Tim Robinson Finds Humanity—and Tests It—in “The Chair Company”
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. ♦
