Funny Jokes Bojack 4 Season Meme
'BoJack Horseman': Here Are the Best Animal Gags
The Netflix comedy's animal-joke architect shares his favorites, and discusses why "the fact that we get so stupid lets us earn when we get so serious."
Over six seasons, "BoJack Horseman," which released its final episodes Friday on Netflix, evolved from a scathing Hollywood satire into a more expansive and often disquieting exploration of depression, addiction and human morality.
But on the fringes of all that, it was also a show about animals doing funny things. As BoJack, the self-destructive celebrity horse voiced by Will Arnett, negotiated the dark corners of Hollywoo and his own psyche, a steady stream of peripheral visual gags — puns, pop culture references, the occasional cocaine-addled lemur — made his various descents more palatable.
"The fact that we get so stupid lets us earn when we get so serious," said Mike Hollingsworth, a co-executive producer and supervising director. "Without the silly animal things, it would get too maudlin."
After Raphael Bob-Waksberg, the show's creator, and the writers finish the script for an episode, the visual jokes are added during the storyboard phase "when we can feel the pacing," Hollingsworth said. "They all have to take a back seat to the story."
Hollingsworth was a stand-up comic who also drew cartoons for publications like L.A. Weekly before he moved into animation. He has been with "BoJack" from the beginning, directing the pilot among other episodes, and serving as a primary architect for "the deep-cut animal things."
"I'm basically a gag man, a reincarnation of Mike Maltese," he said, referring to the cartoon artist and writer best known for his work with the Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones.
In a recent interview, Hollingsworth discussed some of his favorite deep-cut animal things from throughout the run of "BoJack Horseman."
Say When
When the script for the show's second episode seemed to start too abruptly, Hollingsworth inserted a quick joke at the top, a spin on the classic "Say when" construct. "It's one of the oldest setups," he said. "I felt like I was ripping off Winsor McCay."
The scene, which found a bartending pelican pouring a river of booze as BoJack wearily watched, became one of the show's first widely shared moments. "I see that GIF so much all over the place," Hollingsworth said. A ridiculous portrait of self-loathing and bottomless thirst, it also functioned as a kind of mission statement for the series as a whole.
"It's depression meets comedy," Hollingsworth said.
A Diner Named Desire
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Puns of all kinds are core to the "BoJack" experience, and one of the series's most groaningly brilliant came during a Season 2 scene in a '50s-themed restaurant. The bartender? A snugly T-shirted trophy fish named Marlin Brando, of course, but the twist came as he delivered the three beers on his tray:
"Stella!"
"Stella!"
"Corona Light."
"Raphael told me everyone complimented him on that one after Season 2 came out," Hollingsworth said. "And he had to say, 'Thanks, but that wasn't my joke.'"
Prehensile Party Tricks
"It's You," an episode in the third season, found BoJack throwing a rager at his house to celebrate what he thought was an Oscar nomination. The party was a visual smorgasbord of dissipated animal behavior, and offered Hollingsworth the chance to finally bring in an aye-aye, a bizarre-looking nocturnal lemur he'd been wanting to get into the show, for a quick foreground joke. Aye-ayes have incredibly long, thin middle fingers, which they use in the wild to find bugs but that at a Hollywoo bash might also work for … well, you can probably see where this is going.
"We had him with this big, fat line of cocaine," Hollingsworth said.
Celebralopod
One of the show's most acclaimed episodes was a Season 3 underwater fantasia that included very little dialogue. The installment found BoJack attending the Pacific Ocean Film Fest, which led to him getting mocked by a walrus chauffeur, fleeing an angry bodega-owning shark (Tim Jaws) and delivering a litter of baby sea horses, among other animal gags.
"But the one I remember was this celebrity octopus who had all of these autograph seekers surrounding him," Hollingsworth said. "He signed them all at the same time by blowing out a big cloud of ink."
Easy but Funny
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"BoJack" aimed to avoid obvious animal gags. "I was always telling the writers, 'We've got to get past the tall giraffes and fat hippos,'" Hollingsworth said.
But that didn't mean he was above the occasional piece of low-hanging fruit. One such example came in a Season 2 scene of workers building a set, which included a brief shot of a hammerhead shark pounding nails with its face.
Easy? Sure, but it's also one of the jokes "BoJack" fans most frequently bring up, Hollingsworth said. "It's like, I'm glad you like it but it's not my finest work."
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But sometimes an obvious joke can be elevated by its execution. In Season 1, "BoJack" mined gold from a broad premise — cheetahs are fast, sloths are slow — by putting them on treadmills on either side of Princess Caroline (Amy Sedaris) at the gym.
Hollingsworth added that he enjoyed Disney's DMV sloth bit in "Zootopia," which came out a couple of years later, though he noted that a sequence that by definition brings the action to a standstill would never work on television. "In film you can stretch things out a bit longer," he said.
Bad Cat
Early in the show's run, Hollingsworth thought of a riff on one of the oldest clichés in the animal kingdom: a cat stuck in a tree. In this case, an otherwise reasonable businessman kitty is cleareyed about his feline foibles, telling his firefighter rescuers, "Guys, I'm really sorry this keeps happening."
"It was my little New Yorker cartoon," Hollingsworth said.
Bob-Waksberg was less charmed, but "eventually I wore him down," Hollingsworth said. The gag finally appeared in the final season's 13th episode, which premiered on Friday.
"It was a win years in the making," he said.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/arts/television/bojack-horseman-animal-jokes.html
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