I scream, you scream, we all scream for Bottoms—the upcoming teen comedy starring Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott as two lovestruck sapphics, looking to strike some love via a fight club. Both Edebiri and Sennott have been gaining a lot of well-earned positive attention for their roles in recent projects, including The Bear and Shiva Baby (respectively), so this film feels particularly tailored to the current moment in pop culture, and in the best possible ways.
However, the two have been making skits together for a few years now, and their comedic styles play off of each other incredibly well. This is most evident in their 3-episode miniseries on Comedy Central, Ayo And Rachel Are Single. Each episode is packed with clever writing and weird little moments that make me wonder how I’d never seen them before, let alone why it’s taken so long to put the two of them in a movie together.
I’ll share all three of them here for your viewing convenience. Be warned, though: it’ll make you want a proper series, á la Broad City.
How Bad Can A Double Date Get?
This was the first one I watched, and it had such a solid set-up that I really figured this was a longer series. In just a few minutes they give us so many quality throwaway lines in such a strange, outlandish scenario. Like yes, this premise—people leaving their date for someone else—has been tried in sketches before, but Ayo and Rachel’s insistence on doubling down on their BS and getting so aggressive over it cracked me up.
The Dating Trends Putting Ghosting To Shame
The current landscape of dating in your twenties truly is terrifying! I really applaud these two for making this jungle-juice dating world we’re forced to endure something we can actually laugh at.
If All The S**tty Guys On Dating Apps Were At One Party
This last one gets props for so, so, so many reasons. The surrealism of the raw meat. The meta-commentary on dating app polyamory. All the cameos, including my loves Jaboukie and Devon Walker, who play some of the scummiest guys you probably definitely know in your own lives. At once this sketch fills me wish such a sense of doom and gives me a sense of relief—like, no, I’m not losing it, I’m not making things up, it really is a jungle out there.
Altogether, Ayo and Rachel have such a talent for capturing the absurdity of being in your 20s in the 2020s and portraying it in sharp, clever, sometimes-gross-and-unsettling-but-effective ways. They play off each others’ own sensibilities in really effective ways, largely thanks to their friendship in real life, which is very sweet:
Jaboukie made a tweet predicting that Bottoms will kickstart a cultural “reset” and honestly, I truly hope that’ll be the case, at the very least regarding these two! I hope this is only the beginning for them and that we’ll get to see more of Ayo and Rachel together in the years to come!
(Featured Image: Comedy Central)
