As a person who was not amused by raunchy cartoons in the past, I’ve found myself being converted in my old age. Maybe the simple concepts act as a nice break from the complicated act of adulting, or maybe sense of humor has just gotten more silly. But, Netflix original series Big Mouth has stolen my heart, not only for its tongue-in-cheek silliness, but also for its delicious honesty about a topic that has historically been shrouded with awkward silence–puberty.
Big Mouth is the creation of dynamic duo Nick Kroll (Kroll Show) and Andrew Goldberg (Family Guy). The series follows a group of suburban teenagers as they not so gracefully go through the trials and tribulations of puberty. The fictitious element that comes with making the series a cartoon gives the creators license to write about teenagers undergoing sexual awakenings, swearing heavily, and experimenting with masturbation for the first time. The plot lines of the show manage to push the envelope while at the same time bring a refreshingly real sex positive perspective on a crucial point in growing up.
The show also accurately encapsulates the tribulations of puberty in that no two characters’ experiences are the same. There’s Andrew (John Mulaney), who’s learning about relationships and experiencing his first inklings of heartbreak, Jessi (Jessi Klein), the hormonal but unapologetic tomboy counterpart to the two male leads, and Nick (Kroll), Andrew and Jessi’s pint-sized bestfriend that not so patiently awaits for his tango with puberty.
Although the show snagged a stellar cast (including comedy all stars Jenny Slate, Fred Armisen, and Jordan Peele, to name a few), the true stars of the show are the personified forms of puberty, aka the ‘Hormone Monsters’, voiced brilliantly by Nick Kroll and Maya Rudolph in over-the-top, laugh-out-loud vibrato that is oh-so representative of the over-the-top, hormone enraged teenager. The monsters follow their respective teenager around in their everyday lives, acting as humorous commentators and directors of said teenager’s thoughts. Andrew’s hormone monster (Kroll) rages on, urging him to destroy love interest Jessi for breaking his heart, while Jessi’s (Rudolph) counsels her to be perpetually angry with her mom, and wail through her tears to angsty Lana del Rey. The hormone monsters act as a metaphor to the thoughts and feelings we endured in tweenage years, and put a finger on the innateness we frustratingly couldn’t back then, which provides a level of comfort under the humor.
My personal favorite part of the show is the impartiality it shows to puberty experiences in terms of gender. While the male experience of puberty and sexual awakening is typically celebrated in culture, the emergence of female sexuality is almost always shunned to the taboo pile. However, in Big Mouth this isn’t the case, and both are faced with equal amounts of honesty and celebration. Female lead Jessi experiences the accurate ‘inconvenient arrival of the first period’ on a school trip to the statue of liberty, and is forced to wrap a ‘9/11 Memorial’ wall hanging from the gift shop around her waist. She also experiments with masturbation, and she is met with her super-friendly talking vagina, voiced by the wonderful Kristen Wiig. Their polite exchange pushes an uncomfortable level of raunchy, but is laugh out funny nonetheless.
As all adult comedy shows must have, there is a level of absurdity, which is brought in by the ghost of jazz legend Duke Ellington (Jordan Peele) who haunts the attic of Nick’s house. He provides the Grandmother Willow-esque character that grants unexpected wisdom to the boys, including a helping Andrew figure out whether or not he’s gay, with the aid of his famous ghost-friends Socrates, Freddie Mercury, and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Part of me wonders how the character of ‘Ghost Duke Ellington’ came to be, if it’s some sort of cryptic statement. But, based on the rest of the silliness that makes up this series, I can only assume that Nick Kroll, Andrew Goldberg, and Jordan Peele were sitting around at a barbecue and Peele’s spot on impression organically came out, to which Kroll and Goldberg insisted upon putting it in the show, whether or not it really made sense.
Each episode’s runtime is about twenty minutes, so you fly right through. I finished the whole season in about a week, which isn’t necessarily the kind of show you could procrastinate with for a long period of time for, but it would be a perfect series to knock out over thanksgiving break (or if you’re feeling extra adventurous, in a weekend). The recommended snack pairing for this show would have to be something sweet, because it’s only appropriate to #throwback to the tween days, when we could double fist bags of Skittles on the regular, pull all nighters, and not totally regret it in the morning.