A little Tim Robinson goes a long way, as even Tim Robinson fans will admit. The comedian’s signature material involves banality jumping the tracks: conference rooms, traffic jams, and small talk that hurtle into scenes of rage and slapstick, often because a lone character (often played by Robinson) is in the grip of some obscure, tenacious conviction that mystifies those around him. There is usually a lot of yelling. Robinson brought this mode to a wide audience with his breakthrough Netflix series, “I Think You Should Leave,” in 2019, but he’d been perfecting it for some time. Take a skit from 2013, during his early-career stint at “Saturday Night Live,” in which he stars as Dave Tesh, the hapless (fictional) brother of John Tesh, played by Jason Sudeikis. The brothers arrive at NBC’s headquarters to demo a new N.B.A. theme song—“Roundball Rock,” the network’s actual John Tesh track. Here, though, it is accompanied by Dave’s lyrics and vocals, which Robinson delivers with a high-volume gusto that’s almost indistinguishable from fury. “BUH BUH BUH BUH BUH BASKETBALL,” he sings. “GIMME GIMME GIMME THE BALL BECAUSE I’M GONNA DUNK IT!” Their opus rejected, the Teshes use small hammers to smash up the office, while stricken NBC executives look on.
I love this sketch—I’m weeping a little now, having just rewatched it—but this is not necessarily a register you want to inhabit for an extended period of time. Recently, though, viewers have had the opportunity to experience Robinson in long form with “The Chair Company,” an HBO series he co-created with his writing partner Zach Kanin, who’s a regular contributor to this magazine. The show follows a man named Ron Trosper (Robinson) in the wake of a devastating humiliation. Ron is a manager at a company that builds shopping malls, and he has been placed in charge of its newest development, in Canton, Ohio. (Malls have “changed a lot in the last few years,” he explains to one doubter. “They’re just more naturalistic now and less intrusive than what you used to think of when you thought of a mall.”) After delivering a kickoff speech for the Canton Marketplace at Bear Run, Ron attempts to take his seat onstage in a black swivel office chair, only to have the chair collapse beneath him. Ron is left a turtle on his back, helpless, before his colleagues. Who to blame? The chair company.
“I BLASTED THROUGH A FUCKING CHAIR AT WORK YESTERDAY IN FRONT OF ALL MY BOSSES AND MY EMPLOYEES,” Ron tells a customer-service representative whom he manages to get on the phone. “Now could you please get me in contact with the people who make the actual chair so they can apologize to me and they can announce a MASSIVE RECALL RIGHT NOW.” Ron’s pursuit of justice begins with furious scrolling through impenetrable corporate websites, but things grow more serious when a small-time tough menaces Ron with a pipe and demands that he “stop looking into the chair company.” By the show’s fourth episode, Ron is convinced that he is uncovering “a vast criminal conspiracy.” It seems possible that Ron is having a manic break.
In this outline, “The Chair Company” could be a sketch premise: “guy loses it after embarrassing himself at a big meeting.” This was the problem that bedevilled “Friendship,” an A24 movie starring Robinson, released earlier this year, whose premise is “guy loses it after a neighbor rejects him socially.” It’s harder than it looks to conjure the subtle glimmer of surreality Robinson’s sensibility requires. Perhaps the fatal error of “Friendship,” which was written not by Robinson and Kanin but by the director Andrew DeYoung, was to offer an onscreen world in which Tim Robinson was Tim Robinson and everyone else was more or less a straight man.
The world of “The Chair Company,” by contrast, is full of characters who possess their own sparks of Robinsonian madness, their own humiliations and self-defeating obsessions. There is the older colleague who was passed over for Ron’s job, played by the veteran “S.N.L.” writer Jim Downey: following his non-promotion, he makes it his business to enliven the workplace—first by blowing bubbles with a wand he wears around his neck, then by throwing a party at which he urges his co-workers to “make mistakes” with one another. There is the janitor who catches Ron taking pictures of the broken chair’s wreckage: “Were you taking pictures of my wheelbarrow?” he demands. “Are you the guy that’s been saying I’m not allowed to have a wheelbarrow in the office? Why would anybody care? It never goes outside. It’s an inside wheelbarrow. I could understand it if it’s an outdoor wheelbarrow—that’s dangerous. That’s disgusting. But it’s not.” (Ron later catches the janitor outside with the wheelbarrow.)
Nathan Fielder, another comic master of interpersonal discomfort, has also moved lately to translate his sensibility to a grander scale. “The Rehearsal” represented a new degree of ambition, expanding the queasy pranks of “Nathan for You” into a social experiment that had become, by its second season, a psychological excavation of its creator and his work. But, where Fielder’s efforts at expansion went deeper, Robinson has chosen to go wider—rather than plumbing the internal lives of his trademark weirdos, he imagines a world teeming with them.
“The Chair Company” is not a workplace comedy, exactly. It’s not interested in satirizing office life or in developing the kind of quotidian camaraderie that makes unlikely pals out of a group of colleagues. Here the workplace is just a framework, a zone of clear-cut expectations and rules, where idiosyncrasies are only barely held in check. The thinnest film of propriety is all that keeps us from appalling one another. “I just got in a lot of trouble,” a county clerk tells Ron, who has come seeking property records related to the chair company. Ron briefly panics. He has just identified himself with a fake name, and thinks she must be onto him. But no: “I gotta go home and take a shower,” the clerk tells Ron. “People can smell me or whatever.” Office encounters ground the show’s excursions into other genres—the flights of quasi-Lynchian horror, the ratcheting suspense of a crime drama.
Of course, it’s also possible to see another kind of story lurking within “The Chair Company.” Because Robinson’s comedy tends to center on shouty and socially maladroit men, there’s a temptation to read it as being “about” masculinity—men’s anger, men’s loneliness, men’s failures. Ron’s mall job, we learn, is the steady paycheck he has accepted after the failure of an entrepreneurial dream: starting “an adventure-and-Jeep-tours company in suburban Ohio,” in the words of one unimpressed mall colleague. His wife, meanwhile, is in the midst of launching a promising breast-pump startup. “I admire that,” Ron’s daughter tells him. “How you’re able to take a back seat to mom and support her right now.” At work, Ron becomes the subject of a sexual-harassment investigation, because he saw up a co-worker’s skirt when the chair collapsed; inevitably, his efforts to exculpate himself misfire. You can just discern the outline here of a men-in-crisis saga, with Ron’s onstage chair fiasco as the final blow of his emasculation, and his subsequent adventures an effort to reclaim some scrap of manful self-respect.
Robinson and Kanin have sharp instincts for male absurdity. One minor plotline has a retired Cleveland Brown weeping during a TV interview because Canton’s newest mall will not feature football, despite the fact that Canton, home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, “is football.” As the former player’s face crumples like a toddler’s, it’s impossible to tell whether we’re watching satire or entirely plausible culture-war fodder. Such antics are presented in a way that’s refreshingly devoid of commentary. Ron’s mortification is real; it is also ridiculous; these things are in no way mutually exclusive. In the show’s tapestry of human indignity and grievance, his saga is just one thread among many. It’s an unexpectedly expansive, even heartwarming, vision of cringe comedy. ♦
