There’s a particular kind of bravery in making a show about people who are, by most cultural metrics, deeply lame. Ha Ha You Clowns, the new series on Adult Swim that just wrapped its first season, is about three beefy Large Adult Sons who love their girlfriends, their dad, and each other with an almost alarming earnestness. They are dim. They are corny. They are sincere to the point of agonizing cringe—and that’s the point. It’s a show that exists as a bridge between sincerity and the kind of cringiness people nowadays like to hurl as an insult, usually at displays of sincere emotional vulnerability.
It’s hard not to think of King of the Hill, another comedy that treated everyday American life and the people living it as existing at the nexus between reverence and comedy fodder. Ha Ha You Clowns is fascinated by the rhythms and patterns of everyday existence, but not in a Seinfeldian, hyper-specific way. It’s more interested in presenting a moderately unbiased view of a bunch of kindhearted galoots than it is in ruthlessly dissecting their behavior. Even though there’s plenty to dissect (something the boys themselves do later in the first season when they decide to go to therapy).
Every episode ends with a sappy moral lesson explicitly stated by one of its characters, punctuated by cloyingly emotional music befitting a show that, according to its creator Joe Cappa, on Jesse Thorn’s Bullseye podcast, takes heavy inspiration from sappy, melodramatic, sometimes religious, always achingly wholesome programming.
‘Ha Ha You Clowns’ Is ‘King of the Hill’ for Modern Americans, and That’s Awesome
Cappa has described the show in interviews as a parody of extreme, almost self-parodying cinematic displays of sentimentality and wholesomeness, and I don’t disagree. The brothers, while sincere, with their hearts in the right place, are often wrong about everything. And the people they turn to for help or advice—whether it be their weatherman father or their neighbor, real-life professional pool player Jeanette Lee—don’t seem much closer to correct than they are.
Inherent in Ha Ha You Clowns is an acknowledgment that all of this s—t is corny as hell, cringe as f—k, and it may not be fueled by a whole lot of intelligence. But it is kind of nice that there are people like this.
The balance between sincerity and the mockery of sincerity is what makes the show feel necessary in 2026. In an era where “cringe” is often deployed as a shield against vulnerability, Ha Ha You Clowns uses irony as an invitation to laugh at these men, then asks why you’re afraid to resemble them.
The reasons are obvious. They’re lame. They say all the obnoxious public-domain lame things that lame people say. Like when one of Jeannette’s boring tales of rubbing elbows with celebrities, that she frames as salacious, is met with the exact reaction she’s looking for when one of the brothers says the story is “just getting better and better!” It’s not. It’s really, really not. But to them, it’s wild. It’s lame, they are lame, but it’s kind of nice that they aren’t so jaded.
The King of the Hill comparisons are there, though Ha Ha You Clowns is slathered with a little more Adult Swim-style irony. But the humor never punches down, or at least doesn’t punch too low. It feels like siblings making fun of each other: they know each other’s deepest fears and faults, and poke at them gleefully, with no intention to cause serious damage.
Loving Ha Ha You Clowns is to accept that sweetly stupid, corny, and lame things have real value. They’re necessary if we’re to survive life’s hardships, even if it is all cringy as f—k.
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