The Delicious Awkwardness of 'I Think You Should Leave'

I dived back into the hilarious chaos of Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave as its third season went live a few weeks ago. Within days it was, naturally, at the top of Netflix’s rewatched content. I mean, as it should be. It’s painfully hilarious. I was in a bar a few days after it aired and the bartender put it on: instantly the entire bar had stopped talking to gather around and watch and scream with laughter—a phenomenon I’d only ever seen before in said bar with Jeopardy, if you replace the laughter with screaming out the answers.

With comedian Tim Robinson at the helm, I Think You Should Leave is a sketch show whose comedy thrives on the deep and hyperbolic awkwardness of exaggerated social faux pas. Paying it forward in a drive-thru line to try to get the guy behind you to buy you absurd amounts of fast food? Going on a dating reality show just for the zipline over the pool? It’s all delivered for riotous laughs in the strange and hellishly awkward limbo that is the world of the show. And it works spectacularly well.

Why is that? I know, I know, dissecting humor as if it has to have a cut-and-dried formula behind it is a losing game from the start. Sure you have your forms, genres, and conventions, but something’s either funny or it’s not. That said, I usually hate cringe humor with a passion: second-hand embarrassment on an absurd level or repeated laughter at the repeated expense of a vulnerable or well-meaning target, in the style of Big Bang Theory, just doesn’t do it for me. And to each their own, I guess. The Office and Parks and Recreation are old favorites, but those shows have much more of a feeling of earnestness about them that in my mind puts their humor in a different category. But that’s all to say I’m fascinated by how friggin incredibly funny I Think You Should Leave is to me.

I’ve spent an unusually large amount of time thinking about awkwardness on screen—some might say an awkwardly long time (I know, I’m hilarious. I’d go make a hit comedy show on Netflix but I’m busy right now). Specifically, I think about discomfort on screen—the kind of arthouse cinema that isn’t exactly easy to sit through. I’m thinking Joanna Hogg’s Archipelago: the marrow-deep awkward conversations that live rent-free in your brain as you inevitably skirt real-life awkwardness around unfortunate work parties and family reunions.

So it’s extra fascinating to watch I Think You Should Leave take social awkwardness to a high-octane level of satire. I mean I’d go as far as to say it’s baroque, if we’re getting real technical about it. I mean the show’s very first sketch of its very first season is prime: a highly-protocoled social set up, a job interview, gives way to the most egregious social flex of pulling a push door until Robinson is beet-red in the face and the interviewer is profoundly uncomfortable.

I know this analysis is a classic example of hold-on, let-me-over-think-this, but bear with me. Part of the reason I think Robinson’s humor is both cringe and reliably enjoyable is that he’s not making fun of the people inside the absurd world of his skits. It’s the social conventions themselves, spun to incredible and explosive heights of absurdity. In one tremendous and notable sketch, Steven Yeun is made the pariah of his own birthday party via the twisted group logic that escalated around gift giving and gift receipts. While Yeun’s character’s distress is the butt of the joke, the real punchline is the satirical heights to which everyone else rises to obey unspoken social strictures, leaving Yeun as the straight man into the weirdo.

It’s a very similar comedy of manners as Nathan Fielder’s impeccable Nathan For You, where it’s the manners—the lengths to which folks will go to stay in line or reach for some kind of social accountability for perceived infractions—are the final punchline.

Robinson’s execution of that model is something to behold, and you should. Run, don’t walk, to your Netflix homepage and watch it if you haven’t already. Or just watch it again. Nobody can stop you.

All three seasons of I Think You Should Leave are now streaming on Netflix.