The male comedians are going through something. I know, I know, but this time I'm not referring to the obvious ones who have lost their minds through some excess of steroid abuse and podcast appearances. I'm talking about the more thoughtful class of male comedy: Nathan Fielder, John Mulaney, Jerrod Carmichael, Bo Burnham. These guys are savvier, smarter, and more tethered to reality, yet no less stuck in some sort of existential crisis that seems to be affecting all men.
Mulaney and Burnham have waded through this ordeal in their standup, the former engaging with his personal drug and opiate addiction and the latter exploring what the internet has done to the people of his generation. Carmichael has turned his whole life into reality show exhibition in a desperate bid to find any authenticity in front of a camera. Fielder has explored the breaking apart of social communication and the human condition in multiple shows, most effectively in his series with Benny Safdie, The Curse, and most recently in the second season of his HBO show, The Rehearsal.
But if there's one comedian who has most effectively tapped into the specific nihilistic angst that so many men below the age of 50 seem to be facing today, it might be Tim Robinson. Robinson has been lampooning a certain kind of disaffected, desperate, and totally awkward type of man for years on his Netflix sketch show I Think You Should Leave. More recently, Robinson and his writing partner, Zach Kanin, have gone prestige: first with the 2024 feature film Friendship, and now with the HBO series The Chair Company. With The Chair Company, which just finished its first season, Robinson and Kanin have made a definitive series about the eternal, online-fueled existential malaise and dread of the 21st century.
The Chair Company follows Ron Trosper (Robinson) and his family. Ron has the degrading fortune of being part of a company still trying to build malls in a country that has less and less use for them. When Ron's chair breaks during a presentation and sends him crashing down in front of an audience of people including his coworkers, the resulting embarrassment sends him into a tailspin. He becomes convinced that his faulty chair is the result of a wide-ranging corporate corruption scandal involving the chair's manufacturer.
The show uses the conventions of the '70s conspiracy thriller and psychological horror films to heighten the comedy of what is essentially the story of a man coping with the humiliation and shame of his circumstance in the most ridiculous way possible. Robinson's goofy expressions, silly line readings, and incredible commitment to the absurdity of his own ideas make Ron both endearing and a completely unserious character. He desperately wants respect and a life of more significance, and since he can't find it at home or at work he adopts the double life of a pathetic detective. And because he's a Tim Robinson character, he's totally oblivious to the fact that his newfound thrill, while totally absurd, is about finding fulfillment more than anything else. Though the show is impossible to predict in terms of plot developments, what remains consistent is how hapless Ron is at finding some deeper meaning and purpose in his life, much less in his investigation.
Ron finds the same appeal in his conspiracy that many cranks cherish: the ability to glamorize an ordinary life and chalk its shortcomings up to the work of an unseen, powerful force. Ron's only desire is to validate his own life, which hasn't gone the way he originally hoped. Part way through the season it's revealed that Ron quit his corporate job a few years ago to start a Jeep tours company in Columbus, Ohio, but had to return to his old gig after his company went bust.
This is a familiar theme in all of Robinson's work, that tension between chasing your wildest dreams, no matter how silly they are, and the reality of daily domestic life and survival. The millennials are a generation stuck in the middle—between the promises and excesses of 20th century America and the techno-dystopia being created right before our eyes. Most tellingly, Ron is doing better than most. He's got a house, a family, a job—but it's the malaise. The feeling of being stuck, whether in a boring town or in menial work, weighed down by responsibility and unable to feed that core that yearns for more. My favorite scene from Sunday's season finale is when Ron returns a missing dog back to his owner and wants so desperately to be recognized for something that he asks the guy to take his picture and post on Instagram that Ron saved his dog. Later, after the owner does this, Ron looks at the post gleefully, until he reads the comments and finds out the owner was abusing the dog and that she'd been freed on purpose by other people in the neighborhood. "OK, 2025 is officially a dumpster fire," reads one comment. There's nothing any of us can really do to escape the crushing banality of a life lived in the comments section.
There is something specific to what's going on with young men today that Robinson's show and comedy in general speaks to. It's the neediness of it all. Robinson's characters tend to be devoid of purpose and value in a world that increasingly needs less from them. Their crack-ups are set in motion by their inability to find fulfillment in a technological world that preys on insecurities and feeds them depression for every meal. It is a human impulse to wander and search for meaning. Robinson's characters show us how easy it is to get pinned down, not just by the demands of a capitalist system, but by the internet's ability to pick at our anxieties and feelings of inadequacy. If every day is just about going to work and then living our lives online, how is anyone supposed to function?
One of my favorite ITYSL sketches is the Darmine Doggy Door commercial, in which Robinson plays a pitchman for a doggy door company doing an infomercial that devolves into a screaming pile of madness and insanity. Robinson's character ends up telling a story about being terrified by a pig in a Richard Nixon mask planted in his home by his neighbor. He talks about how in the moments when he thought he was about to be eaten by a pig monster, his first thought was, "Great I don't have to go into work tomorrow." When he notes that this was his one thought, he crumples into existential anguish, asking out loud, "What the fuck is this world? What have they done to us? WHAT DID THEY DO TO US?!"
If there's a uniting theme to Robinson's work, it is that question, yelled very loudly.
Plenty of reviews of the The Chair Company have praised it for being the rare piece of Lynchian art that actually earns the designation. There is real artistic vision on display here, which is what allows Robinson to play around with themes that feel so universal to 21st century life without becoming didactic or inert. You can watch The Chair Company and think about all that ails millennials, but you can also just laugh at the bizarre twists and gaggle of strange characters, like the guy with a dent in his head who keeps dipping his elbow in a bowl of queso in order to antagonize Ron. Other than Nathan Fielder, there's nobody making TV that is this entertaining or more well-suited for the times.
