“I’ve always found copulatory ties funny,” Nick Kroll told me over lunch at Leon’s in Manhattan one April afternoon. For those unfamiliar with the term, Kroll is happy to explain this common incident in canine coitus. “Have you ever seen dogs can get kind of stuck together, and they try to wiggle their way out and they’re facing away from each other, and you’re like, ‘What is happening there, exactly?’”
Somehow, despite my years of dog ownership, this phenomenon had escaped me. But I could immediately see the comedic appeal. Kroll did as well: “So I was like, ‘That feels like a fun story bit to play with that’s specific to the animal world,’” he said.
“The Copulatory Tie” is both the title of the first episode of Kroll’s new Netflix animated show, “Mating Season,” and the situation a frisky raccoon named Ray (voiced by Kroll) finds himself in with a female skunk voiced by Sarah Silverman. As Ray tries to help his best friend get over a breakup, his would-be one-night stand tags along, connected at the pelvis. “Release me from your vaginal clutches!” Ray demands of his skunk hookup in one scene.
This is signature Kroll.
Kroll, 47, was once best known for playing quirky side characters on popular sitcoms like “Parks and Recreation” and “Community,” his starring role as Rodney Ruxin on “The League” and his many self-created personalities on Comedy Central’s “Kroll Show.”
Things changed with the 2017 release of the animated show “Big Mouth,” which he co-created and starred in for eight seasons. The show became one of Netflix’s hit animated shows. And because it was animated, it went to places no live-action show could dream of. Where else could you find a talking vulva who gives fully guided anatomical tours?
The spinoff, “Human Resources,” followed, and now with “Mating Season” Kroll is entrenched as the leader of a booming genre — gleefully raunchy adult animation.
When Kroll looks at the progression of these series, it comes down to how he and the team wanted to depict, and of course joke about, real human experiences — even and especially in the case of “Mating Season.” Kroll compares “Mating Season” to a “hangout show” in the vein of “Friends,” “Seinfeld” and “How I Met Your Mother.” “There’s always a great version of that show, but hadn’t really been done in animation in the same kind of way,” he said.
The fun of “Mating Season” is that it takes familiar dating tropes and cleverly places them in the animal world. Ray is the clueless, promiscuous bro, lovable and emotionally stunted with an egregious Oedipal complex. Josh the bear (Zach Woods) is a sensitive, freshly dumped beta male desperately afraid of having to go through his next hibernation alone. Penelope (Sabrina Jalees) is a dorky lesbian fox with absolutely no game. And Fawn the doe (June Diane Raphael) is the token straight girl who has to deal with the animal-world equivalents of typical heterosexual dating scenarios.
The series mixes various types and registers of humor: quirky situational humor, pop culture references and that “Friends” brand of cozy buddy comedy. And there are, of course, plenty of tawdry sex jokes.
The shift to animated comedy made sense to Kroll. It has been a constant throughout his career with voice acting roles in movies and series like “Sing,” “The Addams Family” and “The Life & Times of Tim.” And he’s more than happy with being the new king of raunchy comedy. “I would love to do this forever,” he said.
Netflix was still relatively early in its embrace of original shows and movies when “Big Mouth” premiered. It was an innovative, and daring, series for the streamer, a coming-of-age sitcom about a class of preteen students, including a late bloomer named Nick Birch (voiced by Kroll), dealing with all the embarrassing trials and tribulations of puberty. The risky stunt of the show was its graphic depiction of all the body changes that occur during this occasionally horrific adolescent time. There were sentient penises and vaginas. There were scatological jokes. There was masturbation. So much masturbation.
Part of the reason the series was so relatable was because many of the stories were taken from the writers’ real-life experiences. Kroll teamed up with his childhood friend Andrew Goldberg, as well as the writer-producers Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett, to see where they could take the comedy based on their personal stories and their experience in comedy writing. Goldberg had already spent years working as a writer and producer with Seth McFarlane on “Family Guy,” the long-running adult animated series that was a trailblazer for what you could get away with on TV.
