bee completely undone by a crank call from a colleague. He did a wonderful impression of the abrupt and operatic unraveling of a Sinatra-like charmer who turns into a sniveling, despairing depressive after a single lost bet.
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The roots of his breakout were planted two years ago when Netflix presented “The Characters,” a series of showcases for comedians, including 30 minutes of Robinson, who played fragile neurotics with anger issues. Turn the sound off and you can still tell that his sad sacks are doomed, from his variety of slumps, a perpetually furrowed brow and, often, a ludicrous fake mustache. He has an intensity suited for the macabre, but he tunes it to a comic frequency. (Has there been a better comic performance this year than Cate Blanchett’s sendup of Marina Abramovic?) The subject matter of “ I Think You Should Leave,” the first great sketch show released by Netflix, is less highbrow, but its wonderful weirdness has escapist pleasures you don’t see coming.Īs the show’s anchor, Robinson, who had a brief stint as a cast member on “Saturday Night Live,” is a sweetly vulnerable, baggy-eyed presence whose typical pivot moves from banal boredom to infinite exasperation. The excellent recent season of “Documentary Now!” spoofed the rarefied worlds of 1970s musical theater, jazz and performance art. In the last year, the best examples seem to be going even further in that direction, rejecting topicality and embracing the obscure and the absurd. But it’s also why the most successful alternatives in sketch comedy, like “Key and Peele” or “Inside Amy Schumer,” have typically drawn a sharp contrast to that format with a specific, idiosyncratic sensibility.
The resilient institution still feels like a weekly national event, one made by committee that aims at the most popular targets assisted by the biggest stars.
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If a certain kind of big-tent comedy (the network late-night talk show, the mass audience sitcom, the movie blockbuster) is in decline, the last of this endangered species will surely be “Saturday Night Live.”
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