It’s too bad that anytime a ridiculous character is out in the real world interacting with regular people, the shorthand comparison nowadays is always Borat. Sacha Baron Cohen didn’t invent the comedic device (I think it was actually some caveman), but he certainly found a lot of success with it. Some of Dr. Steve Brule’s outings have echoed that same approach, and even though I assume the “normal” people are in on the joke, tonight’s episode was interesting because it strayed closer to another of Cohen’s creations: Brüno.
The best payoff into this detour occurs about halfway through, when a leather-clad and extremely drunk Brule excuses himself to use a gay bar’s bathroom because he has to go “from both ends.” Next thing we see is Steve on the crapper having explosive diarrhea and puking all over himself, and saying to no one in particular, “What the heck was in that whiskey?” After sleeping it off on the bathroom floor, he emerges, caked-on vomit all over his chin, tie, and jacket to find his new friends in the motorcycle gang called “the bears” have all left—cue some schmaltzy sad piano and Brule realizing that his “friends” have abandoned him. Even worse, he decides they’re hunks, his most hated of enemies. Somehow, these couple of seconds manage to be legitimately heartbreaking. Not that we’ve really seen Brule hang out with friends, but for a solid 10 minutes we see Brule doing some serious soul searching as he tries to come to grips with the fact that he has no friends. Even worse, he hung out with hunks.
This was the second pack of hunks Brule hung out with. Earlier, he heads down to Friends: The Club Of Men as he calls it, even though that clearly isn’t the name of the establishment. Brule’s palling around with a bunch of male strippers backstage, and as Brüno might, he keeps trying to wrestle with them. “I can’t believe I had stumblerd into a whole group of the best friends I could ever have,” Brule beams in the narration. They all seem to be getting a kick out of Steve, but they shoot down his suggestion that the club institute treehouse rules: “No girls allowed!” Basically, Dr. Steve is completely clueless, which is great, because he proceeds to join them onstage for what he thinks is an “aerobics routine.” We never see any schlong (and for some reason, I was completely expecting to in this episode), but Brule insists that some of the women there wanted to see his dingus, and as the male strippers are dutifully gyrating, the doctor is just as dutifully trying to follow along before finally just unbuckling his belt and getting down to his skivvies and white T-shirt. Afterwards, Brule tries to get the strippers to hang out as only friends can, but they also shirk him to hit up a bunch of “women who look like my aunt” for money. The showed a shot of an Asian woman when Brule says this—is Brule’s aunt Asian?
After the encounter with the bears, Brule takes the bus back to the studio and just stares indifferently at the camera before flicking a bouquet off a pedestal. “Maybe I’m derpressed,” he sighs. “Let’s check it out.” In the Doctor To Doctor segment, he asks a psychologist how she’d be able to tell if someone was depressed, going through the motions of pretending he needs help diagnosing a friend of his. It isn’t long, though, before Brule gives up the charade and, as we’ve seen him do so many times before, just lose complete and total interest in the interview. Instead of dozing or giggling, he just gets up and drags himself out of the studio. “Who even cares about this stupid show, just a bunch of hunks watching this anyway.” Cue the piano music again, this time with a bluesy saxophone in the mix.