Tim Heidecker deconstructs the worst comedy sets you’ve ever seen in his first stand-up special
TV Reviews Comedy Special Review
Tim Heidecker’s early work as a master of scatalogical short-form comedy has since blossomed into a number of corners: film, podcasting, music, and parody (Decker is probably comedy’s best indirect skewering of Donald Trump). With his first official stand-up special, An Evening With Tim Heidecker, the comedian draws upon his myriad personae without recycling his greatest hits. Instead, he tells a dizzying array of jokes that were made to be booed, their dunderheaded simplicity—what’s next after Lady Gaga, he asks, “Lord Goo-Goo?”—serving to satirize lazy comics of all stripes. Mr. Show fans will see shades of Tom Kenny’s Kedzie Matthews in the special’s early going.
But Heidecker is spoofing more than mere hacks. An extended bit in which he takes tofu down a peg gives way to a rant about his disdain for “head meds,” which he then reveals his wife is on. “I call her the nag,” he cracks in one of his many appeals to the audience’s dudes. Throughout, Heidecker’s jokes, constructed to appear poorly constructed, reveal the innate darkness of a character who conflates personal grievance and insensitivity with comedy. Later, he segues into a “bit” that doubles as an ad for E-Trade, hilariously emphasizing the hollowness at the core of his multi-pronged onstage persona.
He indulges in a number of other stand-up staples as well—chants, crowd work, punchlines repeated in increasingly shrill voices—positioning the special as a low-key deconstruction of the worst comedy sets you’ve ever seen. A bit in which he forces an audience member to propose to his girlfriend onstage doesn’t land, but his general antagonism toward the crowd produces some gems, such as when he defends his “slow burn” storytelling as “Cosby comedy.” On Cinema devotees will recognize that series’ Heidecker here, both in terms of his quick-hit rage and regrettable choice in mentors.
It’s all in keeping with several themes Heidecker’s explored over the years, specifically the hubris of oblivious people devoting themselves to things they are incredibly bad at. His repeated attempts, for example, to perfect his telling of a joke about preferring Coke to Pepsi are funny because the joke itself is so objectively shitty. But Heidecker’s subversion of form is never as funny as when he’s transitioning. An elegant transition is one of the most impressive feats a comic can achieve, the best of them unfolding without the crowd even realizing it’s being shepherded in a new direction. Heidecker’s, however, are impossible to ignore, serving as jokes in and of themselves. A digression about the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds careens into a bit about “pet peeves.” An upsetting story about running over a dog, meanwhile, abruptly pivots to Heidecker—the persona, not the man, to be clear—attacking Obamacare, praising Trump, and impersonating a baby Mike Huckabee. The blunt-force momentum of it all is purposely jarring, funny for its blatant disregard of the challenges every comedian faces.
Heidecker closes out the show with his guitar, cycling through songs from both his catalog of Trump parody tunes and his work with the Yellow River Boys, a band that writes primarily about drinking piss. Fans of that extremely niche project will be pleased to know that he’s got a brand-new song about drinking piss called “Piss Club Reunion.” It’s a profane nod to Heidecker’s bodily fluid-soaked roots, sure, but it’s also an oddly soothing coda, a spell of communion that serves to distinguish the person from the persona. When you cycle through as many as Heidecker does, that’s important.
159 Comments
Nope. Don’t get him. Not funny.
Now I don’t know what to believe!
It’s okay, I’ll do all of the laughing for you.
No one asked you or cares what you think. I’m sure you’re wildly unfunny though.
nobody fucking asked u
Heidecker and Wareheim (and maybe Eric Andre) are what I’d call “Comedy for comedians”.
Considering about 2/5ths of all Millennials are standup comedians or improv comics it’s a pretty lucrative demographic to target.
I understand the other 3/5 are DJs.
How can an instagram influencer have the time to DJ or do standup? C’mon!
Gotta fund that avocado toast.
I assume the other 3/5 are social media influencers?
Ukulele players…
No.
