'Friendship', 'The Rehearsal' and the Awkwardness of Being a Person
The high stakes of human connection.
I’ve always considered myself a fairly introverted person. During my middle school years, I would spend Friday nights by myself reorganizing my Magic: The Gathering cards and watching ABC’s TGIF bloc of programming. When I’ve attended parties where I hardly knew anyone, I couldn’t wait to get out of there. While I can do alright in smaller social situations or even in public speaking roles, there’s always the underlying anxiety of meeting a new person and facing the lingering thought, “Am I a gigantic weirdo? Weird people don’t know they’re weird. Am I being weird right now? Am I making this person I’ve never met before uncomfortable?” I’m not even trying to look good in these moments; I’m just trying to get through the conversation mentally unscathed.
In the past month, we’ve gotten two pieces about awkward social interactions featuring two of our best working comedians. The new movie Friendship starring Tim Robinson, and the second season of Nathan Fielder’s HBO series The Rehearsal. Neither fits neatly into the box of “cringe comedy” or “weird comedy,” although they both have intentional moments of cringe and weirdness. Rather, they both circle the very idea of social compacts and why these moments can feel so fraught, especially in these trying times.
In Friendship, written and directed by Andrew DeYoung, Robinson plays Craig Waterman, a suburban guy in Clovis, Colorado, living an unremarkable life as a marketing executive with wife Tami (Kate Mara), a florist recovering from cancer, and their son Steven (Jack Dylan Glazer). Craig is starstruck by his new neighbor, Austin (Paul Rudd), a local TV weatherman who radiates laid-back charm and charisma. Austin takes Craig under his wing, but after an evening with Austin’s gang of friends goes wrong and makes Craig out to be the bad guy, Craig’s life begins to spiral out of control as he attempts to win back Austin and recreate their better moments.
Although there are elements reminiscent of The Cable Guy or Robinson’s sketch comedy series, I Think You Should Leave, DeYoung’s film wisely relies on Robinson’s unique comic energy to make the picture come alive. The movie has a dreamy, surreal quality that better insulates the viewer from Craig’s mood swings so that his unusual affect and sudden outbursts always play as comic, but also lend this mundane setting a sense of unreality as if Craig has never fit into the world. His brief interactions with Austin create a twisted lifeline to normalcy, except Craig is so weird that he bungles it every time.
For example, at one point, Austin takes Craig on “an adventure,” guiding him through the sewers to get them onto the roof of City Hall in the middle of the night. After Austin dumps Craig, Craig tries to recreate the experience with Tami, only to lose her in the sewers. Despite his unremarkable existence, every time Craig attempts to forge a normal, human friendship, it goes wrong. His expectations never line up with reality, and the common denominator for these failures is his personality, but he can never get a handle on his behavior. He knows how to go through the steps of creating memorable moments, but lacks the ineffable quality that separates lovely adventures from awkward experiences.
A similar strain runs through The Rehearsal. In the show’s second season, Fielder looks at airline safety, and finds a disturbing recurrence in the audio logs of plane crashes where the first officer didn’t assert him or herself in the face of the captain’s poor decisions. For those with social anxiety, a conversation can feel in the moment like a life-or-death scenario, but Fielder found a situation that’s genuinely life and death based on the connection between two people. His solution is to try and get pilots to open up through a rehearsal process, only to start testing the bounds of reality to where we’re in a funhouse room of mirrors.
Since it’s a comedy show, there’s a lot of room to make the rehearsals themselves painfully funny and also to showcase the limitations of such a prospect. In the season’s third episode, “Pilot’s Code,” Fielder tries to get into the mind of heroic pilot Sully Sullenberger, first by reading his autobiography, and then, in one of the show’s more outlandish efforts, going through Sully’s entire life. This means at one point, playacting as Sully as an infant and breastfeeding from a giant puppet. There’s a strange comfort in seeing Fielder explore the good intentions behind empathy, only to treat us to something truly bizarre.
What makes Friendship and The Rehearsal both so funny is that they’re not only rooted in truth, but they give us a release valve for the anxieties we all share while also acknowledging the unspoken social agreements of what’s acceptable. When Craig is hanging out with Austin’s friends, they all randomly start singing “My Boo” by Ghost Town DJs, which would be weird to outsiders (and why it’s funny for the audience) but every friend group has its rituals and inside jokes. Fielder comically posits that the way Sullenberger got into the groove before the Miracle on the Hudson was by listening to the chorus of Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life,” which would be strange if it happened, but at least not as disturbing as knowing that pilots can’t publicly admit to any mental strain lest they be grounded. No one throws up a big sign for every social situation saying, “This is out of bounds,” and you repeatedly have to feel your way through while wondering, “Am I doing a good job at being a person right now? If I screw up the social mores, will I suffer further alienation?”
Both works feel particularly relevant right now, not because social anxiety is a new phenomenon, but because of our recent social upheavals. We’ve gone through a pandemic and the rise of social media, and both have arguably altered the way we understand interacting with others. Friendship and The Rehearsal don’t explicitly touch on these subjects, but neither feels like a project that would have been made ten years ago. Fielder’s 2013 comedy series Nathan for You starts more like a riff on the conventions of reality TV before arriving at its brilliant series finale four years later, Finding Frances, a funny but deeply felt examination of loneliness and regret. Robinson worked on Saturday Night Live in the mid-2010s, but his sketches on I Think You Should Leave (particularly the Hot Dog Car sketch) play as far more relevant than anything SNL has produced recently, despite the show’s emphasis on covering current events.
Fittingly, neither Friendship nor The Rehearsal provides an answer to its protagonist’s anxieties. Craig keeps trying to chase a dream of normalcy and healthy friendship with Austin, while Fielder comes to a “fake it until you make it” approach that also lingers on the ambiguity of how much has to remain unsaid to keep flying. Our social bonds, as much as they ever existed, now seem to be coming more unglued, and yet we have no choice but to keep going forward. We can’t isolate ourselves behind phones and desktops, relying on fake friends who will never judge us. We have to embrace the awkwardness of being alive, as painfully funny as that may be.