Created by Joe Cappa, Haha, You Clowns has the hallmarks of a ’90s sitcom: a well-meaning dad who’s occasionally at a loss, soft guitar riffs as musical transitions, the butt cut, and earnestness to spare. The premise is a mix of Full House and Home Improvement: Widowed weatherman Tom Campbell does his best to raise three large adult sons somewhere in the Midwest. The storylines could have been plucked from any number of Miller-Boyett shows—when the eldest large son Preston (Cappa, who voices all of the Campbell men) loses his bomber jacket, he has a brief identity crisis. Middle child Tristan starts to feel less special when his brothers horn in on his new hobby: improv. Duncan, the baby of the family who still stands shoulder to shoulder with the rest of these hulking figures, plans the world’s least consequential coverup after he accidentally over-waters their late mother’s prized petunias.
With its made-to-look-homemade animation style and the increasingly bizarre situations faced by the Campbells, Haha, You Clowns fits right into the Adult Swim lineup, recalling some of its earliest hits like Home Movies and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. But its animated family also follows in the footsteps of the first family of animation: The Simpsons, whose character design was also a bit off-putting in their earliest appearances on The Tracey Ullman Show. (In that case, though, their creator Matt Groening handed off sketches to animators with the assumption that they’d refine the drawings. They did not. And now you know the rest of the story.) Both The Simpsons and Haha, You Clowns are populated with archetypes that they use to subvert classic TV storytelling; the former puts the “nuclear” in “nuclear family,” while the latter centers the kind of meathead who would show up in a single episode of Boy Meets World and surprise Cory Matthews with their soulfulness.
Cappa, who co-writes episodes with his brother Dave, has cited The Simpsons as an inspiration, but he didn’t set out to make a spiritual successor to one of the best animated series and longest-running scripted shows of all time. Yet it’s hard to ignore how much the shows have in common, especially in how they utilize the animation medium to create heightened realities grounded in real heart. Bart, Lisa, and Maggie Simpson remaining children for decades both maintains continuity and sets up some cognitive dissonance; Haha, You Clowns is only one season in (though two more have already been ordered), but it offers its own twist on the agelessness of animated children. Instead of being old souls in kids’ bodies, they’re teens with adult proportions and childlike wonder and enthusiasm.
Consider “Therapy,” the episode submitted for Emmy consideration. Preston, Tristan, and Duncan share their trepidation about the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday—presumably their first since the death of their mother—with their therapist, who is about to go on a cruise, leaving them without part of their support network in a time of need. What are three giant teen boys who don’t want to trouble their father, who’s doing his best but whose cooking can’t compare to Mom’s, to do? They go see Justin (Justin Theroux, in a role written specifically for him), a therapist at Empowermen (or is it EmpowerMen?) who either isn’t buying their graciousness about their father’s minor flaw or is just harboring resentment toward his own father for being too hard on him. As Justin’s efforts to “expose” Tom as a bad cook—and therefore, bad father—grow more unhinged, the boys exercise ever greater empathy for their therapist and their dad, who is able to cook a tasty “turkey” after all. The season-one finale “Improv” is more surreal and points to the show’s darker potential (and, okay, is somewhat funnier for it), but “Therapy” is arguably more representative of the show’s humor and ethos. All aesthetic distinctions aside, what Cappa has ultimately made is the latest addition to the pantheon of big-hearted TV comedy, which doesn’t get much bigger, or more winning, than this.
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