Don’t you dare besmirch Eric Andre’s good name by speaking it in the same breath as…those abominations
woah, you better bird up dude. you cant love one without loving the other.
i like my comedy “by comedians and for comedians”
What unbelievably pretentious bullshit.
Yes, I hold hosts of Adult Swim shows to the highest standard, and only view such shows while drinking tea with my pinky out and debating about whether or not to hire another gardener, though I’m sure Misses Cornsworth is dilly-dallying all over the petunias.
My sentiments exactly.
Thank you for letting us know
Damn, this guy has some violently fervent fans!
Yeah three or four people told you you’re dumb and unfunny. That’s definitely enough for you to make a dumb generalization about in the midst of telling everyone you didn’t like the comedy special you haven’t seen. You’re like a bad parody.
Now I don’t know what to believe!It’s okay, I’ll do all of the laughing for you.Damn, this guy has some violently fervent fans!Violent is right! That was quite the onslaught. Crazed Vicious Madmen is the only way to describe fanatics like Modusoperandi.
Fatman McGee must be a Gregghead.
Almost as violently fervent as his haters, given how many times you have posted on this article.
The moment anyone says about a comic, “that’s not him, that’s his persona,” I head for the door.
Why do you head for the door? Is it because of the silly observation or do you dislike comics who have personas (which is pretty much every comic)?
I’ve seen the “persona” used as a get-out-of-jail-free card for otherwise toxic behavior. I once saw a SNL skit way back in which Sigourney Weaver sang a duet with a musician/comedian known for his persona work (I’ve long since forgotten his name), and he was all over her — grabbing her tits, running his hands over her body, all on camera in front of a live audience. But it was OK, because that wasn’t him; that’s just his onstage persona. Bullshit. What he was doing was vile – and it was in no way contextualized for anyone watching – and I personally don’t have time for it.
It was Buster Poindexter, David Johansen’s lounge act alter ego, in a 1986 episode of SNL. And they were doing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”, a song since criticized for its weird, creepy, date-rape vibes.Also, your description of the performance is… not correct?
Do you hate all scripted media? What’s the actual difference between TH playing a character with his same name and, like, Anthony Atamunuk playing Trump? They’re both bad.
I’m not sure you’re quite remembering this correctly…it’s on the Internet if you’d like to revisit it. It was Buster Poindexter (David Johansen), they were doing “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” he never touched her tits, she’s rubbing up on him every bit as much toward the end (once he’s convinced her to stay, the whole point of the song, which has recently become problematic in it’s own right), and she kisses him at the end, unprompted. I’m sure they practiced the hell out of the sketch, and Sigourney Weaver was a huge star in 1986…if she was uncomfortable with it, I’m sure she easily could have shut it down. Johansen’s had a 50-year career, and to my knowledge, has never been in any kind of “me too” peril. Martin Scorcese is actually working on a documentary about him at the moment.
That’s way too broad a criticism. Yes, I agree that some performers use a “persona” as an excuse to get away with terrible behaviours (faux-ironic racism is my least favourite; just watched The Gentlemen and the constant use of racist dialogue seemed much more about Guy Ritchie wallowing in his adolescent understanding of trangressivism than about anything necessary to the characters or story), but there are also plenty of Stephen Colberts, Borats, and Larry Sanderses who use their fictional personae to prise the lid off other people’s terrible behaviours.
Seems like a dumb thing to never watch comics with personas for (I mean unless you think a majority of comics with personas use them to grope women I suppose) and a good reason to never watch SNL again who obstinately allowed that to happen.
You’re missing out on Stewart Lee then! Admittedly nobody can tell the difference between the real Lee and his stage persona.
i’ll give it to you, that figuring out tim’s persona’s makes it hard, but i really enjoy tim and eric, so i just roll with it. it doesnt really matter.
I love internet comments that could be said about anyone, and mean equally nothing for any of them.
I’ve done a lot of drugs and I’ve yet to find one or a combination of them that made anything him or his partner in crimes against humor Eric whatever his name is tolerable, nevermind humorous.
