![]() ![]() I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, but you have to honk if you’re horny first.The first season of I Think You Should Leave was released in April 2019, but Netflix posted the sketch on YouTube in October of 2020. Why ask strangers to Honk If You’re Horny if you don’t want to admit you’ve got magazines in the trunk? Why invite humiliation and discovery after you’ve already put a suit on, why seek out collapse in order to withhold yourself from it? The same reason Christ asks for the cup to pass from him, yet for his own will not to be done – in the hopes that someone else will grant you humiliation, abasement, revelation, need and relief by acknowledging theirs first. The relief of slippin’, walkin’, blarin’, flarin’, hangin’ is bookended by pressing and a belt pulled taut. But he’s already finished the magazine, and the bumper sticker is still on the car even the twice-pressed-and-ironed jeans are already slipping up. Robinson’s newly-reassured performance, of course, comes from the belief that O’Malley has been sufficiently pacified. He claps a hand to his face, delivered and mollified he hugs the magazine to his chest. Not jerking off, just flipping – turning page after page in recognition and triumph: There you are. Robinson leaves to sing a Katy Perry pastiche called “Friday Night,” which is interspersed with shots of O’Malley, back in his car, a scarecrow returned to its post, flipping through a swimsuit catalog with deep, visible satisfaction. “I’ve seen a lot of these,” O’Malley snaps, because the same cure never works twice. “OHHH-HOOO-HOOOOH, WHAT DO WE HAVE HERE,” O’Malley crows. O’Malley, not fair, goads Robinson into a shoving match, during which the latch to Robinson’s trunk is accidentally triggered, and Robinson’s car-body (small, compact, tight, parked) falls open – the cavity reveals them to be the same, that O’Malley’s instincts were right, that he does have magazines and calendars and something, that all along he knew exactly what O’Malley needed but didn’t want him to have it. Most of the sketches in I Think You Should Leave focus on a single unreasonable person - the little old guy in the focus-testing group who wants a too-small car, Vanessa Bayer with the Sunday brunch bunch, Kate Berlant at the Garfield-house intervention, the hot-dog suit guy at Brooks Brothers, Tim Heidecker at his girlfriend’s game night - slowly drawing everyone around them into a shared sense of hallucination/delusion/despair/cruelty, riff after riff on Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”: first it isn’t fair, then it isn’t fair, then they’re upon you. What O’Malley knows, and insists upon, is an acknowledgement of sameness. Robinson, huge, besuited, slow-moving, embarrassed, unhelpful, at a remove O’Malley collapsed, demanding, capering, jabbering, gibbering, incoherent, a walking wound. The art of masculine withholding is designed to collapse the collapse is the point. “I thought that you worked for a service or a company that helped out guys that are so horny that their stomachs hurt! ‘Cause that’s what I am!” ![]() ![]() “I don’t know! Do you have a solution, like some magazines, or a calendar, or something?” He covers his face and lopes back in shame, he tilts his head up like a dog in appeal and shudders forward. He scuttles from tomb to tomb, shoulders hunched up around his ears, swinging his arms like bell-ringers. “Oh, shit! Shit,” O’Malley growls, leaping out of the car and hobbling away. Robinson, suited, power-walks among the tombstones with a shushing finger held over his lips. He goes to a funeral O’Malley pulls up shortly after in the busted truck, unshaven, unwashed, unslept, honking. Robinson, of course, cannot sleep there is no peace for one without the other in the contract of mutually-assured horniness. Something about the way his shirt folds oddly against the crease of the shoulder suggests inflation, padding, artifice. O’Malley’s body is stunning in this sketch he moves like his flannel shirt has been stuffed with straw. “Auuugh,” he screams, mouth huge with teeth, “That’s me !” He points to himself, jabbing a finger into his own chest. He sees the bumper sticker and his mouth drops softly open – he’s struck quiet by it, briefly gentled, awash in hope and recognition. The man stuck in traffic behind him (Conner O’Malley) is driving a huge, busted SUV with rust damage all over the hood his car-body is broken and weather-beaten and bigger than it needs to be. He has, by virtue of the “HONK IF YOU’RE HORNY” bumper sticker on the back of his car he’s nearly forgotten about, signaled something about his kinship with and responsibility towards other men. The “Honk if You’re Horny” segment of I Think You Should Leave is slightly unusual in that Tim Robinson’s character is not the unreasonableness-driving engine that propels the sketch forward. ![]()
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