TV INTERVIEW: TIM & ERIC

Adult Swim Favorites Continue to Baffle, Please & Confuse With 'Awesome Show Great Job!'

Remember Pokémon -- the trading card craze that swept the US in the late '90s? It's still around, and now they're even up to 493 creatures. One could argue that's 493 too many, but that's beside the point -- the point being that, "Wow, people are still into Pokémon!" Not only are people still into Pokémon, but it's huge. There's a whole world of Pokémon merchandise, paraphernalia, and entertainment just waiting to be discovered.

 

At this point, some might become intrigued but also discouraged. After all, is it even worth starting with a show whose 550-episode history one will never be able to master?

 

Enter Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! With 36 episodes thus far, each clocking in at 11 minutes, this is certainly more manageable entertainment. After watching the program, you'll be part of a group of fans that includes Patton Oswalt, David Cross, Fred Willard, and John C. Reilly, who've all made appearances on the show. Just imagine the water cooler talk! Every installment the duo creates is bursting with weirdness, inventiveness, and absurdity, so you'll definitely want to "Catch 'em all!"

 

Ben Kharakh: In your Q & A with The Sound Of Young America, you said, of your commercials, that you consider them to be no more absurd than actual commercials in that they both prompt you to think, “Who needs this product? Why would anyone buy this? Why would anyone even want to be in a commercial for this?” Is this accurate?

 

Tim: We said it. You nailed us.

 

BK: What are some products that epitomize this idea for you?

 

Tim: Well, there’s that one now that I think is pretty great -- the blanket with sleeves. 

 

BK: It’s a robe made out of a blanket.

 

Tim: Yeah, so you can be under a blanket but have access to things. It’s like a big robe, but they’re marketing it as a blanket.

 

BK: In the same way that you think your fake commercials are as ridiculous as real ones, do you think the songs or fake TV programs you make up are as ridiculous as actual songs and TV programs?

 

Eric: Yeah, that’s the core of a lot of our comedy. "Why would anyone pay attention to this?" Tim and I are obsessed with things that are a waste of time or products that don’t make any sense that people spend time and production and advertising dollars to make, and that’s how The Awesome Show is. There are lots of performers on there that you would never see, and they’re singing about stuff that doesn’t matter. The whole point is that they are on TV or someone is trying to make money off of this stupid thing.

 

BK: I like the idea of using ordinary people to do that, because it heightens the absurdity of not only the song you create, but also the real song that exists out in the world.

 

Eric: We have something coming up in our Season 4 in February. We have Josh Groban singing a tribute CD for David Liebe Hart, so it’s almost like a double layer of insanity there -– hearing this opera guy sing these really dumb songs, and he’s selling it, of course.

 

BK: Your work is often thought of as absurd or surreal, but you use non-professional actors, which is a tool of realist filmmakers such as Vittorio De Sica, who did The Bicycle Thief, and Richard Linklater, and I'm thinking of his films Slacker and Waking Life. How much realism would you say is in your work?

 

Tim: Very little. It’s all manipulated and treated by us to get what we want.

 

Eric: I wouldn’t 100% agree with that because we have this thing called Afternoon Review where we do manipulate some of the sounds and stuff, but a lot of people on our show -- for example, David Liebe Hart and James Quall -- are doing their own gig. That’s like if they had a stage somewhere, they’d be doing that, and some of these bad actors...that’s kind of how they act. Sometimes we hold back on the direction so we can get a really funny, unique performance out of these guys.

 

BK: What was this term The Afternoon Review that you used?

 

Eric: That’s a new thing we have. I think it was on Season 3 as well. We had a big casting call in Los Angeles for people that had special talents, and they all came in and we filmed everybody, and some of them we used. We framed it as an afternoon show for women, but what it really is is like a weird talent showcase of wacky people from LA.

 

BK: Do you have terms or comedy jargon that you’ve come up with between the two of you to identify certain elements of the show?

 

Eric: Yeah, we have two. One is called a comedy bit and one’s called a mood piece. If we do a commercial, it's a comedy bit. We’re obviously making fun of some silly product here, but Afternoon Review is a mood piece because it is not necessarily a joke but it is very funny. You’re laughing at it in a different way.

 

BK: You talked about this in Punchline Magazine. Is this also what you refer to as the experiments?

 

Tim: Yeah, we often will write out an idea that we don’t necessarily know how it’s going to turn out in the end, but we go into our studio and just shoot a bunch of very guttural, very primal stuff and then give it to the editors and see what they can do with it.

 

BK: When you’re doing this, you don’t know how it is going to turn out?

 

Tim: Not all the time. We now have a general sense of what has worked in the past and how to apply that to future ideas, but there’s also an element of some of the successes we’ve had with ideas on the show which have come about through not knowing whether it would work or not. We have to continue the element of diving blindly into ideas that might seem dangerous or a waste of time, because you just never know what you’re going to get out of them.

