Why "I Think You Should Leave" Is the Most Underrated Comedy Show on the Internet

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Howdy, Marketer! 

OTT platforms now aim to create content that can be consumed along with scrolling on phone or multitasking – the “second screen” phenomenon. (Source)

Yet, comedy shows often have higher retention because of multiple factors (which we will see in a minute).

An amazing example of this is the show I Think You Should Leave. 

From a pure marketing standpoint, this show has done something that brands with actual budgets would kill for: it built a community so devoted that the audience does the marketing themselves, endlessly and for free.

So let's talk about what's actually happening here, why it works, and what you can steal from it.

Today's Treasure Trove

• What the Show Actually Is

• Who Watches I Think You Should Leave

• The Marketing Strategies 

  • The content IS the marketing

  • Community as distribution

  • Netflix as a "Silent Partner" 

• Wrap-Up

What the Show Actually Is

Instagram (fan community): 939K followers

Reddit (subreddit): 363K members

I Think You Should Leave is a Netflix sketch comedy show created by Tim Robinson - a former SNL writer - alongside Zach Kanin. 

The sketches are short, bizarre, and deliberately uncomfortable. There's no clean resolution. Nobody learns a lesson. Everyone is simply unhinged.

The real audience lives in memes, clips, Reddit threads, and group chats - which one can say is a more durable kind of presence than follower counts anyway.

Who Watches I Think You Should Leave

The primary audience is millennials and Gen Z who are digitally native, extremely online, and fluent in meme culture. 

The comedy is weird enough, niche enough, and uncomfortable enough that casual viewers often bounce off it. And that's fine. The people who get it feel like they've found their people. 

There's a tribal quality to being a fan of this show - it acts as a social filter. 

This is the foundation of every cult brand ever built. You don't appeal to everyone. You appeal intensely to the right people.

The Marketing Strategies 

Before we talk about the show’s marketing, I wanna talk about the genre - absurdist comedy.

Absurdism as a philosophy is the idea that humans are hardwired to search for meaning, but the universe has none to offer. 

Absurdist comedy sits in the chaos and laughs.

You expect a social situation to resolve, and instead it escalates into something completely unhinged. It breaks your pattern recognition. 

In ITYSL, the absurdism usually stems from something real. 

The surreal escalation works because the emotional core is completely human. You laugh because you recognize yourself in it, even when the behavior is objectively insane.

This is also why it spreads the way it does. Comedy researchers call it "benign violation" - something that feels wrong but safe enough to enjoy. ITYSL lives exactly in that zone.

Now let’s look at some of its marketing strategies.

The content IS the marketing

The sketches are built in a way that naturally generates clips, quotes, and memes. They're short enough to share whole, weird enough to create conversation, and specific enough in their absurdity that they lodge in the brain.

Tim Robinson made something genuinely strange and committed to it completely. But the byproduct is content that is almost purpose-built for social media even though it wasn't designed with social media in mind. 

Meme economics. 

ITYSL gets memed indefinitely. 

Sketches from Season 1 are still being referenced years later because the imagery is so specific and odd that it becomes genuinely versatile. The baby of the year sketch. lol.

In fact, there’s a website called I Think You Should Meme which is a searchable database for all memes from the show.

It’s no surprise then that a meme page dedicated to the show has 41.4K followers.

They have become cultural shorthand that fans use to communicate emotions and situations in their real lives. That is an incredibly powerful form of brand integration into daily life.

Community as distribution

The subreddit, the fan accounts, the Twitter threads, the Discord servers - none of these are run by Netflix. They exist because the fans built them. And these communities are active. 

Every new season announcement travels through these channels faster and more authentically than any paid media could achieve. The community is the distribution network, and it self-maintains.

Netflix as a "Silent Partner" 

They understand that spoiler culture doesn't exist for ITYSL. You can see the funniest part of a sketch on Instagram and it actually makes you more likely to watch the full episode to see how the character got to that level of insanity. 

They allow - and likely encourage - the proliferation of "Out of Context" accounts. By not being precious about their IP and allowing fans to chop up the content into five-second reaction gifs, they've ensured that the show stays top-of-mind even during the two-year gaps between seasons. It’s a strategy of ubiquity over exclusivity.

Wrap-Up

What ITYSL does - completely by accident, or maybe by instinct - is the thing every marketer is trying to manufacture: genuine, lasting, community-driven relevance. 

It commits fully to a specific, weird, uncomfortable vision and trusts that the right people will find it.

The lesson is that when you make something genuinely specific the audience that connects with it connects hard. They become advocates, distributors, creators in their own right. 

You stop having a fanbase and start having a community.

✌️,

Tom from Marketer Gems