A man who can't make friends, played for laughs

TIM ROBINSON, THE FORMER SATURDAY NIGHT Live writer and performer who now co-stars with Paul Rudd in the prickly cringe comedy Friendship, is probably a genius.

- BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

Both here and in his popular Netflix sketch series I Think You Should Leave, he specializes in a kind of auteurist awkwardness, playing the zonked-out but subliminally angry guy who has precisely the wrong quip for every occasion, whose facial expressions never quite match the sentiments coming from his mouth, whose rubbery body language seems to follow rhythms beamed from another planet. I Think You Should Leave is theater of the absurd broken into small bites of aggro-humor: Robinson as a guy who gets caught looking at a “nude egg” on his work computer, as a witless nerd who asks his barber for a Bryan Cranston haircut and gets a springer spaniel ‘do instead, as a low-rent stage performer who specializes in gentle Charlie Chaplin-style comedy, only to blow his top when frat boys heckle him at his shows. It makes little sense on paper, but Robinson creates a believable, if bizarre, microworld for each character. He’s like Zippy the Pinhead for the modern age, a naive weirdo traveler out of step with the world.

But how much Tim Robinson is too much? Maybe the exact amount you get in