After the season premiere of Workaholics, which mostly took place in new environments, it’s sort of nice to have these three back at their house and at the office. These locations are almost like their Paddy’s Pub or Central Perk, filled with unusual characters popping up and surprises at the ready, even though there is a familiarity to them. “Fry Guys” find the trio in their element, at each others throats and judging their junk.
The story in “Fry Guys” is the type of weird leap in logic that only makes sense on this show. Blake wants to have a fish fry at the office using his recently deceased koi fish that he’s been keeping in their pool. But Blake’s proposal of eating his friends Koi Orbinson and Rob Koiddry are foiled by a furious Alice, who has just been broken up with by the office’s water delivery guy. According to Jillian, Alice dated the guy because she’s a size queen, so the boys decide to hire a gigalo for Alice, because they believe if they can make Alice happy with the loving of a well-endowed man, they can eat fish that aren’t meant to be eaten in the office.
Yeah, the logic doesn’t really make sense, but neither does saving koi fish from a P.F. Chang’s and feeding them nothing but loogies and Big League Chew. But at the very least, “Fry Guys” puts the focus on Alice, who is probably the most tragic and maybe my favorite secondary character on Workaholics. Just seeing where Alice’s anger will come from next is hilarious, and her level of disgust with anything that happens at the office speaks of years working at this dead-end job.
I had also forget just how wonderful Jillian is after her mostly angry turn on Eastbound & Down. Everything Jillian says in “Fry Guys” is gold, especially when she uncertainly responds to Adam’s singing about true love with an odd level of hope.
Besides the dynamic between these three, Workaholics is at its best when its combining strange ideas in a way that not only would you never think to do, but also in a way that you would never think could be quite as funny as they are. After the group’s gigalo Girthquake fails to win over Alice, she takes Anders back to the office to mount him in the most awkward way possible. Meanwhile, after searching Alice’s YouTube selections, Adam decides to dress up like one of the “Dick in a Box” guys to win over Alice, he sleeps under her desk to woo her in the morning, when his “package” is at its best. But Adam didn’t realize that sleeping under her desk would also mean hearing one of his best friends and his unrequited love having incredibly short and unfulfilling sex. However it’s surprising just how funny it would be watching a guy in what must be a five-year-old Halloween costume cry to awful sex.
What isn’t exactly funny is the gross-out humor in “Fry Guys.” This extends to Blake trying to give his koi CPR, which leads to him pushing all of the fish guts out and then trying to scoop them back in. Later in the episode Anders and Adam have a fight in the emptied-out pool using dead koi as weapons. When the koi explode upon striking each other, the two end up throwing up directly into each other’s faces.
Workaholics’s second episode returns us to familiar areas and fantastic supporting characters, but unfortunately it falters under odd jumps in logic and gross-out comedy that doesn’t work as well as it should (or as well as it usually does on the show). Adam thinking he’s a gigalo because he was paid $5 to poop in a pizza box as a kid is great, but watching two friends vomit directly in each other’s face, not so much.