Wish you did, you’re missing out on some great spoofs ‘n’ goofs!There was an internet rumor that his wife was divorcing him. So what does he do? Releases an entire studio album of songs about love and loss, just for kicks. Songs he wrote, sang, and played guitar on. That’s a deep goof!
^ hasn’t seen it
No fucking shit…
I think we found the resident greg-head
If you don’t think he’s funny, then you DO get him.
I do get him. Still find him not funny.
“Piss Club Reunion” a little too close to home? The smell of pee a little too strong in the room to start making light of it?
There’s my Chippy!
Take Gen-X-styled ironically-offensive comedy but replace the smirk with an Instagram-era ‘CAN YOU BELIEVE I’M DOING THIS IRONIC COMEDY’ pose and you mostly have it
I’m with you on this. Heidecker lands with me like a Seltzer-and-Friedberg movie. It doesn’t strike me as clever parody or satire but rather the kind of meta-antihumor that’s become everything I detest about comedy. It just looks dollar-store knockoff compared to, say, Weird Al Yankovic or Mel Brooks.
weird al shows up on tim and eric stuff all the time.
lmao the ego of the anti tim and eric community never ceases to amaze. this is like saying “i dont like or understand baseball, therefore it is not a sport.” like jeez i get that you dont like it but maybe try getting over yourself?
Does he offer anyone in the audience some free real estate?
He does, but it’s only for Jim Boonie. And I’m not sure if he was even in the audience.
Does he still have the keys for that?
That’s a relief. I was expecting this to be an honest shot at standup, but hoping it would be this instead. I missed how insanely furious people got whenever his or Eric Wareheim’s names were even hinted at during the Awesome Show days, and this should get a few keyboard-punchingly angry rants going.
“Tim and Eric aren’t funny, get them off Adult Swim!” they screamed, apparently forced to watch it.
I’m so old, I can remember thinking that they’d gone downhill after Tom Goes To The Mayor was the controversial opinion.
Long ago before I became a regular here, I spent my time online on the [adult swim] message boards. It always tickled me how a large chunk of people hated Tim & Eric so much you would think T & E ran over their dog (seriously, take the usual reaction any time AV Club writes about them and multiply that by several powers). Even in the Tom Goes to the Mayor days it was virulent, then when Awesome Show came along it seemed to incur even more hatred from the people who were mad at the very idea of live-action programming on [adult swim]. Then of course [as] trolled the hell out of those people by not just producing live action shows, but for a time airing Peewee’s Playhouse regularly and even airing two weeks of the best/worst of Saved by the Bell.
god damn it, Tim (and Eric) DID run over my fucking dog, i talked a lot about it, i got loads of support from the commentariat, i had a post nominated for a Commie (“Best Nonfiction Post about a Personal Tragedy”) come out of the incident. If Tim (AND Eric) get or got a bit of bad press, that’s merely due to the kind of love that i command around here.
I’m imagining this happening with them both on a Vespa and in character as the married news team.
…“character”?
Running over people’s dogs is the pinnacle of anti-comedy.
Years ago I came home from work not feeling well, laid on the couch dozing on and off..saw Robot Chicken and Tom Goes To The Mayor and then next morning I woke up assuming they were just weird dreams, but I liked that old lineup.
Kristen Schaal intentionally bombing on her special remains my favorite comedy special deconstruction.
Yes. Do get him. Funny.
So is this supposed to be On Cinema Tim or something new?
If you go by the cannon that anything he posts to YouTube is the same guy/character, then I’d say this is On Cinema Tim. It’s under his same youtube account that he posts the On Cinema episodes and comments on
Office hours isn’t the same character…
It’s just Tim Heidecker. He did this Youtube special after he was found innocent of all charges.
This is stand-up comedian Tim from “Tim and Gelman have Lunch” This is a totally distinct Tim from the Tim&Eric and On Cinema Tims. You can tell by the leather jacket and green shirt.
