In this regard, “The Company of Chairs” could be a sketchy premise: “a guy loses his cool after embarrassing himself at a big meeting.” It was this problem that tormented “Friendship”, A24 film starring Robinson, released earlier this year, the premise of which is “a guy loses his cool after his neighbor socially rejects him.” It's harder than it seems to conjure up the subtle glimpse of surreality that Robinson's sensibility demands. Perhaps the fatal flaw of Friendship, written not by Robinson and Kanin but directed by Andrew DeYoung, was to propose a screen world in which Tim Robinson was Tim Robinson and everyone else was more or less straight.
The world of The Chair Company, on the other hand, is full of characters with their own sparks of Robinsonian madness, their own humiliations and destructive obsessions. There's an older co-worker who gets passed over for Ron, played by veteran “SNL” writer Jim Downey: after not being promoted, he makes it his mission to liven up the workplace—first by blowing bubbles with a wand he wears around his neck, then by throwing a party where he encourages his co-workers to “make mistakes” with each other. There's a janitor who catches Ron taking a photo of the pieces of a broken chair: “Did you take a photo of my car?” he demands. “Are you the guy who says I'm not allowed to have a car in the office? Why does anyone care? It never goes outside. It's an indoor car. I can understand if it's an outdoor car, it's dangerous. It's disgusting. But it's not.” (Later, Ron catches the janitor with a wheelbarrow.)
Nathan Fielder, another master of comics about interpersonal discomfort, has also recently made an attempt to take his sensibility to a broader scale. “RehearsalBut where Fielder's expansion efforts went deeper, Robinson decided to go broader—rather than delve into the inner lives of his signature oddballs, he imagines a world teeming with them.
Company of Chairs is not a workplace comedy. He's not interested in satirizing office life or cultivating the casual camaraderie that makes a group of colleagues unlikely buddies. Here the workplace is just a framework, a zone of clear expectations and rules where individual idiosyncrasies are barely contained. The thinnest veneer of decency is all that keeps us from terrorizing each other. “I just got in a lot of trouble,” the county secretary, who has come to collect property documents related to the company chairman, tells Ron. Ron briefly panics. He just gave himself a fake name and thinks she must have noticed him. But no: “I have to go home and take a shower,” the employee tells Ron. “People might smell me or something.” Office meetings open up the show's excursions into other genres—flights of quasi-Lynchian horror, the gripping tension of a crime drama.
Of course, you can see another story hiding in The Chair Company. Because Robinson's comedy tends to focus on loud-mouthed and socially inept men, it is tempting to read it as “about” masculinity—male anger, male loneliness, male failure. Ron's job at the mall, we learn, is a steady paycheck he accepted after the failure of an entrepreneurial dream: opening an “adventure and Jeep tour company in suburban Ohio,” according to one unimpressed mall colleague. Meanwhile, his wife is busy launching a promising breast pump startup. “I admire it,” Rona’s daughter tells him. “How can you take a backseat to your mom and support her right now.” At work, Ron becomes the subject of a sexual harassment investigation because he sawed up a co-worker's skirt when a chair collapsed; inevitably his attempts to justify himself fail. Here you can simply discern the outlines men in crisis a saga in which Ron's stage chair fiasco was the final blow of his castration, and his subsequent adventures an attempt to regain some of his manly self-respect.
Robinson and Kanin have a keen eye for male absurdity. In one subplot, retired Cleveland Brown cries during a television interview because the new Canton mall will not show football, even though Canton, home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, “is football.” As the ex-player's face scrunches up like a toddler's, it's impossible to tell whether we're watching satire or entirely plausible culture war fodder. Such antics are presented in such a way that they're devoid of commentary. Ron's humiliation is real; it's also funny; these things are in no way mutually exclusive. In the tapestry of human humiliation and wrongs, his saga is just one thread among many. It's an unexpectedly expansive and even touching vision of cringing comedy. ♦
