Over several decades, as Hollywood comedy has become mostly paint-by-numbers, Adult Swim, the nighttime programming block on Cartoon Network that has played host to weird ephemera alongside hits like Rick and Morty and The Boondocks, has long served as cringe comedy’s deep space region. It has aired shows that plumbed every possible emotional depth except for humor, and for which even discomfort was a barely adequate response from viewers. At their best (or worst), they could trigger a kind of fight or flight instinct. Whether The Eric Andre Show, The Heart, She Holler, any Tim & Eric incarnation, the infomercials, and maybe even for some Joe Pera Talks With You, they often felt like tests of one’s sensory, aesthetic, and philosophical tolerance, and sometimes the bonds of friendship. In the end, you took them, or you left them. A middle ground, a humorous liminal space, was impossible.
On the surface, there is nothing to suggest that Adult Swim’s latest series, Haha, You Clowns, is any different. Its three central characters, hulking brothers Preston, Tristan, and Duncan Campbell, have a distinctively yet typically off-putting presence: flat-faced, almost cubed heads, beady-eyed like subterranean mammals, chronically open-mouthed like obscene phone callers, topped off with identical Jonathan Taylor Thomas haircuts and indecipherable speech impediments, all voiced by series creator Joe Cappa. They suggest nothing less than two generations of inbreeding; a middle-American answer to the Habsburg jaw. And strewn among characters drawn in a style descended from Raymond Pettibon’s ferociously acerbic Black Flag fliers, some already may not be able to smash that “back” icon hard enough.
But it doesn’t take long before these badly drawn boys are revealed as sensitive young men. “The truth is, Tristan, I am scared,” Duncan confesses over a somber piano theme. “I’m scared of this family falling apart.” Having just lost their mother, the sons are in the care of, and in their own ways care for, a father, local weatherman Tom Campbell, whose gruff exterior and store of corny dadisms masks a deep internal struggle. The 12-minute episodes are ruthlessly efficient deployments of the multi-camera sitcom formula. A problem, at once mundane and psychologically revealing, arises from which hijinks emanate. In the first episode, romantic scenes during family movie night trigger Tom’s grief. The boys’ solution is to show him a horror movie and serve him ice cream laced with caffeinated workout powder, resulting in an energy rush that ends with a shattered flatscreen. But every climax, however intense, is never without a resolution of a kind of maturity and clarity unknown to most humans. Everyone hugs; everyone learns.
This is a different style of cringe, one better attuned to vulnerability and of humankind’s moral possibilities rather than their moral failings. It is a far cry from the hypercritical deconstruction of sitcom tropes and themes that pervaded the past decade, and for which Adult Swim was a reliable venue (Remember the lunch break you lost watching Too Many Cooks?). Haha, You Clowns is well-timed alongside a wider reconciliation with the laugh track. Tim Allen, of whom Tom is a loving parody, has a new show — ditto George Lopez, Reba McEntire, and now Tracy Morgan. The show is moreover echoing a similar, if more slight, reacquaintance with vulnerability that lurks beneath masculine stereotypes, such as the novelty of a brood of hunks maintaining their mother’s “she-shed” like a mausoleum and fretting over the survival of her petunias.
Haha, You Clowns may wear its heart on its sleeve, but only a fraction of its humor is derived from its doing so. The wholehearted embrace of sincerity cannot obscure the commitment phobia suggested in its visual style. However much we profess to have exhausted ourselves with irony, it, or some crude variation thereof, clings to us like a compulsion. The very idea of the family is itself a joke; as is the darkness lurking within them in tandem with the heart.
In episode three, Preston misplaces a prized jacket, sending him into a fit of despair that affects everyone around him. It is returned by the police, having been stolen by a fugitive; the family reflects on the lessons learned as Tom patches a bloodstained bullet hole in the lower back. It’s less a comedic liminal space than it is having it both ways: drawing you in with feelings while also striking that stubborn thrill for derision. It’s enough to make you pine for the era when a Tim & Eric sketch could simply recoil you outright.
TV: A HALF-CENTURY OF UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS
This is not to suggest an either/or proposition between being irony-poisoned or sincerity-pilled. There are enough examples from the irony-soaked 1990s that show we can do without the dichotomy altogether. The films of Todd Solondz and Hal Hartley had bleeding hearts for their often uncomfortably flawed characters. At the same time, they were unafraid of humor and resisted melodrama. It was a matter of owning up to, rather than commenting upon, the dissonance of their worlds, as that dissonance is the stuff of life. The Adventures of Pete & Pete did the same with a lighter touch. But even in the polarized 2020s, we can find male-coded contemporaries that are neither cynical nor naive, with characters neither insultingly noble nor irredeemably toxic, like Tires (2024) and anything involving Tom Robinson.
There is every indication that, in its heart of hearts, Haha, You Clowns wants to be taken at face value. It wants to keep you in, it wants its feelings validated, and to be seen as good. Don’t we all? But with faces like those, it’s not going to be easily earned. Haha, You Clowns may be too much a byproduct of its moment. Unlike its characters, it offers no easy resolutions for its viewers, who must judge for themselves whether to laugh with it or laugh at it. The real trouble is that irony is not always a poison you can willingly ingest, and sincerity is not so easy a pill to swallow. How we respond may be psychologically revealing in its own way.
Chris R. Morgan writes from New Jersey. His X handle is @CR_Morgan.