 

BK: I took an Aesthetics of Film class, and we read a philosopher named RJ Collingwood. Since you're both film majors, maybe you've read this piece.

 

Tim: I wrote my doctoral thesis on it.

 

BK: Then you know where I'm going with this. He has a concept called Art Proper. You know you're creating Art Proper when you don't actually know what the feeling you're exploring is but you find out by the time you're done with the piece. So when you gather these people together to create Afternoon Review, for example, you're entering into this exploration and you don't know what you're going to get. Ultimately, however, you discover something that makes you laugh, and your exploration is itself the means by which your audience would discover the very same thing that made you laugh, and it could make them laugh too.

 

Tim: Absolutely.

 

BK: With all these different elements happening in the show, I’m curious if there’s a certain type of laugh or response that you value or enjoy more than another?

 

Eric: I think my favorite kind of laugh is the one (I tell this story all the time) -- someone watched one of our older pieces and he wrote me saying, “I watched the show. I didn’t laugh out loud. The next day, I was driving to work and was thinking about it. I had to pull over on the side of the road because tears were streaming down my eyes.” It’s like once you absorb everything that we’re doing, you laugh at it as one large unit. For example, I just watched a new episode of our show today and I’m not really laughing at our jokes -- I’m laughing at the entire piece. Like, why would someone spend so much time working on something like this? That’s the kind of thing I’m into right now.

 

BK: And how about you, Tim?

 

Tim: It’s nice when we play live a lot and we go out and show new material. It’s nice to get a whole room reacting to one little thing. I generally like moments that are past the punch line -- they’re in the spaces, the pauses, the weird places, and you have to be more with what's happening to laugh.

 

BK: So little details, perhaps, like in the first season where the little person punches Eric in the balls and then he twirls away...?

 

Tim: Right -- the twirl.

 

BK: Although there is a lot of improvisation on the show, it seems like there's a lot of attention to detail. Is that attention to detail actually there, or does something like the twirl surprise even you?

 

Tim: That was a suggestion that we had on set. A lot of ideas come on set and you tell people to do certain things.

 

Eric: A lot of times we don’t know these actors very well. We only see them at our auditions, so once we meet them on set, you get an idea of what they can do and their physicality. Tim and I have always loved twirls and weird spins and body movements that are just inappropriate to do sometimes.

 

BK: Those little touches really stand out in the show. When someone touches some food, for example, you'll edit in a really exaggerated version of the sound of someone touching foods — just this really slimy, slippery sort of sound.

 

Eric: Our last couple of seasons, the sound effects have gone up so many DBs. It’s almost as if you’re watching a cartoon. It just makes us laugh when someone’s chewing and you put a gross flapping wetness in there. It’s just really fun. Tim and I are also really into classic comedy like The Three Stooges. Watch a bunch of Three Stooges episodes -- that has tons of amazing sound effects. I think that comes straight from there.

 

BK: When you do that, what is it you feel is happening to the action there?

 

Tim: It’s really just to appeal to the ten-year-old in you, just to tickle you. It’s like a tickle. It doesn’t have any intellectual meaning attached to it. It’s to elicit a laugh and to create an overall environment for the show. As crazy as the show is, there are certain anchors that appear in the style and in certain techniques that we use consistently. So, if anything, it’s a kind of paint that we use on the canvas of the show.

 

BK: Another thing like that I’ve noticed is that the cadence of Steve Brule, for example, is one that you will use in other scenes as well.

 

Eric: You mean like mumbling words and stuff like that?

 

BK: I guess maybe it’s more when you’re doing something with the feel of Local Access Television.

 

Eric: Yeah, we love that kind of stuff. Our characters, the Tim and Eric on the show, are like that. You’re put in front of the camera and you’re instantly not normal anymore. You’re sort of performing and we’re just playing bad performers.

 

BK: It seems like a lot of the show is you recreating things that you see in the world and you’re like, “That’s just ridiculous,” and then you really heighten the absurdity to just extreme heights where it’s just right in your face how ridiculous so much of what we do is.

 

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. When it comes to storylines in our shows, we generally try to ground them a little bit to what might be happening in our lives if we were these two guys and had this friendship, and then go a little silly with it. Almost every idea we have starts off with saying, “Wouldn’t it be funny if X,” you know? “It would be good if we did this...”

 

Eric: A lot of our bits are recreations of things we’ve seen over the years, but you have to put jokes in there. We’re very conscious that this is on TV and that this is a comedy show, so it’s a lot more difficult than replaying some wacky commercial or some bad newscast that we’ve seen over the years.

 

BK: What is a particularly bad newscast? Is there one that sticks out in your mind?

