The masculine urge for a Tim Robinson side of TikTok
A trend four months in the making.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, from Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.🧩
Before you ask “why didn’t you just start the trend yourself?” it’s because every TikTok video I’ve made I’ve deleted a few days later out of embarrassment. —Kate
The Bo Burnham renaissance of 2021 was not what I expected, but it shouldn’t be a surprise that a creator who started by captivating digital audiences in the early days of YouTube only compounded that success on TikTok. The Bo Burnham hashtag has over 2.9 billion views, and his success on the app was no doubt a large driver of not only his newest comedy special Inside’s place as the number one US Top Comedy Album on the Billboard charts, but also its infiltration of the US Billboard 200. Netflix is notoriously opaque about its streaming numbers, but all this data makes it safe to assume it did, as the scientific community would say, “gangbusters.”
With an example of just how powerful TikTok can be in determining the success of a piece of art having happened so recently, I eagerly awaited what the app would do to a comedy release that shortly followed Burnham’s: season 2 of I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson. Robinson is behind some of my favorite sketches on Saturday Night Live, on which he was a writer from 2013 to 2017, but was finally awarded the spotlight he deserves in the first season of ITYSL. However, that was before TikTok drove pop culture the way it does now, and so when season 2 came around in 2021, I waited patiently for sketches like “Coffin Flop” and “Dan Flashes” to get their own trends on the app.
And waited. And waited.
I had to wait four months. Despite the, in my opinion, TikTok-perfect humor of the show, it was making nowhere near a Burnham-sized impact. Robinson is wildly popular among the Twitter crowd, but TikTok had yet to catapult Robinson into the same mainstream spotlight—Phoebe-Bridgers-cover-the-“Baby-Of-The-Year”-song challenge.
However, this may have just been a matter of wrong time, wrong trend. Because now, out of nowhere, a trend on the app has decided to finally extend a hand to the I Think You Should Leave universe: “the masculine urge.”
“The feminine urge to…” meme format is already at the end of its life cycle, but “the masculine urge to” response is going strong on TikTok. While many have pointed out that the trend as a whole is a revealing look at the vulnerabilities of masculinity, I have to admit I jumped with joy to see the offshoot that was all about ITYSL.
“The masculine urge to tell the waiter to tell my date that the restaurant has a rule that if you order loaded nachos to share that you can’t just eat all the fully loaded ones, like don’t search for the ones with all the meat and only eat that one,” one video reads, in reference to this sketch. Commenters were so excited to have stumbled upon what still feels like a niche interest on the app that the creator made a follow-up.
“Commenting to stay on Tim Robinson TikTok,” one wrote.
Other versions of the trend followed:
“The masculine urge to skip all my meals while on a business trip and use my meal stipend to buy shirts with really complicated patterns that are my exact style”; “the feminine urge to make all your money by suing the city because you were accidentally sewed into the pants of the big charlie brown at the thanksgiving day parade”; and “the masculine urge to decide your student’s burger looks better than what you ordered. So you joke around with him about it to the point that he offers you a bite. Then the first bite is so good you finish the burger. But you’re worried about them telling people so you try to take a video of them saying they’ll kill the president as blackmail.”
The way this played out reminded me of something Godmode’s Talya Elitzer told us about TikTok and the music industry, which is that while TikTok success can provide an unfathomable boost to a piece of art, the power of that boost feels like it’s in direct opposition to how likely it is to happen.
“It kind of feels like flushing money down a toilet,” Elitzer said.
Now, the I Think You Should Leave hashtag has over 40 million views, and Tim Robinson 28 million. Those are still significant numbers, but nowhere near what we know the app is capable of. Maybe we’ll check back in in another four months.