9/12/2023 0 Comments I think you should leave“That’s the thing in Michigan,” Richardson explains. Robinson grew up in the Detroit suburbs of Clarkston and Waterford, Michigan, less than an hour from the Canadian border, and there’s something distinctly midwestern about his characters. He’s a huge hypochondriac,” says Richardson, Robinson’s best friend and a close colleague. They also describe him as painfully ill at ease. His friends describe him as deeply loyal with a powerful work ethic. Robinson, who is 40, lives in Los Angeles with two kids, two dogs, and his wife, Heather, an electrical engineer he started dating in high school. Photo: Jeff Minton Grooming by Simone / Exclusive Artists He is drawn to the types who he’s afraid may be him. He says that Kanin came up with the show’s name, inspired by the characters Robinson often plays: “We talked about how, when I did sketch comedy, there’s always a point where somebody says, ‘Look, I think you should leave.’ Because there’s always one person who’s a problem.” Robinson understands that one person intimately. He does not enjoy the task of pulling apart exactly what makes his work so funny. Robinson does not want to get into a detailed breakdown of how he came up with Hot Dog Guy, or any of the sketches, really. He is charming during our conversation, but he mentions more than once that he deals with anxiety, especially in a circumstance like this one, where he worries he might say the wrong thing. And yet, no one could be less interested in owning a huge political stage. With its second season arriving on Netflix July 6, I Think You Should Leave is poised to surge into cultural ubiquity, with Robinson as the face of a distinctive, defensive, and often embarrassing strain of American identity. “I cannot help but think of this sketch,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes said after the attempted insurrection on January 6, comparing the Hot Dog Guy to Ted Cruz. The most familiar image is one of Robinson dressed in a hot-dog suit, his arms spread wide, his expression a portrait of unconvincing persuasion, with the caption “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.” (In the show, the Hot Dog Guy has just crashed his hot-dog-shaped car into a store.) It became an unavoidable meme of the Trump era, used in response whenever Trump or other politicians uttered bald-faced lies to cover up their own actions. The show quickly became popular among sketch-comedy fans, but it was the eerie resonance between Robinson’s work and the political climate that boosted it into broader visibility. In the two years since I Think You Should Leave’s first season appeared on Netflix, Robinson’s face and clips from the series have proliferated on the internet. “He doesn’t want to be a loser, and yet he allows himself, he allows those characters to go through the gauntlet of emotions of trying to get to the other side of that. “That Schadenfreude that you experience is almost a little too much because you want Tim to be okay,” says comedian Keegan-Michael Key, who has known Robinson since the early aughts. Those characters have often been portrayed by guest actors like Sam Richardson, Vanessa Bayer, and the late Fred Willard, but they’re just as often played by Robinson himself. Its spectrum of moods is small and well defined, but within that, there’s a universe full of people who do not know, or simply do not care to know, when they should stop. Although the show’s sketches can fly to absurdist, surrealist heights, its bread and butter are everyday social settings ruled by widely understood norms - corporate offices, casual parties with friends, baby showers, funerals - and the defensive jerks, idiots, iconoclasts, and well-intentioned dinguses who cannot stop themselves from making things weird. His most indelible characters on I Think You Should Leave, which he created with his writing partner, Zach Kanin, are those who barge into scenes, double down on their own disruption, and lean heavily on toilet material. Robinson’s work is a shrine to the glories of interruption. He looks thrilled at the prospect of hanging out with my kid rather than grimly staring down the barrel of questions like “So how do you define your comedic sensibility?” She demands to show Robinson a stuffed animal. He was polite and tense when I introduced myself when he sees my daughter, a huge grin spreads across his face. Six minutes into my conversation with comedian Tim Robinson, creator, writer, and performer of the Netflix sketch show I Think You Should Leave, my 4-year-old charges into my office and bellows, “I need to go potty!” I’d been trying to seem relaxed, having been thoroughly warned - by a publicist, by other journalists, by his own colleagues - that Robinson does not enjoy press, and has a history of “sinking into nothing” during interviews.
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