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Horace And Pete

As last episode’s cavalcade of purposeless, phony-feeling interpersonal fury demonstrated, Horace and Pete struggles the most when it tries the hardest. (Laurie Metcalf’s Episode 3 is, of course, the exception that proves the rule.) Now it seems that the reverse is true: Horace and Pete is at its best when it’s also at its least ambitious. Few attempts are made during Episode 7 to tear your guts out, to confront the Big Questions, to do much of anything really other than show a day in the life of our lovable (?) losers (let alone to follow up on the emotional apocalypse of the previous outing, which from how well Pete, Horace, and Sylvia get along here may as well not even have happened). The result: an episode where the funny bits are funny, the major sad thing involves a very minor character, and the politics feel exploratory and inquisitive rather than didactic and parodic.

Let’s start with the laffs, which have, to put it mildly, been in short supply in this show. The opening diatribe from perpetual loudmouth regular-customer Kurt is his usual substitution of “man, fuck this” for political thought, yes. But the rant, which starts with his complaints about comedians talking about politics (oooh, meta!), actually contains some punchlines that work. When Kurt kicks things off by yelling about the comedian in question without yet naming him, Steven Wright’s Leon inquires “Ronnie Wilkis?” “No,” Kurt replies. “Who’s that?” “I made it up,” Leon deadpans. (Does he ever do anything else?) Good joke!

As the rant slowly morphs into Kurt’s characteristically profane retelling of the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, which both Pete and Horace have heard of but which neither of them turns out to actually know, he gets to the part where the men of Sodom surround Lot’s house, demanding he surrender the two angels in human disguise who were sent to warn him to get the hell out of there so that they can, collectively, fuck them. Kurt suggests that these guys are all so tired of fucking each other that the novelty is irresistible, but then he notices a logical gap in the story: “I don’t know, when Lot moved in, how he got past that gauntlet of dicks.” Good joke!

But when Kurt calls Lot’s wife a cunt, Sylvia swoops in to 86 him in no uncertain terms. This attracts the attention of a customer we’ve never seen before, one who is obviously pretty deep in the throes of alcoholism. He attempts to strike up a conversation with Sylvia not just over her fiery spirit but her physically obvious cancer, which he says he’s found to be sexually attractive ever since his job as a hospital janitor brought him in contact with women in the cancer ward. “Am I offending you?” he asks when it’s clear his blandishments are falling on deaf ears. “Well, you’re not impressing me,” Sylvia retorts. Good joke!

Horace then receives a surprise visit from Alice, who’s brought along her charmingly awkward new boyfriend Eric, whom she met when she beat the shit out of him during a mock court session in law school. The kid’s an affable goober, completely at a loss around the two feuding family members. “Am I annoying you?” he asks her, regarding his clearly perturbed demeanor? She tells him no: “It’s annoying to me that my father makes you nervous, because if you knew him personally you wouldn’t care what he thinks.” “Okay, I don’t know what to say to that!” Eric replies with inappropriate ebulliance! “Hahahaha! Yeah, I don’t know how to respond to that.” Good joke!

After Eric leaves, Horace and Alice continue their conversation, with her warnings to her not to tie her life to a man’s going over like a lead balloon. When Alice insists that things don’t work that way anymore, Horace pulls rank on her, noting he’s been around, and been around women, a lot longer than she has. She calls this condescending, and after a moment, he owns up to this. Can’t anyone talk down to anyone else, if that person has less experience and power in the world, he wonders? “Can’t a pumpkin condescend to a peanut?” Good joke!

Horace’s day, already better than normal since his meeting with Alice ended in laughter and a hug rather than fury and an abrupt departure, improves still more dramatically when he picks up a patron named Rhonda (Karen Pittman, whose alcoholism means she could be playing a time-traveling version of her recovering character from The Americans). “Men can contribute two things to my life,” she tells Horace boozily. “They can lift things, and they can fuck…Fuck me, move my furniture.” As the conversation steers rapidly toward Horace attempting to fall into Category A, much to Rhonda’s amusement and delight, she comes out and asks what he’s up to. “I’d like to move your furniture,” he says with a smile. “I’d like to make a contribution!” They both crack up. Good joke!

The morning after, Horace and Rhonda compliment one another’s performance and equipment over an egg breakfast. Rhonda tells Horace that his penis, while not as big as advertised, was quite nice. “You have a very nice pussy,” he replies, grinning. “Thank you,” she says. “I picked it out myself.” Good joke!

Or is it? Dun-dun-dunnnnnn! This throwaway line segues into a long, awkward conversation about transphobia that isn’t half the disaster, for the characters or the show, that you might expect. It’s basically Rhonda probing Horace’s feelings about trans women, whom he feels should be treated as women and given all the rights attendant thereto, but whom he deep-down still considers to be, in some inalterable way, men, as evidenced by his discomfort with having sex with someone who’s had gender-reassignment surgery without her at least telling him first. It’s deep down in feelings like that—feelings that speak to the fundamentals of the person in question, rather than the peripherals—that Rhonda says bigotry and ignorance really live. It’s not a perfect disquisition on the subject, not that you’d expect one from these clowns; not even Rhonda broaches the idea that trans women are women even if they still have penises. And much of it boils down to the unanswered question of whether Rhonda was in fact joking when she said she now has a pussy where her penis used to be, so there’s a gag element to the whole thing. But the lack of frothing table-pounding ignorance and anger puts the whole thing head and shoulders over quite literally every single political discussion anyone else has had on this show.

And to wind things back to the beginning of the episode, remember the drunk cancer fetishist who tries to pick up Sylvia? When she blows him off, he delivers a monologue in a halting half-stutter about how he’s used to being treated like he doesn’t exist. “I’m a person,” he insists. “I have a story.” His story is that he was forced to raise his kid brother, just two years his junior, when his parents left one night and never came back. Now his brother doesn’t even talk to him. “I struggle, so I appear weak,” the man says. “People don’t wanna look at the weak because it reminds them of their own weakness. But they don’t get is that when you see someone who’s struggling, they’re strong. Because the weak don’t struggle—they just die. Whatever you think of me, I’m alive. I’m alive.” I’m sorry, but this is fucking beautiful, beautiful writing, humane and empathetic like nothing else on the show save the Metcalf episode, and it cuts to the heart of Horace and Pete‘s alcoholic demimonde like nothing else has. Comedian Rick Shapiro’s brief, brilliant performance here is one of the things I’ll take from this show alongside Metcalf’s star turn and Paul Simon’s theme song, and I don’t expect to take much else.

Oh, we also find out that one of Horace’s kids is Sarah’s sisters, not Sarah’s, though she raised them together, and that Sylvia’s cancer is in remission. Happy endings all around!