Review: Season Three of Big Mouth Proves That, No, P.C. Culture Hasn’t Killed Comedy

The series never shies away from the pleasures and perversities of incipient sexuality.

Big Mouth
Photo: Netflix

Netflix’s Big Mouth is continued evidence against the dubious argument that P.C. culture has made it impossible for comedians to be edgy. As a subject for an animated sitcom, the sex lives of 13-year-olds constitutes an ethical, political, and cultural minefield—one that the graphic and logorrheic Big Mouth gives the impression of approaching blindfolded and in a headlong rush. But there’s a method to its mania: Even while firing an entire volley of cum jokes at viewers every few seconds, the new season covers topics like female masturbation, slut shaming, incel masculinity, biphobia, social media addiction, and the gay teen experience with a heartening frankness that belies its apparent irreverence.

The sixth episode of season three, “How to Have an Orgasm,” not only sees the return of Jessi’s (Jessi Klein) personified vagina (Kristin Wiig), who coaches the teenage girl through the proper digital masturbation procedure, but also features a B plot in which the show’s perpetually horny geek, Andrew (John Mulaney), struggles to take the perfect dick pic to send to his cousin Cherry. Big Mouth never shies away from the pleasures and perversities of incipient sexuality, but perhaps most remarkable about the episode is how it handles young women’s bodies and desire: Deploying a surprise image of a dick for laughs is hardly a new trick for popular adult-oriented comedy, but the series breaks new ground in its willingness to base jokes around a girl’s talking, occasionally clapping vagina. Use your imagination.

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It should be observed that one of the reasons that Big Mouth is able to pull off such an explicit depiction of young teens and their bodies is because its characters aren’t meant to necessarily be taken as seventh graders. They’re unmistakably voiced by adults, and are never quite as childlike as real middle-schoolers can be. Nick (Nick Kroll) may be at seventh-grade emotional maturity levels, wavering between intense sexual insecurity and grandiose masculinist narcissism, but he also possesses a biting humor and sophisticated understanding of the world around him. These children are adult-child hybrids, caricatures drawn up by adult comedians projecting themselves backward into the awkwardness of teenagedom, which makes the show’s frank depiction of underage sexuality a bit less distressing than it could be.

It’s also to the show’s advantage that, no matter how funny such gags can be, there’s nothing prurient about Big Mouth’s depiction of, say, Jessi’s garrulous vagina, or Missy’s (Jenny Slate) recurring sexual fantasy involving a space ship, Nathan Fillion (voiced by the actor himself), and a sexy horse named Gustavo. And one of season three’s best ideas is the formation of an unlikely bond between über-nerd Missy and unreformed slob Jay (Jason Mantzoukas), after Jay incidentally discovers Missy’s erotic fan fiction and the polymorphously perverse pair begin collaborating on the story of Fillion’s equine love affair.

Jay gets some of the best material in the new season in general, with the series jettisoning the “Jay fucks pillows” joke that had long worn thin by the second season’s conclusion, and leaning into more grounded aspects of the character: his squalid and unnourishing home life, his hyperactivity, and his love of magic. A fictional Netflix series—what else?—about a bisexual Canadian magician named Gordy (Martin Short) helps Jay cope with his bisexuality in episode three, “Cellsea,” though when he comes out later, he finds that his classmates are hesitant to accept bi men, even as they go crazy over Ally (Ally Wong), a new girl in school who professes her pansexuality in episode eight, “Rankings.”

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As much as “Cellsea” opens up some of the most fruitful through lines in the season, it also exhibits some of its recurrent weaknesses. Gordy may be amusing, but Big Mouth’s incessant self-reflexive jokes about streaming (the season is dotted with winking praise for Netflix, digs about fellow controversial teens show 13 Reasons Why, and forced HBO Now disses) get a bit tiresome over the course of 11 episodes. Gordy’s late-episode song about the spectrum of human sexuality also points toward the show’s tendency to use musical numbers as a crutch—nowhere more on display than the low-hanging-fruit Florida jokes in the hair-metal song performed by Murray the Hormone Monster (also voiced by Kroll) in episode five, “Florida.”

That said, it’s the musical numbers that make the season’s penultimate episode (“Disclosure the Movie: The Musical!”), in which toxic male teacher Mr. Lizer (Rob Huebel) stages a musical version of the 1994 film Disclosure, such a highlight. The uncomfortable songs about reverse sexual harassment are more thoroughly integrated into the episode’s plot than the season’s previous musical sequences and resonate more with the episode’s themes. Missy finds in the play’s racy (and woefully sexist) material inspiration for a new sexual assertiveness, while Nick’s confidence boost from being cast as “the Michael Douglas character” develops his character’s awkward flirtation with a “big dick energy” performance of masculinity. The teenagers’ negotiation with the distorted representations of wrong-minded pop culture to formulate their own sexual identity rings almost painfully true. “Disclosure the Movie: The Musical!” proves that Big Mouth is at its best when its mile-a-minute humor supports, rather than distracts from, its open exploration of the convulsions of early-teen sexuality.

Score: 
 Cast: Nick Kroll, John Mulaney, Jessi Klein, Jason Mantzoukas, Jenny Slate, Maya Rudolph, Jordan Peele, Fred Armisen, Andrew Rannells, Jessica Chaffin, Ally Wong, Gina Rodriguez, Joe Wengert, Richard Kind, Paula Pell, Chelsea Peretti, Nathan Fillion, Kristen Wiig, Rob Huebel  Network: Netflix

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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