I Think You Should Leave is not just a hilarious show; it’s a meme juggernaut. The Netflix sketch show’s second season recently dropped, and it’s been predictably filling up social media feeds with images of the prankster guy in a fat suit who has an existential meltdown, or the retired professor trying to steal his former students’ dinners, or just images of star/co-creator Tim Robinson screaming out of context, as he’s wont to do.
Turns out Robinson could have had a darker real-life impact on the world. In an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, the comic discussed an old SNL sketch he and his ITYSL co-creator Zach Kanin wrote that could have made New York City a worse place than it is already. It focused on an investigative reporter and his little brother trying to figure out why bugs were scampering about the city in droves. What sounded like a simple sketch on paper proved a little difficult when it came to shoot, namely when they talked to bug handlers and handling real bugs.
“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 recalled.
When asked if he thought endangering the already bug-besieged Big Apple was worth it for what could have been a great, albeit deadly bug actor, Robinson emphatically said “no.” So the eight million-plus residents of the five boroughs should thank him for not making things even worse.
Robinson also discussed, among other things, the logistics of shooting certain ITYSL sketches, namely how tricky it was to get some of the shots in the instantly iconic “Coffin Flops” sketch, which depicts a documentary show that exclusively shows corpses flying out of poorly constructed coffins. So when you watch that, think about how hard it was to make one of the silliest and most Mad Lib-y sketches that has perhaps ever made it to air.
You can watch Robinson’s full Late Night appearance in the video above.