Hmm, hadn’t seen that one, suppose I better catch up before the special.
This is NOT his On Cinema persona and is not OCATC canon. There would be no room for the On Cinema Tim to hold a live event with a theater full of people. In the universe of On Cinema, both Tim & Gregg are massive screwups with no fans. (And yes, they’ve held On Cinema live events, but Tim says that they exist outside of the show’s canon).
It’s not in the On Cinema universe. It’s stand-up Tim, which is separate from On Cinema Tim, Tim & Eric Tim, and regular Tim.
I love absurdist comedy, and I’ve never been able to appreciate Tim (and Eric). I don’t have any particular reason, other than they tend to revel in being obnoxious for the sake of it, even if there isn’t much humor there… or maybe that’s the point. I don’t know.
Have you ever watched On Cinema? That series is when I finally started to “Get” Tim. And his appearances on Comedy Bang Bang podcast really won me over.
I haven’t, but I’ll check it out. They always struck me as something I should probably enjoy, but I’m missing something, lol.
I came upon them by accident. Each episode is like 10 min long.Some of them are pretty God damn funny
Yeah, I hated Tim and Eric but loved On Cinema. I may have just been Eric I hated.
“I love absurdist comedy, and I’ve never been able to appreciate Tim (and Eric).”lol. I absolutely adore dirty nursery rhymes but I never liked Andrew Dice Clay.
I really think I could understand both points of view there. Whether or not you’re being sarcastic.
OH
I’m unabashedly a fan of Tim, I think Eric brings more of the gross-out style that doesn’t appeal to my taste though I don’t deny he’s talented or that they had a huge impact on comedy together.
But Tim with Gregg Turkington doing On Cinema is the best comedy of the 2010s. It’s a slow build but so worth it.
I starred On Cinema with season 4 I think and that was a good way to go. The older seasons are slow.
Eric in his separate work made it clear he felt there was something funny in normal and perhaps less than average/normative people’s desire to be liked and famous. I just think of his major lazer video work and some of the other pieces he did. I’m not a huge fan of Tim but basically anything that seemed to have a coherent and absurdist take seem to come almost exclusively from him and all the unsettling mockery of less than idealized people seem to be the Eric thing even if Tim was complacent in it.
I feel the same way. On paper it seems like something I should really enjoy but I just never have. *Shrugs*
I liked Awesome Show, but never much cared for Tom Goes to the Mayor. Tim’s newer stuff is a lot harder to watch. It’s not grosser or anything like that. It’s just spaced out across different types of media. The On Cinema Podcast is one show, and then there’s Decker, and then there’s Tim and Greg’s Twitter feeds, and the trial that was something like 6 hours a day for four days. I’m old, and I find it difficult to follow stuff like this. A weekly TV show was an easy way keep up with stuff. I don’t have the time I had when I was in my 20’s. What a world. Of course, this is all my own problem, and years from now people will probably be praising the cross-platform genius of this.
They are more anti-comedy. They relish in making the audience uncomfortable,
I like to think of myself as being able to appreciate a wide range of things as funny, but I have to agree that I don’t ‘get’ this sort of humor.
And reading the review of the special, I’m left wondering what the qualitative difference between ‘deconstructing hack comedy by performing jokes calculated to be terrible’ and ‘performing terrible jokes that were supposed to be good’ is for someone who watches comedy with the purpose of actually laughing.
“It’s bad because it’s supposed to be bad and that’s why it’s good” is some logic that loses me when I try to apply it to the real world.
Heidecker is very deliberate and serious about what he’s trying to do. The problem I have with that is how pretentious and elitist he is about something that is best appreciated in its true, raw form. He creates fictional versions of disaster humans. But those people EXIST. No Tim Heidecker filmmaker character could be as hilariously odd and self-deluded as the real Tommy Wiseau or Neil Breen. Public access show hosts on the autism spectrum really exist. So what’s the point of what he does? Other than indulge in some passive-aggressive intellectual elitist bullying?
