Worst To Best: Every I Think You Should Leave Sketch Ranked Part Four
25. Jamie Taco
One of the sweetest sketches this show has ever done. No matter what extra levels of absurdity it piles on: a mobster play, Jamie Taco, poker night sleeping bags, the sketch is always moored by the simple truth that jokes about wives are harmful, and we all love our wives very much.
Best line: “I love my wife” It’s not even funny, I just like it when characters stick up for their romantic partners.
24. HR Class of 2023
Stand aside Ruben Rabasa and Bob McDuff Wilson, as Alison Martin has entered the ring as season three’s strange guest star. Martin manages to carry an entire sketch off of just one single line delivery and the bout of giggles that she collapses into for most of the rest of the sketch. The way her eyes light up and sparkle the moment she starts forming the word ‘banana breath’ is intoxicating. Also I bought my girlfriend one of those shirts for her birthday and I don’t know how I’ll ever top that present.
Best line: How could it be anything but the iconic line: “Back away, banana breath. What the hell did you just eat? A banana?”
23. Ghost Tour
I like Ghost Tour because it has Robinson tearing up crying while saying “cum and horse cock”. The final moments of the sketch with him sadly walking to be picked up by his mother after another friendless night, sets the more emotionally raw second season into motion.
Best line: “Not trying to be funny. Not trying to get a laugh. I don’t want anybody to have the worst day at their job… But… do any of these… fuckers… ever blast out of the wall and have, like a huge cum shot”.
22. Barley Tonight
No season has started off as strongly as season three. Robinson’s physicality when he suddenly grabs his phone and slouches into his chair
Best line: “But if I smell blood, I go in for the kill. And if you start to win, I go on my phone”.
21. Jellybean
This sketch has one of the most perfect escalations in comedy and it’s only at number 21!?
Best line: An entire audience of frats loudly screaming: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?”
20. Laser Spine Specialists
Another excellent sketch which combines the manic energy of Tim Robinson with fellow loud comedian, Connor O’Malley. O’Malley plays a desperate con man who has been tricking men into singing for him by finding them songs in their “Q-zone”. Robinson is one of said men, who thanks to a laser spine specialist (which this entire sketch is somehow an ad for) is finally able to get his money back. He also plans to fight his ex-wife’s new husband and lift up his adult son. The ending with Robinson’s character providing us with a tone deaf recording of “Moon River Rock” is one of the show’s finest musical moments.
Best line: “He’s been rude to me his whole life!”
19. Supermarket Swap VR
Best line: “I don't know how to work the body”.
19. Bozo Dubbed Over
It’s potentially controversial to have ‘Bozo Dubbed Over’ ranked so high on this list, but this two part season one sketch is one of my personal favourites. It would even possibly be much further up if I wasn’t trying to retain some level of objectivity. I just love how obviously flawed Robinson’s scheme is in this sketch. From the single view, the fact that it was uploaded at 6AM that morning, the name of the video, and finally to the half-hearted attempt to provide what “Bozo wishes he could be saying”. It’s all just such a wonderful level of misguided effort to impress his co-workers.
Best line: “I’m not even supposed to be here. I hope I don’t jack off!”
17. Pic Party
Best line: “Could've been like Barney's hair. "Hey, look at me, I'm Barney, like Barney's hair."
16. Bad Driver
This is probably the simplest sketch to make the top 20. Robinson plays a driver who doesn’t know how to drive. Touching the wheel hurts his hands, and beeping the horn makes him scream. It’s simple pure Robinson at his best.
Best line: (horn honks, Robinson screams).
15. Chunky
Such is the genius of ITYSL, that every one of the top fifteen sketches could arguably be considered the show’s best. Everything from here on is purely subjective. I will do my best to justify my own placements here but inevitably you, my dear reader, may disagree with many of my assessments. When playing in this game show, you never want to get Chunky, because he gobbles your points. What exactly that means in the context of the game show, not even Chunky has figured out. This sketch only narrowly misses out on a top ten place, potentially because I feel that it fizzles out a little too much by the time Chunky comes out for the third time. Despite that, everything else about the sketch is just all hits: Robinson’s unraveling, Andy Samberg’s resignation, the ridiculously simple questions and answers. I always lose it the first time Chunky comes out, the music cuts and he just stands there vacantly, like a dazed muppet.
Best line: “Don’t talk! The mouth on the thing doesn’t move! It looks fake!”
