Why Is This Line From 'The Chair Company' Stuck In My Head?

I will admit that I was skeptical about The Chair Company. I was a little worried it wouldn’t work. I wondered if the thing that makes a Tim Robinson character work so well on I Think You Should Leave — the abrasiveness, the relentless commitment to their own belief about something, the absurdism of their whole existence — would play as well over a whole season-long arc, or if it would wear thin without shifting gears every 5-8 minutes. I was excited, sure. And hopeful. Maybe skeptical was the wrong word way up at the beginning of this paragraph. Maybe the right word was “worried.”

Well, after the premiere… uh, premiered this week, I already feel a little better. Yes, the episode was littered with scenes and characters you could build an ITYSL sketch around (Guy Who Is Annoyed The Waiter Keeps Trying To Take His Plate, A Guy In The Office Just Bought A Bubble Necklace, Guy Doesn’t Want To Consent To Customer Service Recording His Call, etc.), but those things do appear to be in service of the larger through line. There are things happening here. There are layers developing. Jim Downey plays the guy who just bought a bubble necklace. All good things. And all things I would be interested in discussing further if my entire brain hadn’t been short-circuited by this line of dialogue.

I’ve been trying to figure out why this is the one that got me, the one I saw in a screener last week and is still clanging around my noggin today. Some of it is the delivery, for sure, which I’m sure you can hear in your head just by reading it if you’re familiar with Tim Robinson’s whole deal, even if you haven’t seen the episode. Try it now. I'll wait a second.

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See?

Some of it is the placement in the episode, too. It happens early, like a few minutes in, just after we’re introduced to his character and made aware that he has a huge presentation the next day. The whole scene where he says the line is a few seconds long, tops, just him furiously flailing around in bed and cursing the existence of his pillow. It looks like a throwaway, a non-sequitur tossed in to get a funny line into an episode of a television comedy. Which would be fine! “Disco Stu doesn’t advertise“ had little to do with anything and I have been thinking about that line every few weeks for my entire adult life. But this one is actually saying something. A few things, actually. It’s showing us:

• This is a guy who is really nervous and/or agitated about the big presentation that’s about to go very wrong and set in motion all the events of the series
• This is a guy who will funnel his nervousness and/or agitation into ridiculous complaints about unrelated things
• This is a guy who is already teetering on the edge a bit

Those are important things! We learn a lot about this guy in one very short scene where his entire existence is being pushed to the brink by a piece of fabric filled with squishy stuff. That’s really good storytelling!

But… I still don’t think that — the thing where the show gave us a mountain of background in one brief shot — is the reason this is sticking with me. I think it’s the phrasing. I think, specifically, it’s the ”in town” at the end. Not “in the world.” Not “ever made.” He has the worst pillow “in town.” There‘s something almost more conspiratorial about it being such a smaller scale, like he’s just annoyed that his neighbors – people he knows personally and has specific opinions about – might have better pillows than him. It’s also just a really funny collection of words to shout into the world. And even just to type out in all-caps.

Here, look:

“I HAVE THE WORST PILLOW IN TOWN”

“I HAVE THE WORST PILLOW IN TOWN”

“I HAVE THE WORST PILLOW IN TOWN”

Yeah, I think that’s it. I think I figured out why this one lodged itself into my brain. The other stuff is important, too, I guess.

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STUFF I CLICKED ON

— interesting long blog about how things are getting weird for Kevin Costner

— Jim Downey is having a moment between his appearances in One Battle After Another and The Chair Company and he talked to GQ about it ($$$)

— very excited for another year of watching Victor Wembanyama do stuff no other human can do

— dug this AV Club thing about SVU using different episode endings for TV and streaming

— Diane Keaton died, which sucks, and I recommend reading this remembrance by Brian Phillips and also taking a moment yourself to remember that her one credited TV role was on The Young Pope as a nun who loved basketball 

— a long look into an international scheme to steal rare books

— a guy ate so many gummy snacks he almost died

— big iguana arrested

— “Runaway inflatable pumpkin spooks police”

— “Lawyer Caught Using AI While Explaining to Court Why He Used AI”

— Kimmel confirmed that Seth Rogen was basically banned from presenting at the Emmys

— Apple TV+ is now just Apple TV, which someone probably made $200k to decide

— hackers attack brewery

— it is really funny that Drake made a judge rule as a matter of law that Kendrick Lamar was allowed to wreck him with an absolute banger

— “Gwen Stefani and No Doubt will reunite inside The Sphere” is one of those sentences we just say now without acknowledging that it sounds like a Futurama joke from 1999

— thank you to Ryan Nanni for sharing an incredible Wikipedia time waster: “List of inventors killed by their own invention”

— imagine Bebe Neuwirth — THE BEBE NEUWIRTH — glaring at you from across a laundromat with scorn and disappointment in her eyes (I would certainly perish at once)

Okay, that's it for this week. Please subscribe and share and acquire a comfortable pillow.