Sproing! Awakening

Like beer, Big Mouth shows that God loves us and wants us to be happy

I haven’t been as delighted to hear any entertainment news during this wretched pandemic as I was to learn last weekend that Big Mouth was starting Season 4. I only caught up with the show last year and was immediately transfixed — by the grotesqueries, certainly, and the sometimes ecstatically wrong jokes — there’s a great one this season about how one of the characters is bummed about 9/11 because one of her mother’s old boyfriends died in it, but not the way you’d think (“You mean he was one of the pilots?” “Well, towards the end, yeah”) — but also because it really nails (ha ha) something about adolescent sexual awakening.

It’s kind of strange that I would find it so, because when I was pubescing, way back in the Middle Ages, the general idea of sex was halfway between a dark, forbidden mystery and a smutty variety show punchline, and I, a socially retarded Catholic schoolboy, was utterly confused and shamed by the whole thing — the unbidden hard-ons in class, the compulsion to beat off whenever I looked at a mail-order catalogue, the hair-raising puberty-wrought changes in interpersonal relationships among my peers. It took me long years to get up to speed, and sometimes I think I still haven’t quite managed.

My assumption has long been that other people, except possibly the ones who grew up to be serial killers, had an easier time of it, and that with each era of sex education and general enlightenment the process got even easier for coming-of-age kids, so that by today the Change is no more of a big deal than pushing out baby teeth.

If Big Mouth is any indication, that isn’t so. It’s made by grown-ups but has the feeling of authentic adolescent anxiety, so at least the young adult creators who were tweens themselves not that long ago (though certainly long after I was) felt that confusion enough that they were inspired to make relieved jokes about it now that that part of life was over for them.

And the jokes do seem relieved — glad to be not only past the physical surges but also past the childhood twilight when for stretches you feel something like adult confidence until the no-funhouse mirror of adolescence suddenly makes the world ugly and throws you into despair and paranoia. The Big Mouth kids have less fun than angst as they move into and through sexual identities and associated crises — Do I really want this experience? Am I really comfortable being seen this way? Does getting what I suddenly want mean losing family, friends, and self-respect?

If that sounds too heavy, there are also fantastically gratuitous jokes and musical numbers about menstruation, masturbation, porn addiction, drugs, and even teen pregnancy, though that one involves a pillow that the hypersexed and maladjusted Jay has been fucking. The pillow’s name is Pam and when she has morning sickness she vomits feathers. Jay is ready to do the right thing even after he finds out the kid (a small pillow) is actually his brother's. Zing! But Pam leaves Jay, so he calls her a bitch and takes up with the bathmat (“Oooh — you’re already wet!”).

Look, as an anonymous New York Times TV movie reviewer/my hero once said, you want Hamlet, read it. The kids have more realistic (though still fantastically rendered) growing-up traumas, too. The new season, for example, introduces anxiety mosquitoes who, in suitably annoying voices and with disturbingly familiar passive-aggressiveness, magnify the kids’ insecurities until they become distracting enough to lead to counterproductive behavior (“They've got inside jokes... say something perfect!”). It’s childhood and it’s a cartoon, so they’re not going to blow it with too much reality, but you can sometimes sense a faint, threatening shadow of where things might go if this weren’t a fantasy and the kids didn’t have sitcom luck.

Fortunately the kids also have their hormone monsters — part satyr, part sleazebag — who encourage them to indulge their new appetites, often with high lack of appropriateness:

Young schlemiel Andrew Glouberman: I think I'm just gonna jerk off and go to sleep.
Hormone Monster: [Into it] What do you want to think about?
Andrew: Uh...
Hormone Monster: Ooh, what about that tall woman from the YMCA? Remember how big her car was?
Andrew: [Dreamily] She had to push her seat so far back.
Hormone Monster: I wonder if she played college volleyball.

They main HMs, Maurice and Connie, are voiced by Nick Kroll and Maya Rudolph and they’re my favorite characters, partly because their sex pep-talks are non-stop, eloquent filth, but mainly because though they’re lacking in discernment, by their limited lights they really have the kids’ best interests at heart. In Season 4 Missy, the nerd offspring of interracial dorks, gets pushed out of her comfort zone — and her nerd overalls — by her own bitchy HM Mona, who steals her dad’s credit card so she can get hotter clothes. And Connie, originally monstress to a girl, eventually transfers to Nick (around the time he is revealed to have tender nipples), who is disturbed and refuses her but later realizes (during a Valentine’s Day party!) that he’s made a mistake:

I've been thinking a lot about you and me and I’m just not gonna fight it anymore... I don’t know why I pushed you away — I guess, I guess I was just scared — but Connie, I love how you take care of me and my tender nipples — I love how you inspire me to jack off! I love how your hair, it’s like hands. I love everything about you because you, Connie, are the one for me — you’re my hormone monstress — that is, of course, if you’ll have me.

I have to say, I teared up a little at that. I love the idea that those primal drives, powerful and frightening as they may be, really are given to us as a gift and, while they may be a hassle, they need not be a plague. And I hope every kid gets the chance I never did, and learns to get through that difficult time of life by establishing a healthy, respectful relationship with their hormone monster.