The other night, I ran into my old friend, the comedian and writer Josh Gondelman. 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. 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. The point was to keep the volley going. When we saw each other face to face, we kept the stream of gibberish going, this time out loud. 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). 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).
To the outside observer, the exchange would have been totally incomprehensible. But many devoted viewers of “I Think You Should Leave” communicate the same way. The show, whose first season aired in 2019, invites, and even demands, re-watching, re-mixing, and rote memorization. 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. 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. 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.”
But, 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. “I Think You Should Leave” is the only show I know that is infectious in this way. 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. 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 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. At its most absurdist extremes, “I Think You Should Leave” seems to invent entirely new ways of speaking.
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. 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. His consonants are crisp and his vowels are blatty. He stocks the show with guest players—Sam Richardson, Tim Heidecker, John Early, Kate Berlant—who share a similar sense of chaotic repartee. 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. (The histrionic way she says “these tables are how I buy my house!,” in a sketch about a confusing driver’s-ed instructional video, is particularly inspired.) “I Think You Should Leave” doesn’t have an official recurring cast, but it is slowly assembling a troupe of the best brains in alternative comedy, a motley band of thespians with a shared commitment to deranged, fantastical wordplay.
Most Robinson sketches have two lives: the first when they air as part of the Netflix series, and the second when they blossom, afterward, on the Internet. Much has been made of the “I Think You Should Leave” to meme pipeline (there is even a dedicated “I Think You Should Meme” generator now), and of the show’s ability to capture the ridiculous and often unhinged mood of modern life. The hot-dog sketch went viral during the Trump era, the writer Kath Barbadoro argued, because “Robinson’s character cycles through the greatest hits of a desperate person avoiding accountability.” This may well be true—Robinson’s bits feel timely insofar as they are about stubborn blowhards barrelling past the boundaries of reasonable behavior. But “I Think You Should Leave” sketches are not political comedy by any stretch, and it’s not topical humor that has turned them into a beloved lingua franca online. On the contrary, it is often when the show makes the least sense that it goes the most viral.
Perhaps the biggest hit of the current season, for instance, is a sketch in which a man, played by Robinson, lies on a couch in a business meeting because he is too weak to sit up. He hasn’t eaten in days, we learn, because he spent his per diem for a work trip at “Dan Flashes,” a store that sells shirts—the more complex the patterns, the pricier the shirts. “Everything in the store, I would wear,” the man says, splayed out like a wet noodle. Almost immediately after the second season was released, the Dan Flashes memes started to circulate. People found ornate shirts in the wild and posted them on Twitter; they joked in droves about a bold print that LeBron James wore to the N.B.A. Finals. The official account for the Minnesota Timberwolves posted shots of players in loud outfits with the caption “Dan Flashes got a new shirt in today that’s $450. BECAUSE THE PATTERN’S SO COMPLICATED.”
As with any cult hit, getting the joke is a form of social currency, a winking acknowledgment among fellow-fanatics. But the obsessive riffing on “I Think You Should Leave” feels less like a passing Internet craze than like a summer-camp ritual, convivial and intense and free. Each quote is an offering, a secret language forged out of aggressively inane comedy. As one of Robinson’s characters says in Season 2, in a sketch about a pompous Santa Claus promoting his role in an ultra-violent action film, “It almost moves to the beat of jazz.”
