In the new season of the sketch comedy series “I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson,” Robinson plays a driver’s ed teacher showing his students instructional videos. He puts one on in which a hysterical woman poses a danger to other drivers by averting her eyes from the road to complain about the dirty folding tables she happens to have in her trunk. “What was her job?” a student asks after the video wraps. Robinson pauses for a moment before incredulously replying, “Tables.”
Her job is tables, duh! Tables, the very real job that a room of teenagers should consider commonplace enough to treat as a footnote rather than the most perplexing element of the video. Robinson sticks his neck out — in the literal sense, as a turtle-like head nod punctuates his delivery of the word, but also by riskily framing an entire sketch around the spectacle of an increasingly frustrated man insisting that tables is “just a generic job that the writers of this [video] made up for this.”
You know, tables.
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The woman in the video is played by Patti Harrison, a comedian fluent in absurdity whose portrayal of the irate driver fits right in with the cast of characters present throughout the Netflix series (which Robinson created with his writing partner, Zach Kanin, a fellow “Saturday Night Live” alum). These people are ridiculous and, in many cases, delightfully rude. They don’t know when to stop, whether it’s Robinson stubbornly eating (and then choking on) a hot dog hidden in his sleeve during a work meeting, or Sam Richardson forcing the boss at a company dinner to judge a “Little Buff Boys” pageant for muscular kids. Children are treated as adults in this world, and adults give into the impulses of their inner children. Everything is perfectly dumb, silly and sometimes even a little dark.
Robinson, a master of committing to the bit, oscillates between playing the straight man and causing the mayhem himself. In a standout sketch from the first season, he leads a car focus group where an older man (played by Ruben Rabasa) wreaks havoc on the session by repeatedly suggesting “a great steering wheel that doesn’t whiff out of the window while I’m driving.” In a sketch often memed to point out hypocrisy in American politics, Robinson drives a hot dog car into a store and, while sporting a hot dog costume, tells a police officer that “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this.”
Those two sketches set the bar mighty high for a second season, which premiered Tuesday and features a new set of jokes that could (and probably will) make the jump to Twitter memes as well. Robinson has a knack for identifying awkward dynamics in everyday interactions and blowing them up to ludicrous proportions. Office tensions flare, for instance, when his character berates a co-worker who questions his decision to spend all his business trip meal stipends on expensive, intricately patterned shirts instead. (Robinson’s character speaks while lying down, weak from having skipped several meals.)
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This is what the driver’s ed sketch does so well; it takes the simple premise of an instructor frustrated with his students — in this case, because they keep defying his order to not ask about the woman’s job — and sprints with it. The discomfort builds with each video he plays for the students, as Harrison’s character continues to scream and cry about her filthy folding tables before crashing her car.
Share this articleShare“What is her job?” the student asks again.
“TABLES!” Robinson yells back, leaning over as he sticks out his neck, his hands perched on his hips. “Do you want me to turn the lights off? Everybody puts their heads down? Nobody gets their license, [so] you gotta walk everywhere? You gotta walk to the food store, you gotta walk to the house?”
In the final video, Harrison drives up to a man who taunts her about the “problem with her tables.” She swears at him, and he exclaims that she doesn’t know how to treat her customers: “If you’re gonna keep renting tables to comic-cons and horror-cons, you better learn how to treat the talent,” he says.
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Finally, the students receive clarity on the woman’s job. But in true “I Think You Should Leave” fashion, the sketch doesn’t stop there. After ordering the teenagers to shut up, Robinson asks whether they have any questions. One of them begins to crack up.
“Don’t laugh!” Robinson screams. It’s a tall order.
I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson (six episodes) is now streaming on Netflix.
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