Living Your Truth As An Uptight Prig - Cartoons Hate Her
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Living Your Truth As An Uptight Prig<br>"Being yourself" when "yourself" is the opposite of a free spirit
Cartoons Hate Her<br>Jul 07, 2026
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This article will be free, but most of my 4-5x weekly articles are paid. Please become a free or paid subscriber for more like this!<br>Today, I will start by walking you through my favorite moment of my favorite episode of my all-time favorite TV show, Peep Show—something which unlocks something very important and fundamental about one of my all-time favorite topics: being yourself.<br>Peep Show is basically a lower-budget, drier British Seinfeld set in the 2000’s, starring two friends and roommates: Jez, the free spirit who, well into his thirties, believes he is one big break away from becoming a famous musician, and Mark, a buttoned-up, geeky loan manager who would much rather be a world-renowned historian.
It might seem implausible that these two men are friends—and at times, they loathe, taunt and sabotage each other over their remarkable differences. In one memorable episode, Mark gets fed up with Jez mooching off him and forces him to interview for a job at his stuffy bank. Terrified that the (actually disastrous) interview is going “too well,” Jez randomly makes a weird face at his interviewer to freak her out so he can continue his position as a layabout.
But they keep coming back to each other, time and time again, because they need each other in the delicate balancing act that is their decades-long friendship. On the occasion that Jez spends time with his even-more-Jezzish burnout musician friend Super Hans, things get out of hand (in one episode, the two go on a drug and alcohol fueled bender and wind up giving each other blowjobs after destroying the apartment.) Jez needs Mark to keep him from hitting rock bottom and winding up in rehab, and Mark needs Jez to occasionally push his boundaries so he tries new things. But crucially, Mark needs to remain Markish and Jez needs to remain Jezzish for this relationship to work. The goal is not for them to change into one perfect man who is both free-spirited and responsible, but to continue balancing each other. This is confirmed in a later season when Mark and Jez briefly part ways and Mark houses a new roommate who is basically a redheaded version of himself. He tires of this man so quickly that after his new roommate refuses to move out, he calls Jez and Super Hans to kidnap him and force him out of the apartment in a sleeping bag.
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I am a Mark. I know this may surprise you because I’m a creative, so I should be a Jez. But I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a “free spirit.” Respectfully, get that shit out of here. Yes, I love to talk and make jokes and I like to wear bright colors but I am perfectly happy to die of old age never having tried magic mushrooms. I do not like dancing in the rain (I don’t even like getting wet.) I have never, and will never, go to a music festival that involves being in a desert, sweating, getting sunburned, or taking a long train crammed full of other sweaty people on their way to the aforementioned festival. When my brother visits a new city, he occasionally reports back to me that I would “love it” and so far the only times this has happened has been in Singapore and Copenhagen, his reasoning being, “It was safe and clean.” (My mom said the same thing when she visited South Korea.)<br>I may not be a loan manager, and I may not be a historian, but I am a Mark, through and through (including the fact that Mark is prone to neurotic freakouts from time to time, or the fact that he handed over his belongings to a guy on the street who aggressively demanded them without a weapon- this happened to me once too).<br>I’ve noticed that it’s much easier to appear authentic (or at least convince people you are authentic) if you are a Jez. Nobody questions whether the guy dropping acid in the yurt is “being himself.” Of fucking course he is, because why else would someone do that? But Mark? He just needs to “loosen up and let go!”<br>In one of the earlier episodes of the miraculously eight-season show ( basically unheard of in this genre of British TV) Mark finds himself up against a predicament to which I can relate. He hacks into his crush, Sophie’s, emails (okay, I haven’t done that) and discovers that she likes him, but wishes he were more “fun,” lamenting that he’s so uptight all the time. Naturally, Mark decides to change Sophie’s perception, viewing his uptight nature as something he must shed so he can be more fun. He goes up to her mere minutes later holding some kind of party kazoo and suggests they “do matey things” together, to which she joyfully invites him to her dance class.<br>What follows is perhaps the greatest scene in all of TV history, and I’m not exaggerating. Mark expects that Sophie’s dance class will be a nice, conventional salsa class. But he has read the schedule wrong....