Which sketch from I Think You Should Leave should you show to your normal friends?

There's something eldritch and invasive about I Think You Should Leave. Wilfully obtuse content relayed to an audience sure of its power and meaning, mantras that permanently alter brain function and strip sanity from eager ears. It's a cult, more or less; a community drawn together by slavish collective knowledge of the sacred texts. I don't know what any of this is. Has this ever happened to you? I don't want to be around anymore. Shut the fuck up, Doug.

You can't run a cult forever on old blood, though, and being an ITYSL fan compels a person to pass on the gift to others, like COVID, or the video tape from The Ring. More people need to watch the show so that I can talk about the show and reflexively quote from it a dozen times a day. More people should experience the magic.

Tim Robinson must feed.

It's a delicate process. You have to assume a normal person, brain not remotely cooked by Gen Z memes and years of being terminally online, is going to be immediately repelled by much of the show. ITYSL is abrasive and cryptic on purpose, with many skits evolving into mad screaming and absurd imagery. Naked bodies bursting out of coffins, the logistics of table hire, motorcycle aliens. Most people are surprisingly resistant to being told they have to sit down and watch an entire episode of a show about what their paralysis demon does in its time off. At best, you're going to get one brief chance to show this person exactly one sketch.

Ideally, they find something intriguing and want to watch more. Even more ideally, a deep and unshakeable existential dread gnaws a hole in their skull, and they resent you for introducing parasitic thoughts into their ecosystem. You find them, years later, standing at the edge of the woods; they rush at you with a knife. "I think you should leave," they say, as the knife slides past your ribs. There is no emotion in their voice or on their face.

Which sketch, though? To make this as scientific as possible, I asked several fans of the show what they would choose. Everyone took this incredibly seriously, even going so far as to ask what my motivations were and about the desired results.

Any of these fuckers

All research participants agreed that the key was not to introduce anyone to the full ITSYL cocktail of madness right from moment one. Like an eclipse, Tim Robinson can cause you to go blind if you look directly at him without protection. A rookie should not be presented with the bit about a guy who wants to know if any ghosts ever pop out of the walls and do a big cumshot, and then has to sadly go home with his mum because he didn't make any friends. A layman is not going to be able to truly identify with the comedy of a man who questions the very logic of society after seeing a pig wearing a Richard Nixon mask.

The previous example is a sketch about an electronic doggy door. If you can't accept that, you're not ready to hear why Dan Flashes shirts are expensive because of the patterns, or that the shirt is more expensive when the patterns overlap.

It's tempting to consider the Hot Dog Car sketch as the perfect entry point. In this scene, a car shaped like a hot dog has hit a high-end clothing store. Everyone is trying to find the guy who did this. The guy who did this is the man wearing a hot dog costume. Funny joke, everyone laughs. It was him the whole time! A different sketch comedy show could easily stop there, with a complete joke on screen. This, however, continues toward a rambling diatribe about judging people too quickly, discusses who is responsible for smacking the bare bottom of a criminal to teach them a lesson, has the hot dog man steal a lot of shirts, and returns to requests for people to spank his buttocks and balls.

55 Burgers is another top contender, with a core joke that is easy enough to understand on the surface: what if a guy tricked a stranger into paying for his food at a fast food drive-thru. The Robinsonisms careen into view soon enough. What if he actually ordered $700 worth of food. What if he screamed at a woman to get out of his way because he was "doing something".

Turbo Time was high on the suggestion list, because we all know what it's like to have a couple of guys come to fix a termite infestation and they replace your toilet with a joke toilet that's just for farts. Coffin Flop could work, as there's no sane person who doesn't find it funny when 20-30 naked corpses fall out the bottom of cheap wooden coffins. I Used to be a Piece of Shit connects with anyone who used to be a piece of shit (slicked back hair, white pants, white couch); then it goes all Sloppy Steaks at the end, which is either a great introduction to the unhinged heel-turns of ITYSL or a fever-dream nightmare from which the viewer will never truly recover.

What about the Tables, you might say. STOP ASKING ABOUT THE TABLES.

Baby of the Year is a fire hose of jokes about how much a baby sucks and everyone hates him, old people dying in car accidents, whether or not a woman needed to perform oral sex. I've personally watched multiple normal human beings watch this sketch and simply say 'what?' over and over again until the episode finished. Is that a good outcome? Hard to say.

What the hell are you talking about?

It's tempting to describe I Think You Should Leave as absurdist humour. The truly unhinged content does have a surface-level connection with absurdism's philosophy of a world without meaning. The universe is ultimately nonsensical, like a man who tries virtual reality and forgets how to use his own legs. A person can wander the abyss of time and space, desperately trying to work out how to stop being really, really horny, hoping to find a car full of porn.

But the comedy of ITYSL isn't holding a mirror up to an absurd universe. Despite asking if this ever happened to you, it knows it never happened to you. True absurdism relies on an acknowledgement that the world as a whole is meaningless, not merely that it contains meaningless pieces.

Tim Robinson's work is closer to surrealism, both in philosophy and messaging.

Surrealism emerged in the gap between World Wars I and II, as a response to the rationalism that its adherents claimed was partly responsible for the Great War. The movement champions unconscious thought and imagination as not just a panacea for the grim realities of the world, but as an answer to them. Where absurdism positions itself as somewhat defeatist, surrealist art was a methodical attempt to explore consciousness and find answers that couldn't be provided by cold rationality.

A piece of surrealist art is designed very specifically to challenge the viewer, to provide them with a juxtaposition of images, thoughts and ideas they aren't equipped to deal with. It demands a level of discomfort, and to observe the results.

ITYSL demands the same of its audience, throwing too much shit onto you with every sketch. The daughter wants ice cream but the ice cream store is closed because the man with triples of the Nova says it's closed. His wife died. She was hot. The sketches come right from the base of the brain, plucked directly out of a dream we all once had about choking on a hot dog.

Watching too much of the show does something peculiar to your brain over time. Eventually you might realise that the parts of the show you and your fellow brain-poisoned leave-heads are losing your mind over aren't even jokes at all. When the guy at the party in season one who accused his friend of having poop-covered hands turns up dead in the car at the end of the sketch, the female driver screaming in terror, it's really, really funny. For some reason. When the host of a prank show has a depressive episode and suicidal thoughts, that's also funny. These are all very funny things. I'm being normal. I don't know what any of this is, but it's definitely comedy.

That's the experience you're trying to pass on when you introduce someone to I Think You Should Leave, a chance to connect with the lawless psychic universe that exists in our collective unconscious. Break free from the rational and the logical, revel in the parade of little buff boys.

Which sketch should you show your normal friends? It doesn't really matter. Put them in a randomiser and hit play; broadcast an episode at someone's wedding without asking. Smash the state, banana breath.

But probably the one where the lady says she's slapping down some pig shit with these fat fucks.