Male Loneliness: Friendship (Andrew DeYoung, 2024)

Hello, my friends. I am here to alleviate your loneliness with my words, but first, book announcements:

My non-fiction book DILF: Did I Leave Feminism is available for pre-order anywhere you buy books. If you've already pre-ordered it, you should know that, due to some problems at the printer's, it won't hit bookstores until October 21. I'll still be in NYC on October 14 for a conversation with Heather Hogan, and we'll have books on sale at the site. Get tickets and learn more here.

Meanwhile: Be Not Afraid #3, the third issue of my horror comic series with Lisandro Estherren, is on stands now. Issue #4 will be on sale October 1. 

One of the worst feelings I ever had, as a child, came while watching a Robin Williams routine about suicide. Like most kids born in the 1980s, I had a profound obsession with Robin Williams. He was the Genie in Aladdin, he was Peter Pan in Hook, he was my best friend and/or secret biological father in about half my fantasies. 

He was also Mork, in Mork and Mindy, the old sitcom that Nickelodeon used to run every afternoon at the height of Genie Fever. It starred Williams as a childlike and benevolent alien newly arrived on Earth, who was always making mistakes because he didn’t understand our Earth ways. It wasn’t a challenging show, and most episodes fit pretty comfortably into a third-grader’s TV diet. Then, there was the suicide episode. 

A man came to Mork — under the impression that he was a priest, I think — and said that he was thinking of killing himself. Mork, being a helpful alien who did not understand that suicide was bad, listed a whole lot of methods that he might consider. What happens next, I will never be able to tell you, because I panicked. I plugged my ears; I hid behind the couch; when none of that worked, I physically fled the room. 

I’m sure the monologue was supposed to be funny: It ran on and on, in the way the monologues always did when they decided to let Robin Williams improvise. He gesticulated and did voices. The suicide method I remember most clearly involved sticking your head into a church bell. But I was eight. All I knew was that lovable alien Mork was about to kill somebody. This other man was so sad, he was so sad he might die of his own sadness, and Mork couldn’t understand, so he was making the man believe that no-one cared about him. He going to be the reason someone died in pain. 

That was my first experience of “cringe comedy:” The experience of watching someone who doesn’t know better violate the social contract in all sorts of painful and consequential ways, while we, the audience, laugh at them for their stupidity. I found it physically painful and distressing as a child, and as an adult, I still have trouble with it. Call me sanctimonious or oversensitive, if you like, but I’m not sure we should be laughing at people for things they can’t help doing, and there are plenty of people who — for very real developmental and/or neurological reasons — can’t help not fitting in. 

I have watched a thousand horror movies, in my life, and I have not really blinked at most of them. I still have to leave the room and concentrate on deep breathing whenever my husband watches I Think You Should Leave. The sketches on ITYSL all follow roughly the same outline: 

1) A character — usually, though not always, played by the comedian Tim Robinson — unwittingly violates social convention. 

2) All the other characters mock and shun him.  

3) The character — again, usually Tim Robinson — becomes belligerently angry, or even violent, in response to being laughed at, thus 

4) Confirming that he is an asshole, and that the other characters were right to mock and shun him. 

Where softer cringe comedies like Freaks and Geeks or (the American version of) The Office humanize their idiots, in an I Think You Should Leave sketch, the person who is being laughed at is always a terrible person who deserves everything they get. This does not necessarily negate the impression that there is something neurologically or developmentally off. I’m not a total philistine, and I get why the sketches are funny — Patti Harrison as an adult woman who slowly reveals her belief in Santa Claus always gets me — but something like “Brian’s Hat,” where the joke is just that a dorky, self-conscious guy finds out all his coworkers are laughing at him behind his back, is just agonizing.

Friendship is a feature-length I Think You Should Leave skit, with the same beats, but I actually enjoyed watching it. This may or may not be a mark in its favor, depending on your tastes. What makes it work for me, I think, is its acknowledgment of the underlying tragedy — whereas I Think You Should Leave thinks the archetypal Tim Robinson Character is funny, Friendship acknowledges that being that guy is very, very sad.