Friendship
Tim Robinson is a comedic national treasure at this point. Full stop. He’s not just a sketch comic—he’s a category unto himself. An offbeat oracle of the absurd who’s managed to warp modern sketch comedy to fit the shape of his brain. Whether I Think You Should Leave ends up enshrined in the comedy canon or fades like a cult t-shirt left out in the sun, we’ll have to wait and see. But there’s no denying Robinson’s found his groove. Detroiters was the warm-up, I Think You Should Leave the breakout, and now Friendship feels like the evolution—something messier, riskier, and weirdly more refined.
I’ll admit: I was nervous walking in. I don’t do well with cringe comedy. I watch it the same way people watch horror—through parted fingers, waiting for the next social injury to strike. Robinson's universe is built on that tension, and the question loomed: can that brand of chaos hold for ninety minutes without collapsing in on itself?
Turns out—yeah. It can. Friendship works. And not just “doesn’t fall apart” works—it sings. It’s a fever dream of awkwardness and specificity, packed with wild set pieces and surgical one-liners that somehow coalesce into something resembling a story—if you squint. The tone is all gas, no brake. The awkward beats are stretched into moments of full-body discomfort, but they breathe. They bloom. It’s not just absurdism for absurdism’s sake—there’s structure here, even if it’s buried under a pile of cursed props and bad decisions.
The film feels like a pure distillation of Robinson’s comedic instincts, unfiltered and deeply committed. Every scene feels like a sketch that escaped containment, mutated, and found a new ecosystem inside a feature runtime. And it works because it doesn’t apologize for what it is. It just keeps going.
Connor O’Malley nearly walks off with the whole thing in his brief, brilliant cameo. Whitmer Thomas and other outsider-comedy fixtures fill out the edges, lending just enough texture to keep the whole thing from spinning off the rails. Their presence doesn’t just boost the film—they feel like extensions of the world Robinson’s been quietly building over the last decade.
Friendship is a ride. A weird, deeply specific, totally unhinged ride. And it deserves its place in the cult comedy hall of fame—though, frankly, I hope it punches above that. I hope it cracks the mainstream just enough to remind people that there’s still room in cinema for something this strange, this idiosyncratic, this fearlessly itself.
Because the best kind of comedy isn’t just funny—it’s unmistakably personal. And Friendship feels like a love letter to the weirdos, the overthinkers, the people who never quite fit in, but never stop trying to say something only they can say.