14. Baby Shower
What begins with another of Robinson’s weirdos making bizarre suggestions for gifts for a baby shower, devolves into one man’s struggle to off-hand the entire prop department of a failed mob movie. This sketch features some of the finest word jumble of the series in “fifty black slicked-back-hair wigs” which even Robinson seems to struggle to get out in one go. I also have no idea how the final ending frame came to be, but I know pure genius when I see it.
Best line: “They’re stanzos, they’re nice”. This line has become my go to whenever I’m trying to convince someone of how good something is.
13. Summer Loving
Robinson has a lot of peak moments in season 3 of ITYSL but none come close to his determined flight on the zipline, ending in a flailing half spin into the water.
Best line: “He's just too excited. He's too rough on the rope”.
12. Pay It Forward
Sometimes you can see through the haze of ITYSL absurdity to the premise that must have birthed a sketch. In this case, Robinson is just a guy trying desperately to take advantage of a ‘pay it forward’ chain. However when Robinson starts spraying the rapid-fire unnecessarily specific order at the drive-thru window, we’re lifting off once more into the strange world of the ITYSL universe. Even funnier is when the second driver starts to repeat the exact same order, suggesting that in this world, this is THE order you do for a ‘pay it forward’ scam. Even Robinson’s final sad confession that he’s on his way to “alcohol class” is a wonderful topper to the sketch. Does he mean a sommelier course? Alcoholics Anonymous? This show is always at its best when you’re left guessing whether a detail is just a strange perversion of the character or just a never again mentioned element of this reality.
Best line: “55 burgers, 55 fries, 55 tacos, 55 pies, 55 Cokes, 100 tater tots, 100 pizzas, 100 tenders, 100 meatballs, 100 coffees, 55 wings, 55 shakes, 55 pancakes, 55 pastas, 55 peppers, and 155 taters”.
11. Grambles Lorelai Lounge
I just can’t get this sketch out of my head. Every single line reading by Bob McDuff Wilson radiates through my body, turning my entire skeleton into a funny bone. It is truly transcendent comedy when a man is able to make me laugh so much just by grunting and pretending to snatch and eat a burger. I could watch this sketch five times. I could watch it ten times. Hell, give me an academic air-eating a burger any day and I’ll be happy.
Best line: “Gimme that!”
10. Feed Eggs
And so we finally make it here again, the top ten. The cream of the crop. We begin with a game of eggs. A game that you can play right now, at work if you wish to: https://egggame.org. It’s a great game but maybe NSFW. Your prize may be a nude egg. At the end of the day though, shouldn’t we be allowed to watch SOME porn at work? Feed Eggs is just prime absurdity mixed with the usual ITYSL awkwardness. We all have been that guy, at least once. Playing a mindless video game at work just to make the hours go by. Can’t wait for Egg Game 2 to be launched on the next Steam VR Headset.
Best line: Everything that Robinson says in this sketch makes me double over but his reading of: “It's got a bush? What the hell?” makes me laugh the hardest.
9. The Day Robert Palins Shot Me Down
I feel as if I too am in danger of being shot down for not putting this sketch higher. Robinson plays a confused folk singer who’s decision to riff with his Johnny Cash-esque partner leads to what a lot of improvised songs often sound like: a confusing mess of repetitive conflicting information, mostly to do with bones and skeletons (I’ve been to a lot of Halloween-themed improv nights). ITYSL sketches don’t often play as much with genre pastiche, but here, Robinson’s insane improvisation clashes perfectly with the scene of a musician finally discovering that ‘new sound’. Even if you don’t have a passing familiarity with the key beats of music biopics, the sketch is still hilarious, as is Robinson’s assertions that he was talking about skeletons so much because he thought he was asked for something ‘spooky’.
Best line: I wish I could put the entire song here, but to save space I just want to highlight any mentions of how the skeletons will pull your hair “up, but not out”, lest they turn to bones. Which are their dollars.
8. Brooks Brothers
Even though Robinson still features heavily in many of the sketches ranked higher than this, I think this sketch features his best performance. It’s pure Robinson. Put him in a situation where it is impossible for him to talk his way out of it, and watch as he delightfully and fitfully advocates for himself. In this sketch, his efforts include: listing pornographic websites by name, obfuscating the argument to being about who should spank the perpetrator, pointing out how he’s not the only one who is dressed like a hotdog, and just loudly shouting ‘WRONG’ to anyone who attempts to disagree with him. For all my 12-year old readers, this sketch is like the stupidest game of “Among Us” ever played. The sheer breadth of jokes that the writers are able to pull out of such a simple premise as ‘man dressed as hot-dog tries to convince others that he does not own the hotdog shaped car’ (which as I write it, may not actually be that’s simple) is astonishing. And I genuinely believe its almost all down to Robinson’s incredible performance.