Have you tried “Tom Goes to the Mayor?” Their more obnoxious impulses are a bit toned down in that.
i hated them at first. but something happened one day and that’s all there is.
So, like a less caustic Neil Hamburger??? Maybe this reviewer has never watched Hamburger, or On Cinema with the (out of character) Greg Turkington? B/C anti-comedy has been a thing for quite awhile. I still really like Heidecker, but this doesn’t seem to be new territory.
You Greg Heads will always find a way to shit on my man Tim. Really disrespectful to the legacy of Tom Cruise Heidecker.
Is On Cinema accessible to new people? Will the episodes feel dated if you go back?
The episodes would be “dated” in a sense if you consider “reviewing” movies from a few years ago to be “dated,” but the actual point of the episodes (hint: it’s not reviewing the movies) and the storylines of the seasons aren’t dated at all. IIRC it’s a slow-burn that takes a season or two before it starts going off the rails, but it’s worth it. (You could technically just start watching recent stuff, but you’d be missing a whole lot of the context and might not fully get why some stuff is funny.)
Another Delgado and Rosetti goon? You’ll never get a cent from Tim again!
sounds like another “triggered” Ant-head has made his way to the stageDidn’t Gregg “The Joker” Turkington kill a man a few months ago at the oscar special?
Gregg was in character as the jokester so you can’t really put the blame on him.
Anything to deflect the conversation away from Tim causing the largest concert tragedy since Altamont, am I right?
I really enjoy some of his stuff. But I for sure have to take a step back from it and kind of process what he is trying to do as he does it.
Tim and Eric is the funniest thing I’ve ever experienced (outside of maybe Longmont Potion Castle). Cannot wait for this. It’s also amazing watching him interact with like Qanon supporters on Twitter.
I mostly like Heidecker, but isn’t the deconstruction of the “hack” comic itself pretty hack by now?
No
Oh cool, another terminally-ironic guy boldly kicking against tired old comedy cliches and conventions like ‘telling jokes’ and ‘making people laugh’ and ‘being funny in any way’.
For those of you with Stitcher Premium. There was an episode of Comedy Bang Bang he did—I think Brett Gelman was on it, too—where the bit was that Heidecker is incapable of being serious and only does bits. And then he goes into a bit about being molested, and in the middle of it keeps knocking over his glass on the table and it…just…fucking…makes me laugh hysterically.
That sounds…not funny.
it’s ok to not understand comedy. i hear that there are plenty of women comics that talk about their periods and sucking dicks you can think you enjoy instead.
And Jon Daly. And then they would all get in increasingly loud and intense arguments after hurling very personal insults at each other before eventually revealing THAT WAS A BIT. And then doing the same cycle 2 or 3 times and that was the whole episode. I fucking love that episode and most CBB fans hated it.
There’s one joke on this stand-up special when Tim is doing crowd work, and a woman says her name is “Cookie,” and in my head I was waiting for him to say, “Where’s milk?” And instead, he just says, “Cookie… cookie… cookie monster.” with no enthusiasm whatsoever, and the way he had to think that through to come up with the least obvious and least funny retort possible just made me cackle out loud. I totally get why people would not find Tim or this special funny, but my god, I love it.
I get his humor, but don’t at the same time. Being absurd for absurdities sake just seems like too much trouble. My take-away from the clip that the AVC posted a week or so ago was that I didn’t realize that doing a Jack Nicholson impression was still a thing. Yelling and screaming and falling on the stage? I love me some old school Robin Williams at the Improv, but I didn’t know he left some coke from 1982 back stage.
“Being absurd for absurdities sake just seems like too much trouble.”
Personally, I find it pretty easy and pretty lazy.
I see what you did there, and well done good sir/madam.
I should make more posts where interpreting them as word salad makes them funnier than my intended point.
Welcome to the Lazy Absurdism Movement. Don’t forget to pick up your membership card at the front door.
