There's a certain kind of humor that's hard to define—not quite an anti-humor, but more of a post-humor—where comedy is extracted from what happens after the punchline.
A good example would be a New Yorker article from last year, "Guy Walks Into a Bar." It retells the bar joke about a hard-of-hearing genie who grants a bartender a 12-inch pianist, but continues past the punchline into a kind of absurd Tennessee Williams play. An excerpt:
And the bartender’s, like, “No kidding. You think I wished for a twelve-inch pianist?”
So the guy processes this. And he’s, like, “Does that mean you wished for a twelve-inch penis?”
And the bartender’s, like, “Yeah. Why, what did you wish for?”
And the guy’s, like, “World peace.”
So the bartender is understandably ashamed.
And the guy orders a beer, like everything is normal, but it’s obvious that something has changed between him and the bartender.
It goes on.
BoJack Horsemancan best be explained as applying this post-humor treatment to the increasingly Dadaist world of adult-cartoon comedy. Over the course of its first season, the series mutes from a derivative high-concept sitcom full of sound bites and cutaway gags into a creative character-driven comedic drama, and eventually into a diligent attempt to subvert viewer expectations of characters and plot resolutions.
The high-concept pitch, as laid out in the show's theme song, is thus: "Back in the ‘90s / I was in a very famous TV show / I'm BoJack the horse.” The pilot is so heavy on cut-away gags, parodies of lame ‘90s sitcoms, and rapid-fire jokes about BoJack as an abusive degenerate that it seems cobbled together from a discarded Seth MacFarlane notebook. It seems intent to bank as many disconnected sucker-punch laughs as possible and then cut to black before viewers can even process what’s happened. I hated it.
I only continued to the next episode because of a strong word-of-mouth consensus, and because Netflix’s format meant it was just a click away. If I had to wait a week before giving the show a second chance, I probably wouldn't bother.
I’m glad I did, because the show quickly proves the Family Guy shtick is just one patch of inspiration in a quilt made of bits and pieces of much better shows. To namecheck just two, BoJack’s petty celebrity squabbles in a world of humanoid animals plays out like Curb Your Enthusiasmmeets Ugly Americans.
There's a great moment in episode 2 that kicks off when BoJack gets into an argument over the last pack of cupcakes in a store, and he spitefully buys them over the protests of a seal who, unbeknownst to him, is a literal Navy SEAL. The seal takes the story to the gossip-hungry media, and we’re treated to an MSNBSea news anchor—a whale voiced by a dead-serious Keith Olbermann—angrily blustering over the depravity of "stealing a meal from Neil McBeal the Navy Seal!" before reflexively spewing water from his blowhole.
BoJack’s selfish impulses coming back to bite him in the ass turns out to be the series’ theme, which reminded me more than a little of Eastbound & Down. It hits that Kenny Powers balance: let BoJack run wild to get laughs, then reveal his unfulfilled desire for respect on his own terms to remind us that he’s still (sort of) human.
As the series follows BoJack and ghost-writer Diane working on a “warts and all” memoir, we see the uncomfortable position it puts him in. He has a deeper desire to create something honest and 
important, which only a person of integrity like Diane can pull out of him. All the while, he struggles to see people as anything but puppets made to bring him satisfaction, and hates himself for it.
The memoir and its creation work as a mirror of the show, with BoJack and Diane arguing about whether the brutal honesty of BoJack’s pathetic existence will endear him to audiences. It’s a clever wink at the viewer, who at that point in the show should be seriously wondering how they feel about their comedic lead mixing his mental struggles in with his binge-drinking jokes.
This reaches a head when BoJack pointedly asks Diane to tell him, in spite of everything she’s seen, that he’s a good person deep down. It’s a question that may be on writers’ and viewers’ minds in television’s age of anti-heroes, as we evaluate who we root for, who we laugh with, and who is even worth our time to watch. We want BoJack to be terrible because he’s funnier that way. But we want him to be a good person so that we can approvingly share in his eventual success. BoJack presents a real viewer moral quandary, because his only redeeming trait is his desire to be worthy of the success he desires, and his acknowledgement that he isn’t.
By juggling heavy questions and light gags, BoJack Horseman highlights why few series make such an attempt. It can make for a very uneven experience, especially during binges of multiple episodes at a time. By forcing us to take our main characters’ existential crisis seriously, the wackier jokes fall flat as the season moves on.
On the other side of the coin, by indulging in bizarre gags (a Red Sox family grinds up their deceased father so his pulpy remains can be dumped on Derek Jeter) it doesn’t quite have the capital to dwell on morality issues that that dominate the second half of the season. There are a few tone-deaf moments where the writers linger too long, and too on-the-nose, with BoJack and Diane’s big dramatic questions that felt like an overestimation of how long BoJack could maintain interest as a sincere, nearly well-adjusted straight man.
In all, BoJack Horseman does its best when it laughs with us at BoJack’s warts-and-all existence, and then lingers just long enough to make us worry how he got those warts.
