Funeral services have been the settings of some of the most poignant screen experiences in pop culture — the reading of WH Auden's "Stop All The Clocks/Funeral Blues" in Four Weddings And A Funeral. Bojack Horseman's dark, funny monologue in the "Free Churro" episode. The slapstick shenanigans of the Derry Girls (and the Wee English Fella) at Erin and Orla's grand-aunt's open casket service (stolen heirloom earrings, a kitchen meltdown, 'special' scones, and a clogged toilet all play an unexpected part in this season 2 segment). Or the time Gob Bluth sets up a coffin trick illusion as an eulogy to his presumed-to-be-dead father, in Arrested Development. (Okay, perhaps poignant isn't the right adjective for all of these examples). But, one might argue, “Coffin Flop” tops them all.
“Coffin Flop” has the Corncob TV team stationed at funerals all over America, capturing thousands of hours of footage just so they can get you the scoop when one of them goes awry. In the creator’s own words: “It’s just hours and hours of footage of real people falling out of coffins at funerals.”
The parameters for Funeral Fail Footage that makes the cut are simple: the deceased must fall out of their coffin en route to burial. Is it an indictment of the funeral services industry that tries to cut corners (or bottoms) on coffins? An attempt to put poor quality lumber suppliers in the dock? Belated body shaming? A satirical critique of the human need to impose meaning on the meaningless? Or is it just a winning formula that has got Corncob TV its highest ratings ever? Like life's biggest questions, this is something we will never have a conclusive answer to.
“Coffin Flop” is well in keeping with the insanity that permeates every bit of the Tim Robinson-led series it belongs to — I Think You Should Leave (seasons 1 and 2 are on Netflix). Tim Robinson wrings humour out of situations in which there shouldn't be any, and infuses pathos into settings that you’d have been hard-pressed to imagine.
Take the case of “Prank Show” in which Robbins plays Carmine Laguzio, an actor who has a prank show on reality TV. He puts on his costume and sets out to pull off some good old pranks, only to have an existential meltdown in the middle of a mall.
Or “Brian’s Hat”, where the evidence in an insider trading case — the messages exchanged between two employees who are the defendants on trial — turns into a commentary on a colleague named Brian who has a penchant for wearing a weird hat (that despite his beliefs to the contrary, he cannot roll down his arms like Fred Astaire) and keeping a set of dice in his pocket.
This is a world where you pay more for a shirt depending on how complicated the pattern of its fabric is, and pants are designed with damp looking spots on the crotch to deflect questions should any bathroom misdirection occur. Where a man dressed as a hot dog can drive a car made to look like a hot dog into a menswear store and trigger a tense little whodunnit. Or when a reformed asshole becomes obsessed with whether or not a wailing baby knows how much he's changed, and that indeed, if the baby knows that people can change.
Funerals are heartrending, exhausting, surreal, bittersweet. If the deceased wasn't well-liked (or you know, was the figurehead for an oppressive, exploitative system that left swathes of the world in shambles — and never even said sorry), then one imagines other emotions register their presence as well. Grief doesn't follow a linear progression or adhere to any cues. There may be protocols and rituals that shape how we mourn, but there is no guidebook for navigating grief. Nothing that prepares you for the finality and unchangeability of death, the fact that there is nothing you can say or do or bargain away to reverse its effect.
Since that's the case — “Coffin Flop” seems to say — maybe all we can do to ease the pain a little bit, is laugh.
(Oh, and the Queen’s “death”, yeah, we’re taking that with several grains of salt.)
