Tim Robinson tells Seth Meyers about his SNL sketch that could’ve ruined New York’s bug ecosystem
Guy Who Accidentally Decimates Urban Environment For Joke sounds like a decent sketch character, actually
TV Features Seth Meyers
Tim Robinson has been rightly celebrated for the second season of his Netflix sketch show, I Think You Should Leave, which continues to bring the world happiness in the form of existentially anguished prank show hosts and burger-hungry professors. As he shared with Seth Meyers on a recent episode of Late Night, though, Robinson is also a dangerous man who’s prior work on Saturday Night Live once came all too close to destroying New York City’s bug ecosystem.
During the interview, Meyers refers to all the challenges comedy writers like Robinson create for stunt people and props departments by coming up with ideas like “corpses flopping out of coffins.” He goes on to mention an old SNL sketch Robinson and I Think You Should Leave’s Zach Kanin wrote where an investigative reporter (and his little brother) look into why bugs are always running everywhere—a pretty simple bit that involved hiring insect handlers in order to get shots of reporters sticking microphones in their path.
“There was one bug there that the bug handler was like, ‘Don’t let that one get away. If that one gets away it could mess up the entire New York City ecosystem,” Robinson remembers.
Meyers asks how good an actor the bug could have been to be worth the risk, and Robinson recalls the terror of potentially being the guy responsible for permanently altering a major city’s ecological balance because of a funny idea he wrote down for TV. The interview continues by touching on casting I Think You Should Leave’s “Santa Claus,” skateboarding, and the ongoing memeification of his work, but the main point remains the profound, previously unknown dangers of sketch comedy—something far more terrifying than even a grim post apocalyptic future filled with never-ending skeleton wars.
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21 Comments
If the bug could do that, why would the bug handlers let it out to be used for comedy bits?
Gotta get paid?
“The global ecosystem is in a state of collapse! There have been food riots in every major city, and we’re facing an extinction-level event. What were you thinking?!”“I thought it would be funny.”
Because it was a really really good actor, apparently.
I like how he tried to convince Seth that in the show title I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, the “Tim Robinson” part has nothing to do with him.
I had a small panic attack when I read about the bug sketch from 2013, as we had a very similar concept for a bug talk show sketch that was produced in 2016. Thankfully, VERY different in execution. Thanks for finally coming through, NBC.com’s subpar SNL sketch database!
I just tried this show out the other day. It was like watching Portlandia without the funny bits.
So Portlandia then?
This guy doesn’t give.
Eh, it’s fine… Mira Sorvino will take care of it.
She released that bug too! And “Beginning of the End”, the giant locust flick. Peter Graves created them! Then he’s lecturing the Army about how dangerous they are. “Well it was pretty fucking irresponsible of you to create radioactive crops wasn’t it dipshit?”
Truly, man is the REAL bug.
The real bugs were inside us all along.
That’s kind of how 1950s monster movies worked. I guess the point was that they were metaphors for the creation of nuclear weapons, but the metaphor kind of breaks down when applied to monsters.
All the giant bug movies were ripoffs of Them!, which at least had the sense to not make Edmund Gwenn’s character a nuclear scientist.
Some fans try so very very hard to use Tim as a reason for why they hate SNL (when there are plenty of other reasons, I’m sure) and point to his show as an example of all the genius SNL throttled, and so on (even though his product on both shows was pretty much the same, just with added profanity on Netflix) – it amuses me that he clearly has no ill will toward the show and is still happy enough to talk about his time there.
Same! And look, SNL doesn’t need anyone to defend it, but there’s room for other types of sketch comedy. SNL is its own thing and we’re lucky for it, but I’m SO happy Robinson is doing his own weird-ass thing because it’s completely different from what he could have done on SNL and we’re lucky to have it.
I haven’t eaten anything in weeks to save up for a VERY complicated new shirt from Dan Flashes.
I wonder what kind of bug they were going to release?
Sure there was a risk, but I’m not worried about it! I’M NOT WORRIED ABOUT ANY OF THIS!