Best line: Robinson’s final monologue will now be printed in its entirety: “Perfect. We’ve been sitting here talking all day and you all never bothered to learn my name. We’re so… buried in our phones. Instead of giving someone a real smile… we send an emoji. I mean, we don’t even look at porn on our computer anymore. We look at it on our phone? Pornhub, Xtube… I know these names better than I know my own grandmother’s. YouPorn, XXN, RedTube, panty jobs, homegrown Simpsons stuff. All great, but I ask you this: If I was a big old guy with a big burly white beard would you still be yelling at me? Or would you be spanking my bare butt, balls and back? Think about that for one second. I guess if nobody wants this car, I’ll take it”.
7. Prank Show
A standing ovation is necessary from the props department who managed to construct the monstrosity that Robinson’s character finds himself trapped inside in this sketch. The confines of the costume lead Robinson’s character to a state of existential despair, which not even the potentially hilarious antics of ‘Karl Havoc’ can cure. Robinson’s character in this sketch truly goes through an experience: from being frustrated by the heat and discomfort of the suit, to arguing about the point of a hidden camera prank show, to finally completely questioning his existence. And all the while… that goddamn skin suit never stops being funny.
Best line: “I don’t even want to be around anymore”.
6. Darmine Doggy Door
Robinson and Kanin love an advertisement parody. And when they’re as good at it as this, then MORE I say, GIVE ME MORE! Only two new sketches from season 3 were able to crack into the top ten, making this one the top sketch of season three. Akin to many of the sketches at the top, it does this through a commitment to an INCREDIBLE piece of production design (the terrifying pig creature), a clever subversion (Robinson’s character being less disturbed by the creature and more disturbed by the fact that he was relieved to not have to go to work tomorrow if eaten by the monster) and of course, plenty of brilliant non-sequiturs (Robinson’s complaint that he’s not sleeping very well because he hasn’t stopped thinking about his wife being flipped like 20 times by a dancer). Though not as immediately memorable as the sketches that make the top five, nothing made me laugh more in season 3 than the reveal of the creature bounding through the Darmine Doggy Door.
Best line: “My life is nothing I thought it should be and everything I feared it would become. All because for 50 seconds I thought there was monsters on the world”.
5. Corncob TV
Coffin flops is perfection. It’s hard to accurately put into words how much I laughed the first time I watched this sequence of dead bodies falling out of coffins all while Robinson asserted that it was a crime for it to be pulled off TV. And I would have to agree. The morbid joy I get from seeing dead bodies hit the floor in a shower of splinters is unmatched from any other ‘reality show’ I’ve seen. In particular, the placement of this sketch so soon in the run of season 2, meant that I was wheezing before I had even reached the halfway point of the first episode. There are not a lot of comedians that can so confidently come up with a concept like this and place it so early in a show, knowing that it won’t immediately turn people off, but rather draw them right in. The sketch is even more impressive when you hear the story behind how hard it was to get those coffin flops to happen.
Best line: “We’re allowed to show ‘em nude cause they ain’t got no soul”.
4. Printer Joke
Honestly, it’s Patti Harrison. It always was Patti Harrison. Comedians have been telling jokes for thousands of years, and yet I feel like I can say with complete certainty that nobody has ever uttered a sentence with the same cadence and rhythm that Harrison employs in this sketch. She has the uncanny ability to take lines that are otherwise quite ordinary statements, and turn them into the funniest shit that anyone has ever said. And yet, she never does the same trick twice. It’s incredible. Every single syllable is a surprise. Even her relieved smile at the end, after someone finally laughs at one of her Christmas jokes, is unlike any smile I’ve ever seen.
Amongst all the pitch perfect line readings of Harrison, I want to take this opportunity to commend the ITYSL directors and editors for knowing how to utilise the camera in enhancing jokes. Harrison complaining that she didn’t ask for the printer for Christmas, followed immediately by a shaky cam zoom-in on the printer, is immaculate comedy filmmaking. And its moments like that: where performance, writing and directing are all working perfectly in tandem to sell the silliness of the ITYSL universe that make this unlike any other sketch show.
Best line: “I know that. I’m not stupid. I’m smarter than you”
3. Qualstarr Trial
The best sketch of season 2 takes a typical ITYSL premise: another Robinson weirdo with far too much unearned confidence, but elevates it with a unique format. This time, Robinson has a weird hat. But it’s having a professional solicitor read out the details of Robinson’s latest temper tantrum involving said hat, during a deposition into insider trading, that elevates his usual buffoonery. All of this is complimented with present day Robinson (still with hat) providing his reactions in the audience, and trying desperately to offload the dice he usually keeps in his pockets. Also - that hat is just by itself incredibly funny. By simply just adding some camouflage flaps onto a fedora, the crew of ITYSL have crafted one of the single funniest props in comedy history.