 

Tim: Well, I grew up in Allentown [Pennsylvania]. There was a local station, Channel 69. It wasn’t like anything in particular. It was just cheap and they were aspiring to be in a bigger market, and there’s no way they could do it. There was a crappy quality to it. We’ve seen a million mistakes and bloopers and shit on YouTube and wherever that capture the uncomfortableness of bad graphics and people making mistakes on air. We try to replicate that as best we can.

 

BK: When you see that, do you ever imagine yourself from their perspective? Are they thinking, “This is great because we did a really great job?”

 

Eric: I don’t think it matters to them. I don’t think they’re trying to make anything of high art or high aesthetic quality. They’re just trying to get through it.

 

BK: I imagine the name of the show, The Awesome Show, Great Job!, is the sort of pat on the back that they would be giving to one another often.

 

Eric: Yeah, sure.

 

BK: What do you think is more absurd –- your show or the real world?

 

Tim: I think it’s probably the real world.

 

Eric: Agreed.

 

BK: You had mentioned earlier that it seemed like one laugh that you seemed to generate is you actually thinking about how silly it is that you guys are putting the effort forth to make the show and you’re like, “Oh, I can’t believe we’re doing this.” Is that the case?

 

Eric: Well, it’s not like we can’t believe we’re making this; it’s just kind of a proud laugh that we’ve compiled these very personal bits together into one show, and sometimes I sit back and laugh at the idea that, “Wow we’re pretty lucky.”

 

BK: I’m curious where some of the bits originated from, like the chippy.

 

Eric: Chippy is from a German porno that Tim and I saw, and the narration called girls chippy in a derogatory form.

 

BK: What about beaver boys?

 

Eric: Beaver boys is a comment on men that love vagina. Beaver is a term for vagina sometimes -- you know guys, our way of making fun of douche bags.

 

BK: How did their fixation with shrimp and white wine come in?

 

Tim: In a room with writers trying to make each other laugh.

 

BK: Is there a particular place that inspiration strikes you most often?

 

Tim: Usually five minutes before I go to sleep, then I can’t go to sleep. I get up and write something down.

 

BK: How about you, Eric?

 

Tim: You seem to have a lot of ideas in the shower.

 

Eric: Shower and airplanes.

 

BK: When you’re out and about and with so much of the world being fodder for your comedy, do you sometimes just find yourselves laughing at a commercial or interaction that people have with one another?

 

Tim: No.

 

Eric: I used to, but things change when you’re in the biz, doing this everyday. You don’t laugh out loud. You think about it. There’s stuff that makes us laugh, definitely.

 

Tim: You know what I think has been funny is that recently I’ve been noticing more and more actors that have been on our show on other TV shows, and it’s so funny to see them on other TV shows. The guy who played Bill Crystals on our show was just on an episode of Cold Case, which is this terrible drama. It’s hard for me to enjoy TV anymore because all these monsters from our show keep appearing on the television.

 

BK: If more of the elements of the program started to permeate through to the real world, how would that make you feel about the real world? Like, if reality television became even more like The Beaver Boys...?

 

Eric: I’d be honored. We'd be doing our part to help entertainment.

 

Tim: I see a lot of fans of ours getting tattoos and shit from the show.

 

BK: What sort of tattoos?

 

Eric: A lot of Great Jobs, Chippys. This one girl has got a huge Casey Tatum on her leg.

 

BK: What sort of changes, if any, have you seen in the way that you approach comedy? How have you seen your own work evolve?

 

Eric: Devolve...

 

Tim: I think we’ve been able to manage it so that we can make lots of it as opposed to spending a long time on a small amount of material. We're capable of making a lot of shows and making a lot of different projects and figuring out how to not be so precious about things -- just looking at the big picture.

 

Eric: We take a lot more chances now.

 

Tim: Definitely gone a lot browner than we might have been four years ago -- poo humor.

 

Eric: We have a huge poo bit coming up in Season 4, and then in Season 5 we have two that we are debating about that are just so disgusting -- the worst poo thing ever. That’s just what we’re into.

 

BK: Are there some things that you create, but then the higher-ups at Adult Swim say you can’t do that?

 

Tim: Well, we are in a discussion about that poo idea for Season 4. That is a problem right now.

 

Eric: Creatively, we usually don’t get any notes like that, but sometimes it’s too sexual or too violent or too brown-town, but that’s coming from the legal department.

 

BK: In the third season, in what someone summed up as, "Larry gets jealous of Mr. Henderson and Carol's date together" on Wikipedia, the character of Larry blows his brains out with a gun and it looks like there's quite a bit of brain on the wall.

 

Eric: We were lucky to get that one passed, to be honest with you.

 

Tim: They have no issues with violence, but if you even imagine a penis or poo, you’ve got problems...which is crazy.

 

Eric: You can see brain matter, a man committing suicide, but we had to cut down in our sex and romance episode when Tim was making love to that woman. We couldn’t have any real thrusts. That’s why we did all those silly moves.

 

Tim: And you have the gall to ask if the world is more absurd than our show?!