A long time ago, a good friend of mine gave me a very valuable piece of advice I carry around with me to this day: “Be yourself, and no one will like you.”
I used to think that applied to me specifically. I thought it was just my friend Sahm gently poking fun at me for being a nervous person who always fell into situations that consistently warranted serious thought and examination into my behavior. I thought if I looked inward, maybe I’d find clarity as to why I kept finding myself in painful situations that made me feel like I did something wrong. For a long time, I thought it was just my problem, until Tim Robinson showed me it’s something we all carry.
Cringe comedy used to be about accidents. Someone said the wrong thing. Someone walked into the wrong room. Someone embarrassed themselves in public, and we watched, white-knuckling it, as they tried to recover. The joke was always situational. Something uncomfortable happened, we laughed; catchphrase—wink at the camera.
Tim Robinson is using a different color in the palette of cringe humor. In his universe, nothing needs to happen. The awkwardness is already there, simmering beneath the surface. The characters he plays don’t stumble into a situation created by environmental circumstances. Nor are they crazy characters you can’t relate to. They are normal men who generate these moments by being themselves. They exist at the intersection of insecurity and quiet desperation. All it takes is for one of those qualities to be exposed, and then, boom. They detonate.
We don’t need to look any further than “The Chair Company,” Robinson’s most recent series for Max. It follows William Trosper, a project manager at a property development firm, who was recently hired to oversee a shopping mall project. After giving a presentation to his co-workers, he sits down in a chair, and it collapses on stage. He isn’t physically hurt, but the humiliation is devastating. Instead of dusting it off and forgetting about it, he becomes obsessed with the company that made the chair, putting his job and family at risk just to prove he was wronged. Whether the company is actually responsible barely matters. Trosper is willing to destroy everything he has built in his life to vindicate himself.
Trosper, like many characters Robinson likes to portray, is a nice man, or at least he believes he is a nice man. He sees himself as polite, reasonable, and fundamentally decent. The kind of guy who would tell you, without being asked, that he’s just trying to do the right thing. But what he and these characters mean is that they are nice guys as long as everything is going their way. People, for the most part, are decent until something bad happens. That’s when the classic Mike Tyson quote, “Everyone’s got a plan until you get punched in the face,” pops in.
Tim Robinson harvests those self-induced moments of awkwardness we all experience in the uncomfortable moments of our lives. We commit a social faux pas at a party, or slip and fall in front of your co-workers, we get up, we shake it off, and it disappears into the back of our minds. You forget about it for a while, sometimes for years, until one day you wake up in the morning and, out of nowhere, a memory of that time you said the wrong thing on a date you went on years ago appears in the forefront of your mind and makes you feel that exact same level of embarrassment again. All the people involved in it have probably moved on and forgotten about the entire thing, and so did you.
Until you remember it.
And that’s where the discomfort of Robinson’s comedy lies. Inside that waking nightmare where mundane life reveals its hidden horrors to our concealed insecurities. These characters are not villains; they’re painfully ordinary people who think they’re kind and that their shallow idea of social propriety should protect them from consequences.
They mistake self-image for self-control, and the meltdown that ensues does not transform them into bad people; it reveals who they actually are. It forces us to confront something far more unsettling: that the situation is us. This is why his characters are so hard to root for. This isn’t a fantasy. We follow them into the meltdown because we recognize the machinery behind it. And Robinson’s genius is that he never lets us fully detach from them. He makes their shame feel familiar.
If David Lynch unmasks the surreal darkness in the world around us, Tim Robinson reveals the micro-horror within us. Lynch shows us that beneath the tidy surface of American life, there is a quiet, uncanny rot. Robinson shows us that beneath the tidy surface of male politeness there is something equally disturbing: a churning pit of fear and self-deception looking for just an inch of daylight to escape. Ego, entitlement, and a furious need to be seen as righteous are the catalysts that make the explosion inevitable.
We live in a time when men are encouraged to look inward and be emotionally aware, but they have no idea how to regulate what they find. The result is a generation of men who can name their feelings but have no idea how to control them. They recognize their mistakes but keep repeating them, insisting on their goodness as they stand in the wake of everything they destroyed, and Robinson captures this contradiction with merciless clarity. His characters expose the lie at the heart of the modern Nice Guy.
Niceness is not the same thing as kindness. It is sometimes a strategy to avoid conflict, secure approval, or to hide fear. When that strategy fails, what remains is not virtue but raw, unfiltered insecurity. Robinson’s characters do not lose their composure because they never had any in the first place. It is horrifying and hilarious because it is so deeply human.
And yet we keep watching. We keep leaning forward. We keep following these men into their own undoing because Robinson understands something essential about shame: it is magnetic. It draws us in. It reminds us of our own small humiliations, our own moments of emotional collapse, and those private moments we hope no one saw. The moments that come about when we are just “being ourselves.”