Best moment: That first reveal of the dumb-founded Robinson and his hat is a perfect visual needle drop.
2. Baby of the Year
The greatest strength in ‘Baby of the Year’ is how the writers find so many different ways to make us laugh within the one central concept. It’s not one joke taken to it’s most logical extreme, but rather several variations on a truly funny theme. Sam Richardson is the jewel of the sketch (despite how cute the babies are) and everything about his opening song is immaculate, especially the strange and sudden shift to hard rock for the line: “look at their toes like so many curled canned shrimp”. Following that, we are then treated to a smorgasbord of incredible baby names, the concept of a ‘bad boy’ contestant (Bart Harley Jarvis) that gets the audience so riled up to scream expletives, and a judge revealing that the entire competition is rigged due to some unnecessary oral. The speech by the judge is the least funny part of this sketch, which demonstrates how good it is because every repetition of ‘the oral’ is funnier than the last. And it’s all capped off by a genius “in memoriam” segment playing both off of the joke of Richardson’s assurance that all the dead people were adults not babies when they died, and the decision to include the cause of death for all the people being mourned. It’s a brilliant capper on one of the most varied and chaotic sketches of the show.
Best line: “Mr Jarvis is one of the most aggressive babies I’ve ever met. He has a massive underbite and completely flat back of the head”. Something about having a medical professional completely buy into the idea of an asshole baby, while the crowd loudly agrees is the shining moment of the sketch. Either that or the punchline: “Tiny Dinky Daffy: Pancaked by Drunk Dump Truck Driver” once again demonstrating the show’s literary brilliance when it comes to awkward alliteration.
Focus Group
We finally made it. After rewatching the show three different times to make this list, and continuously moving the placements around, especially in the top 15, it was always one sketch that stayed strong. That reliably made me laugh at least once in all of my rewatches. And it was the sketch that when I first watched the show, finally secured my unabashed admiration for the creator’s ability to find the most beautiful bizarre untapped weirdos. This is what brings us to the Ruben Rabasa in the room. Of all the weird old people that populate the ITYSL universe, Rabasa remains the undisputed king. From his very first line, which is almost unintelligible on the first watch, he commands your attention. It’s mesmeric. You brain almost doesn’t even want you to believe that such an odd little man exists. Not all of us get to live out the glorious purpose that we were placed on Earth for, but Rabasa has. It was for him to play Focus Group Man #1.
Best line: It’s almost impossible to choose, but I do love: “Too small. So that when you get in there, you think: If the steering wheel fly off, I’m toast”.
With that, we come to the end of the ranking of ITYSL sketches. I hope you at least mostly agree with me. And if you don’t comment below so that you can debate with me on the more controversial placements of some of these sketches.
BONUS: Every Episode Ranked
I Think You Should Leave Episode Rankings
I’m Wearing One of Their Belts Right Now (S01E04) - A
They Said That To Me At A Dinner (S02E01) - A
We Used to Watch This At My Old Work (S01E06) - A
It’s the Cigars You Smoke That Are Gonna Give You Cancer (S01E03) - A-
I Can Do Whatever I Want (S03E02) - A-
You Sure About That? You Sure About That’s Why? (S02E03) - A-
That Was The Earth Telling Me I’m Supposed To Do Something Great (S03E01) - A-
Everyone Just Needs to Be More In The Moment (S02E04) - A-
Has This Ever Happened to You? (S01E01) - A-
Don’t Just Say Relax, Actually Relax (S03E05) - A-
Cut To: We’re Chatting About This At Your Bachelor Party (S03E03) - B+
When I First Thought of This You Didn’t Even Have Hands Up There - You Were Just Walking Straight Up The Wall (S03E06) - B+
They Have a Cake Shop There Susan Where The Cakes Just look Stunning (S02E02) - B+
Oh Crap, A Bunch more Bad Stuff Just Happened (S01E04) - B+
Didn’t You Say There Was Gonna Be Five people At This Table? (S02E05) - B
I Need A Wet Paper Towel (S02E06) - B
Thanks For Thinking They Are Cool (S01E02) - B-
So Now Every Time I’m About To Do Something I Really Wanna Do, I Ask Myself “Wait A Minute, What Is This?” (S03E04) - B-