In case anyone was worried that any idea was too outlandish or weird for The Lonely Island to tackle in a musical/rap format, The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience is now on Netflix to disabuse them of that notion.
The idea of a — just to get this straight — Lemonade-style visual album complete with spoken word poetry and rap tracks about Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco’s baseball careers in the late '80s is obviously bonkers, but the fact that The Lonely Island did it on purpose is reason enough for the show’s existence.
Somewhere between the rap about Canseco cramming a broom up his ass surrounded by cardboard cutouts of Kathy Ireland and a bizarre, traumatic sequence wherein Maya Rudolph coerces the Bash Bros into “shaking their nasty butts” in an IHOP parking lot, it’s reasonable for the average viewer to dissociate while viewing TUBBE. “Yo,” a normal person may say to themselves, “what the fuck am I watching?”
That’s always been The Lonely Island’s thing, but stretching the joke into a full 30 minutes of nonstop “why” becomes more impressive the longer one watches. Whatever happens on screen, the actors and songs are hypnotically deadass. The bit is the bit is the bit. And everyone commits to it.
That’s what The Lonely Island is great at — in fact, they might be three of the greatest bit-committers currently existing in the comedy space. For all of its outlandish visuals, TUBBE never mines its humor from winks or nudges to the audience. There’s never a hint that the people involved think any of this is funny. Consequently, the show is ten times funnier than it would be if those winks were there.
It’s difficult to categorize TUBBE as satire, considering the gun barrel of its humor is pointed in wildly different directions. It’s not making fun of Beyoncé and Lemonade, but it borrows its tropes and cadence in a recognizable enough way to make the mere allusion hilarious. It’s also not 100% making fun of McGwire and Canseco, whose presumably unauthorized likenesses are used not for their specific personalities but for the specific '80s brand of hypermasculinity that they represented. If anything, TUBBE exists as a wildcard example of funny dudes making something for shits and guaranteed giggles.
And hey, in a TV and Netflix environment where everything seems like it has to mean or say something, that’s actually pretty neat. TUBBE has no agenda beyond its own existence, which lends its acid-trip stylings a different kind of meaning. That meaning is: sometimes, stuff. Occasionally things. It’s not that deep and it doesn’t have to be. The lesson (to use that word as loosely as humanly possible) is that picking up a chuckle-worthy idea and going balls to the wall on it is fun!
So go forth and have fun with The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience. Do it, just because.
