I Think You Should Leave Season 3, premiering Tuesday on Netflix, doesn't have any sketches as outrageous as Season 2's "Coffin Flop." Still, the new season maintains Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin's unique tone of sketch comedy in new scenarios.
Season 3 still features the show's trademark drastic tonal shifts. That applies not only to going incredibly dark, but sometimes going from absurdity to sincerity and back again.
The show's editing makes physical comedy even funnier. A zip line joke would simply be a mundane swimming pool activity were it not edited so aggressively.
Several of the Season 3 sketches apply I Think You Should Leave to show business scenarios like a TV sitcom taping or black-box theater. While those clearly express the frustrations creators can feel, they still explain the scenarios to general audiences.
Two game show sketches craft such absurd premises that they'd be funny even to people who never have seen a game show. Both get increasingly uncomfortable, as is I Think You Should Leave tradition.Plenty of the sketches satirize real-world interactions, like a date from a dating app or a house party. The date sketch executes an elaborate set-up for an utterly silly joke, and then it generates sympathy for the absurd situation only to turn on the protagonist for the final punchline.
A fast-food line also is a relatable situation, and I Think You Should Leave spoofs a relatively recent social phenomenon.
Each of the six new episodes are still 16 minutes or less, which proves to be the right amount of time for these comedy sketches. It's a bit longer than Adult Swim's 11-minute blocks. It's easy to binge all six in 90 minutes.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001 a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
