This post contains spoilers for BoJack Horseman Season 4.
Well…it’s complicated. BoJack Horseman, billed as a dark comedy, is much less of a comedy this time round. This season continues the show’s brutal realism, and throws in a lobotomy for good measure. In the usual BoJack fashion, Season 4 holds an ugly mirror to society, demanding that its viewers peer into reflections of their not always pleasant reality. That’s also where the show draws its humor. BoJack Season 4 is funny the same way that Tyler, The Creator is funny in his music videos; it’s strange and hilarious because the dark depths of the soul are so relatable.
One of the characters tasked with spelling that out is Princess Carolyn. This season is one for her stans, without question. Finally, she gets the character arc we’ve all been waiting for! We watch her experience success (her agency), loss (the baby and Ralph Stilton), and, for the first time, true self-actualization (her worth and what she wants). She also gets a very meta come-to-Jesus moment late in the season at the start of the season finale “What Time Is It Right Now?” If you were binging, you just watched BoJack commit his dementia-stricken mother to a crummy, broken-down nursing home—the raw, tragic climax of the season. A brief monologue from Princess Carolyn serves as the transition from that.
Princess Carolyn begins it by launching a pitch about stories, and why they matter to her, as a way to sell producers on a TV show. As she speaks, we see PC visibly clutching her worthless yet sentimental trash necklace. In the same frame, a clock ticks through seconds to drive home the best joke of the entire season. This is what PC says:
“…But also, you have to be careful, because if you spend a lot of time with stories, you start to believe that life is just stories, and it’s not. Life is life. And thats so sad because there’s so little time, and what are we doing with it?”
She stops. She looks a little uncomfortable by what she’s just said, realization sets in and…boom.
Haven’t we all been Princess Carolyn? Aren’t we all are clasping onto worthless things we fill with meaning in the hope that they will make us happy as time continues on, and we wake up each day closer to our inevitable deaths? Haven’t we, the consumers of this tragically hysterical, binge-worthy entertainment, realized that we distract ourselves and live our lives through stories—either the ones animated for us or the ones we create in our own heads? Isn’t that detrimental to a degree, because life itself isn’t a story with a beginning, middle, and end? The visual metaphor of the clock, which even has a separate timer underneath its face, in this moment hammers this home, because it is all too relatable to our own lives. Time doesn’t stop. What are we clutching to for security and for meaning? What are we doing with our time?
This is the point of the show. It’s the best joke of BoJack Horseman. It’s that we can relate so passionately to a cartoon that anthropomorphizes animals who replicate the sad, hopeless reality of being a living human being.
The best joke in BoJack is you.
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