Kroll also attributes some of the success of “Big Mouth” just to good timing.
“We were coming on at Netflix when they were really chasing people to do what they wanted to do in a risky, sort of eye-catching way,” Kroll said. “We got to come out with something that no one had really ever been able to do before, which was a really honest, at times graphic, exploration of puberty, sexuality, human development, adolescence.”
There did seem to be something in the air around that time in streaming TV. A few years into “Big Mouth”’s eight-season run, some other starkly honest series about sex and adolescence premiered, like “Pen15” and “Sex Education.”
But these were live-action shows, and it’s worth distinguishing how much of a gulf there can be between a raunchy live-action comedy about sex and a raunchy animated comedy about sex. Animation is a medium that allows more risks, more impossibilities, more explicit renderings of body humor of all shapes, sizes and flavors.
What set “Big Mouth” apart as an adult animated comedy was its diligence in educating its audience as much as entertaining it. Yes, it was full of totally absurd and memorable bits — Hugh Jackman as a penis version of himself stands out — but it was also about normalizing our bodies and representing the diversity of bodies that exist in the world.
“We found that the more emotional and honest the stories get, the more big, crazy, hard jokes we could do,” Kroll said of this balancing act. “And the more big, crazy hard jokes we do, the more we could also explore a more emotional story. It gives you real latitude to do both.”
As fans of such long-running series like “South Park” and “Family Guy” can attest to, vulgar animated shows aren’t new.
What is new, however, is the recent wave of these shows and movies with graphic humor focusing in large part on sex and sexuality. Kroll’s trio is just one of many seductive options in the genre. If you surf through the streaming platforms right now, you might see a madcap animal orgy scene on Netflix’s “Fixed”; very horny ghosts and aliens on the anime hit “Dan Da Dan”; the ribald anthropomorphic foodstuffs of “Sausage Party: Foodtopia”; or hear hilarious vulgarity from Whoopi Goldberg as a feral cat on “Kevin.”
Though each of these series has its own style and humor, taken together they form a trend of animated series that all, at their root, draw from a fundamental misconception about cartoons: that they are targeted toward juvenile audiences. At their best these shows cleverly mine the tension between what many of us still reflexively assume the medium is meant to offer — the generally wholesome family-friendly cartoons we grew up watching — and obscene, expletive-ridden humor. The result is entertainment that pushes boundaries in a way that its live-action counterpart can’t, for risk of being deemed too exploitative of the actors or too pornographic for audiences.
At lunch Kroll mentioned a familiar tradition: sneaking episodes of the coveted “mature” show when you’re a kid. As the youngest of four, Kroll says he was exposed to crude jokes and explicit language much earlier than his siblings. He noted “South Park” as an example, and many of us of a certain age can remember the rebellious rush felt by kids coming to elementary school repeating what they heard Cartman say on TV the previous night.
At some point during the run of “Big Mouth,” Kroll realized that there weren’t just some younger viewers sneaking his show like kids used to sneak “South Park”; there was a whole generation that came of age just as the coming-of-age series was at its peak. “What I started to hear at the end of ‘Big Mouth’ was, ‘I grew up on Big Mouth,” he said, adding: “They watched in high school or in college and now they’re adults.”
This is the lasting appeal of more risqué adult animation like the kind Kroll specializes in: Whether you’re watching as a young viewer or an older viewer, the show still has that transgressive appeal. To take a medium that allows for impossibilities, exaggerations and whimsy, and test how daring such a vehicle can be for jokes about sex, love and bodies, is to cross the gap between the imagination of a child and the humor of an adult.
And while Kroll appreciates all of that, he’s also content to keep it simple: “The truth is, you just gotta do your best to write a [expletive] funny show.” And sometimes that will include a humiliating death by genital maiming.
Maya Phillips is an arts and culture critic for The Times.
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