Tim and Eric's Awesome show - "Robin" episode - deconstructed

It would be profoundly obvious and therefore moot to call the Tim and Eric's Awesome show great job! on Adult Swim ([AS]) purile. But deconstructing its message and meaning as an artifact of culture holds great value in understanding the mindsets of the two generations who regularlly view and who have created the show.

The show is the product of comedians Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, both in their early 30's, placing them at the cusp end of Gen X. [AS] viewership is nortoriously aimed at the under 35 demographic, for an audience largly made up of millenials.

There is a sketch at the start of the "Robin", episode cut in two parts, that depicts a relationship between manager and a managee set in an office best described as sado-massochistic. The joke is that Robin loves her boss who humiliates and degrades her. The sketch begins with Robin bent over, showing her disproportiantly lumpy and therefore unfuckable ass, turned towards the camera. Robin stands up to reveal that she has a stomach the size of an airbag with understated breasts. Thus the joke is firstly infused with body fascism. The character is played by Eric Wareheim in over-stated drag, thus amplying the point that Robin is grossly "un-feminine", conflicting with the patriarchal ideal.

Tim and Eric's commentary on Robin's boss, played by Tim Heidecker, is unremarkable in that the comics do not scathingly attack the character, other than to hyperbolize his baldness, comparatively modest (to Robin's) beer gut and the fact that he secretly is sexually attracted to her. This is the boss character's central joke/source of shame. The sceene is presented through the lense of the boss character, and thus the cultural standpoint of biases and assumptions he represents, and is presented as the more relatable character the audience may identify itself with. The sceene is an exercise in blatant bullying, and the boss character serves as a touch point wherein the audience may participate in his bullying of Robin, and thus recieve the pay-off of momentary empowerment at the expense of a degredated party.

And so the misery continues, with Robin patiently and subserviently uttering "yes sir" responses to his oinking at her like a pig and his insults, including that she looks like she's had five breakfasts. The second half of the sketch resumes a few minutes later, with Robin's boss calling a meeting to screen a private sex tape Robin created for him. Joke after joke is just an expansion and deepening of the character's humiliation... and that's about it, lacking further comedic content.

While this sketch is alarming as an exercise in un-mitigated group domination (the audience becoming a complicit party), it's a great example of the verility and tenor of millennial generation sexism. Having rejected the ideals of the boom generation and the positive feminist progress it encloses, while also having been bombarded with right-wing propaganda that stunts intellecutal and moral development, the younger generations of Americans find an added exhiliaration in their irreverent rejection of social expectations. While I'll be the first to call most non-conformist urges rare and wonderful, when the channeling of these are mis-directed towards re-inforcing the dominant paradigm instead of deposing it, it is a fucked-up warping of the evolution of the human spirit. If such a thing exists.

The rest of the episode is less alarming. Yeah, I get the joke about Candy Tails, another expression of the millenial generation's (healthy) distaste for consumer marketing. And then there is a sceene featuring David Liebe Hart, a well-meaning yet obviously mentally ill ventrilloquist. Mr. Hart, self-identified as a memeber of the Screen Actor's Guild, has obviously had his mental illness exploited. In turing the camera on him, he embarasses himself with his natural behavior. Readers will hear the dominant paradigm's rebuttle that this is Mr. Hart's own fault, and that he is responsible for his own actions/decisions, echoing in their minds, and there may be posts to this effect. This is exemplary of an ideaology that enables exploitation to continue, because it does not put the reponsibility for having exploited a person disempowered by mental illness on the exploiters - Tim, Eric, their staff, [AS] and everyone complicitly viewing the show - but on the mental patient, himself. Whether Mr. Hart's claims that Jim Henson was his Sunday school teacher at a Christian Science church is beyond my desire for verification, because his subesequent claims that Mr. Henson "told" him to pursue puppeteering is enough to cause me to bet their accuaintance is a delusion.

So there ya go kids. Garbage in, garbage out. Unquestioned, undisputed and unfathomable.