Netflix’s With Bob And David Is Aggressively Unfunny At First…And That’s A Good Thing (I Think)
What does this say about the state of being a cult favorite today?
1.
I didn’t laugh once during my first watch-through of With Bob & David, Netflix’s new original sketch comedy series starring Bob Odenkirk and David Cross. In fact, the not laughing at things started a bit before that. When Netflix uploaded a sketch from the show to YouTube, three weeks prior to its release, things didn’t exactly look promising despite the undoubtedly cresting hype for what is ultimately a reboot of the cult favorite sketch comedy show Mr. Show with Bob and David.
“Resolutions”, which happens to be the first full sketch in the first episode of the show, is not funny. It wasn’t funny three weeks ago. It wasn’t funny this past weekend. It’s not funny right now. However, living in the current pop cultural apparatus means understanding how the internet and social media can take something initially unfunny, breed it as a potentially scalable inside joke and then go at it so hard it transmogrifies itself into something funny for a larger mass of people. It’s possible “Resolutions” and the other sketches I found initially unfunny could one day be funny.
2.
Not everything here is a long-term comedy investment. True, I didn’t laugh at anything the first time through but, if this makes any sense, I did find a bunch of things funny. In a way, this conflicting sensation tends to tip me off that a more surreptitious higher power of comedy is possibly at work. Exemplifying this sensation are sketches like “Know Your Rights with Gilvin Daughtry,” which has so many different things going on with it intellectually that it barely leaves you any space, the first time around, to laugh at the actual jokes.
Who is this making fun of? Gilvin, an annoying self-righteous YouTube constitutionalist so hellbent on catching the police abusing his civil rights that he ends up catching the very real physical pain of police abuse in order to prove his point? The police? The fact that the biracial officer (played by Keegan Michael Key) begrudgingly puts up with Gilvin’s desire to catch him abusing his rights on camera until Gilvin, a white man, dons blackface, at which point in time the biracial officer defers to his white partner who promptly begins macing the shit out of him? Or is the target merely the absurd universe which plays house to this kind of shit IRL? I wasn’t sure.
Nonetheless, by the third watch, I was laughing, half-ruefully because of the on-point satire in play and half because I love it when Gilvin’s little pop-up annotations appear. I love the little oblique humor of how redundant the annotations are. That amuses the hell out of me.
3.
It almost goes without saying a lot has happened since Mr. Show went off air. Nearly all of its cast and writers have ascended to hallowed levels in the pop culture hierarchy. Bob Odenkirk is barely “just Bob Odenkirk” anymore and instead, more “Bob Odenkirk who plays Saul Goodman,” one of TV’s greatest characters of all-time. David Cross too has been nearly subsumed by his performance as the iconic TV character Tobias Fünke in Arrested Development (though it helps that while Arrested was off the radar for its initial TV run, Cross became arguably the greatest pissed-off comedian in the world, cementing a legacy for himself, Tobias or no Tobias). Sarah Silverman is now The Sarah Silverman. Scott Aukerman has the immensely popular Comedy Bang! Bang! brand. Mary Lynn Rajskub killed it big time as Chloe from 24. Jay Johnston is “that guy” seemingly in everything. Paul F. Tompkins, one of the most respected and omnipresent comedians working today, just turned in one of the best TV performances of 2015 with his voicing of Mr. Peanutbutter in season two of Bojack Horseman. And Dino Stamatopoulos is the immortal Star-Burns.
In other words, it’s difficult to look at With Bob and David and think, “Just like the good old days of Mr. Show!” Splitsider’s Rachel Sugar said it best when she wrote that the Mr. Show aesthetic had a real “high school play” feel to it. Even despite some of the transparently cheap-looking sets, it’s difficult to look at all the accomplished players here and think “high school play” anymore. No longer are Odenkirk and Cross two accomplished writers going for broke in their first big opportunity to become visible comedic faces.
If you, like me, have or had any misgivings about With Bob and David while you watch or watched it, you knew they weren’t coming from the possibility that Odenkirk and Cross are no longer funny but rather that the humor and mannerisms of the two — which have been stridently codified and contextualized elsewhere — have outgrown the Mr. Show slash sketch comedy aesthetic.
4.
About that aesthetic. Splitsider’s John Wenzel breaks it down best in his piece on how fans of Mr. Show should approach With Bob and David:
“But when fans and newbies settle in to absorb two new hours of Bob and David on Netflix, they must keep in mind that it arrives in the shadow of all it influenced, and therefore may never feel as sharp or groundbreaking as it did two decades ago.”
Detractors of With Bob and David will undoubtedly choose this horse to ride into their critical battle. You could say it feels a little bit like when Kraftwerk made a comeback a few years ago and played a bunch of live shows and festivals. The sounds — once so paradigm-exploding and, in the most poetic of ways, mind-altering — sounded dull and common. Nothing had changed about Kraftwerk and the music they were playing but everything about the context — a context saturated and subsumed by the very sounds they had introduced into the sonic ecosystem years back — had changed.
