TIFF 2024 | Movie Review: "Friendship" Capitalizes on Tim Robinson's Brand of Cringe Comedy
10/12 ForReel Score | 4/5 Stars
One of the most basic rules in literary theory is the narrative principle of Chekhov’s gun. For those uninitiated, the rule is that if a gun is introduced in a story, it must go off by the final act. That’s been the basic pattern of Tim Robinson’s hit sketch series I Think You Should Leave, where he typically plays a walking embodiment of Chekhov’s gun. Whenever Robinson is in a sketch, you know something terrible will happen. What’s even worse, though, is that the longer Tim Robinson plays a normal character, the encroaching possibility of him going off the rails boils like a pressure cooker. Robinson’s entire style of comedy revolves around the inability to handle social cues, which creates an extremely potent dilution of cringe comedy.
Robinson stars as Craig Waterman, a sales executive who helps companies make their apps more addictive, who kindles a friendship with his cool new neighbor, Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd). Austin’s a weatherman, and Craig thinks that’s the coolest thing in the world. Austin and Craig immediately make an impression on each other, but, as with the rule of Chekhov’s Tim Robinson, Craig is bound to fuck things up eventually. The longer Craig appears to come across as a normal individual, the greater the feeling of impending doom.
It’s almost disturbing how well Robinson can torpedo a seemingly normal scenario and turn it into a situation that makes you want to retreat into yourself like a scared turtle. The magic, and maybe even the restraint, of I Think You Should Leave, is that it’s a sketch show. Sketches are no more than seven minutes long, and, when the cringe is over, it’s like taking a big breath after going underwater. You can’t escape Friendship once you’ve sat down, and the cringe is harder to stomach than some horror movies.
Andrew DeYoung’s feature film debut, Friendship, is the ultimate weaponization of Tim Robinson’s comedic sensibilities. It’s not like I Think You Should Leave where you get a break from the cringe after less than ten minutes; you’re stuck there for ninety minutes with no escape. I had never seen a comedy so challenging in my life, because the amount of cringe is too strong. At the Q&A, DeYoung said that the main hurdle of writing Friendship was that it’s virtually a jokeless comedy. The humor isn’t delivered through punchlines, it’s through behavior instead. It’s a form of comedy that’s based on the people in the scene not being on the same wavelength. Someone says “up” and Robinson says “down.” It’s almost like Robinson humiliates himself for your amusement, which makes watching him feel like a Herculean task. You almost want to leap into the film and slap some sense into him; he’s like watching a car crash in slow motion.
Robinson expertly takes the fall of being “that guy” so you can reflect and ensure you’re not “that guy” in a social situation. In a world where everyone wants to fit in, the last thing anyone wants to do is to be the one who stands out (negatively, at least). Nobody wants to be the guy who kills the vibe at the party, which is why Tim Robinson’s style of comedy works so well; it’s because you’ve seen it before.
You’ve seen someone embarrass themselves by acting erratic in public, you may have seen someone embarrass themselves in private. You may have even been “that guy” at one point; I know I have. Robinson’s comedy, and Friendship by extension, tap into a primal fear of being conspicuous, the odd one out. As social animals, it is genetically coded into our brains that we must be with other humans to survive. As laugh-out-loud funny as it is, the innate social horror of Friendship is the burgeoning fear of being considered an outcast.
Even if Friendship is laced with enough cringe to take down a rhino on steroids, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s unbelievably funny. If I were to boil it down to mathematics, I would put Friendship at a solid 2.2 LPM (laughs per minute). Applying that measurement to the film’s 97-minute runtime, it’s no exaggeration to say that I laughed so hard that my temples started to hurt.
Even if the pickings have been slim this year (aside from Sean Baker’s Anora), Friendship is certainly not a comedy to skip out on, if you dare. If you love Tim Robinson’s comedy, you’ll have a great time. If you don’t love his comedy, this will be an experience akin to pulling teeth. Honestly, it’s like pulling teeth either way, but I suppose some people (me) enjoy the pain of awkward social situations more than others.