Difficult People Season 2, Episode 4 Recap: To Porn Or Not To Porn

Let's get this week's New York actor guest appearance out of the way so we can move on to porn. Fred Armisen reprises his role as Billy's brother, with the delightful Jackie Hoffman back as his wife — her "excuse me!" fight with Marilyn is the stuff of middle aged NYC women's dreams. Billy points out that he's being henpecked and so he does what so many men before him have done: He goes chasing his youth and some idea of coolness that was never there. Sadly it's not with a hot rod car, but with all-night dance parties by himself. It ends exactly how you think it ends. This week's plotline starts off like a bar joke, but stay with me: Arthur walks in on Julie masturbating to what she refers to as "crowded" porn. Rather than talk about it, he abruptly turns heel and runs. The whole thing is a rather trite play on their reversed gender roles, where Arthur is afraid of Julie's outlandish sexual proclivities. Eventually they play a game of "I'll show you mine if you show me yours," where Julie discovers that all of Arthur's (magazine-based) porn is about redhead Jewish girls with large breasts (a.k.a., her). This difference in taste causes a fight that results in a freeze-out lasting approximately 24 hours. And then they ravage each other, following up the sex-capade with Julie's third dinner from the office. What office, you say? Julie and Billy decided to become squatters in an empty office she finds at NPR while visiting Arthur. They get an intern named Ines, who's experience mirrors the crappy interactions many of us had with showbiz internships circa 1999 to 2007. They get kicked out by Ken Burns (which in itself is a dream for a certain kind of person), since it's actually his office. Oh, and it turns out Nate is a former (and notable) porn star who goes by the name Blade Stallion. But who among us doesn't know at least one former porn star?