Why Tuca and Bertie is Horror

There’s a show I saw on Adult Swim sometimes. It’s called Tuca and Bertie. It recently got cancelled. That guy from the Walking Dead is also attached to it as well — Steven Yeun I think.

I was first introduced to it when I was visiting C_________. It was hotter than shit in the middle of June. I couldn’t sleep, was staying in a Home2 hotel (which is peak corporate hideous millennial color scheme/design itself) and worse yet, not drunk. I was laying there under my sheets like the guy in Michael Gira’s The Consumer. Just a severed pigs head laying there on the pillow and letting the TV beam its images into my skull. Suffering, agitated, bored.

Yet what I saw manifest in the show began to intrigue me. What I was seeing on the television reflected the gentrified town I would soon be living in (and now am).

Tuca and Bertie are archetypal characters. They are both 30, and moreover, neither have their shit together — just like millions of millennials living in America. The intended audience of the show.

Tiffany Haddish and Ali Wong, the main voices behind the show, themselves almost fall into this range, both being around 40. Haddish and Wong are your typical run of the mill State Jesters. Unfunny, unoriginal, and moreover, unrelatable.

Before you chastise me for “oh you can’t say that b/c they are women and women are good etc.” First off, I don’t really care, but second, comedians, male and female and non-binary kinfolk are not funny anymore. Comedy does not exist in totalitarian states. They all have the same act. Women do the “I have a vagina,” white people do the “aww gee aww shucks I’m a dweeb,” black people do the “white people be like,” etc. etc. It’s just formulaic Bowlderized US-regime drivel. I fucking hate it, and it if you like it, I hate you too. Not really, but, get better taste.

So Tuca and Bertie is not funny. But it’s not bad in the sense that it’s a bad show (it is a bad show) but rather, it’s interesting nonetheless.

Boomers always called us entitled, and while the counterpoints to this criticism about our economic future and overall situation are accurate and have been done to death, there is one thing they are correct about. And that is an extended adolescence.

Maybe Tuca and Bertie is the crystallizing of Adorno or something. All art sucks, you suck, everything sucks, but once the revolution happens, it’ll all be okay.

I like Adorno.

What Tuca and Bertie articulates perfectly, is this idea. You’re a millennial, you’re 30, your life sucks. But so does ours!

We take comfort in that, I suppose, in the flickering opulent light of the television. But as Trow would say, that only works for a moment. Then we’re left alone again. Like when you have a good lay, then wake up the next morning and she’s gone. And she took your favorite hoodie.