As Wenzel mentions in his piece, the thing Mr. Show was doing back in 1995 wasn’t really been done by too many shows, if any at all. It cut through the bullshit. It took oblique and original stances on The Issues. It defined a brand of comedy that captured surrealism by way of extreme realism. It was tone genius and most importantly, it was funny.
Now? Key and Peele, until its recent series finale, was the voice of our generation, the cut-through-the-bullshit machete of our pop cultural moment. South Park is now (and, yes, still) the preeminent source of oblique and original stances on The Issues. The work of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, who were actually founded by and in a very real way, creatively nurtured and guided by Odenkirk (Odenkirk produced Tom Goes To The Mayor and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!), has honed that special brand of surrealism via extreme realism into something that is now unquestionably their own. Nathan for You has done the opposite, turning extreme surrealism into something unavoidably and certifiably real. Not to mention, Broad City has taken the tonal formula of Mr. Show and turned it into something that could be narratively coherent in addition to thematically intimate and comedically vulnerable in the most entertaining way possible.
And the list goes on.
5.
Saying With Bob and David lost a lot of its value when the pop cultural landscape got saturated by its own ideas about what televised sketch comedy could be has its merits. But it misses the point. It doesn’t need to be groundbreaking or original to be of value to Netflix or to you. As I suggested in my review of Master of None, comfort and watchability (and rewatchability) metrics take precedence over the metrics commonly ascribed to prestige programming.
What With Bob and David really only needs to be is what Mr. Show became and was: a cult favorite. Unfurl the comedy of Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, no matter how reluctant-to-please many of its sketches are on first and second glance. Let it linger and simmer as it’s streamed and re-streamed by its devotees and devotees-waiting-to-happen. Let these audiences tug out the comedy from what they can and watch them turn things into inside jokes and memes, its utterances into secret passwords to their circle of fellow acolytes. It’ll be what every network these days dreams of for a show: Its viewers taking ownership of it. This is how you get a new cult favorite.
Of course, it helps that some of the show is funny — though not LOL funny — early on. As I mentioned above, there really is no comedy quite like the comedy of a pissed off David Cross. Cross understands his targets supremely well — most commonly religious people and whom he perceives to be dumb Americans — and knows exactly what can get under their skin.
This country-music music video parody seems harmless and unaggressive until you realize how it hearkens back to a joke from Cross’ first standup album in which he lampoons how poor Republican voters mistakenly identify with rich Republican politicians despite the fact that these politicians are absolutely nothing like them beyond the strategically implemented Regular Joe affectations.
To know that With Bob and David retains at least some of the essence of Mr. Show as well as the comedy of David Cross is like a comedy bat signal: It draws in people with the promise that they’ll not miss out this time on witnessing comedy greatness. This is why it doesn’t matter whether or not With Bob and David is funny at first.
6.
**SPOILERS**
The best parts of With Bob and David so far:
- The “THE END” gag from the “Better Roots” sketch (Episode 1)
- “Zimble Phones: Mike Said I Couldn’t Do It” (Episode 1)
- The Interrogation Room Sketch (Episode 2)
- Regarding the death of the nearly invisible fifth Beatle, Gordy McIntosh: “His family asks that nobody sends nothing nowhere in honor of his life’s work.” (Episode 2)
- “No, no no! The stairway should throw the party. NOT the dining room!” (Episode 2)
- “I can’t be everywhere at once…but I can be three places at once.” (Episode 3)
- “I’ve heard that when someone has a sense they’re missing, they’re missing one of their senses, that the other senses are kind of…GOOSED! Up…higher…in power. That would mean Chef Chrissy has better eyeballs to see with and nose smelling than me. That’s not fair. That makes ME a handicap person.” (Episode 3)
- Everything about the “Little Corey the Wonder Kid” sketch. Every single thing. (Episode 4)
**END OF SPOILERS**
6.
What are cult favorites and cult comedies supposed to look like today? The cult favorite comedy aesthetic of the past, that “high school play” feeling, now seems very much like the mainstream comedy aesthetic of the present — or as mainstream as something can get in our massively segmented and saturated culture. If shows like Nathan for You, Rick and Morty, Bojack Horseman, etc. had aired ten years earlier, there’s a chance they could have become the cult favorites today — single-season runs of comedy redolent in inside joke cologne — instead of what they actually are today: successes.
This begs the questions: Can shows that enjoy immediate success and immediate effect on their audiences also be considered cult favorites or cult classics? Is cult comedy about the iconography and aesthetics used in the show, that kind of awkward deader-than-deadpan solipsistic expression of humor? Or is cult comedy forever about its initial difficulty, its ability to filter out the sensibilities of those seeking comedic stimulation shortcuts, with the long game in mind?
What my current feeling of With Bob and David suggests is that cult favorites have to find new ways to not be immediately funny and accessible. For a new comedy being released into this current pop cultural climate, things have never been so competitive. Of course, you always run the risk of making something that’s simply just not funny.