I think I respect Tim Heidecker more than I like him. He’s got a clear comedic vision, and he understands the importance of specificity (my favorite part of the “free real estate” skit is the way he says “puuuuhl in the baaaahk” in a way specifically calibrated to sound completely unnatural), but there’s only so much uncomfortable irony a man can take.
So normcore it hurts.
“It’s all in keeping with several themes Heidecker’s explored over the
years, specifically the hubris of oblivious people devoting themselves
to things they are incredibly bad at.”Same. I am also exploring those themes. No further questions.
Yeah, I also want to know how I can get Adult Swim money for exploring my own hubris. Because I’m pretty good at it.
I can’t believe this dude ripped off my “Lord Goo Goo” joke. I’ve been doing that bit for years and I can prove it. My version even had a funny button on it. (unlike Tim’s) I’d say “….what’s next Lord Goo-goo? Yeah, I think I’m gonna go up to my room and listen to my Lord Goo-goo albums.”
I’ve never really watched much of his work (I saw a bit of Tom Goes To The Mayor but it left me cold), but pretty much everything I read about Tim Heidecker’s body of work kind of gives me a headache. It just sounds like too many levels of irony and deconstruction and personas and intertextuality and canons and metatextuality to keep track of without a spreadsheet. Like, hack comedians are hacks, but at least when I’m watching them I don’t feel like I need to have a Ph.D in English earned with an intensive study of the interplay between stand-up comedy and Bertholt Brecht to “get” it.I dunno. Nothing against Heidecker or those who find him their bag, baby, I guess I’m just not really into postmodernist deconstructionist anti-comedy.
I think he’s funny.
HOW DARE YOUR OPINIONS AND TASTES DIFFER FROM MINE
I can’t tell if you’re being ironic or if this a character you created that thinks it’s ironic but is filled with rage.
Okay, but whatever you’re taking about has nothing to do with this guy’s comedy.
its not that deep lmao if you dont want to think so hard maybe try not thinking so hard? T&E have gone on record a few times as saying what they do is more based on intuitive comedy instincts. if you listen to their episode on Marc Maron’s podcast, they talk about how their comedy dynamic was born out of just trying to make each other laugh. they’ve acknowledged the academics who write essays that approach their work from an intellectual angle but have stated numerous times that they have never looked at their work on that deep a level. so this idea you have of them demanding their audience to consume their work purely on an intellectual level is something of your own creation. thats never been a necessary part of T&E’s work. if its not your style, thats fine. we’re all entitled to our taste. but i believe taste should be defined by giving everything a fair chance, letting it be what it is instead of trying to look so deeply into everything, especially if you dont like looking into things deeply. like your whole pov makes no sense to me. its like taping a brick to the gas pedal on a test drive and then complaining that you don’t like the car because its too fast lol
We saw him do this bit at one of Jack Black and Kyle Gass’s “Festival Supreme” comedy festivals. It’s funny for around 10 minutes, and then it becomes grating and annoying. I really love stand up and comedy. We’ve seen a lot of great comedians, and I’ve sat through a lot of “bad” sets because sometimes some gold accidentally pops out, and I also know that working on sets is hard. You need an audience to give you feedback. But his set was the only one I’ve ever walked out of. Standing in the Shrine Auditorium parking lot drinking an overpriced beer sounded more attractive to being subjected to his set. I think the issue is that at a certain point, the audience’s irritation and annoyance BECOMES the joke. So for people watching the show on video, it’s hilarious. LOOK AT HOW UNCOMFORTABLE THE AUDIENCE IS!But for the people in the audience, it’s unbearable, even if you like the person. DeVito talked about what it was like working with Andy Kaufman. I have to think it’s like that. To the outside world, the performance art is brilliant. But to the people contained within the art, it’s horrible. I’ve heard actors say the same thing about strict “method” actors. Yeah their performances are great, but working with them is a pain in the ass.
Finally, someone has the courage to take on the sacred cow of “comedians that nobody likes”
If I never see another “deconstruction” of a genre again it’ll be too soon.
Seriously, in particular it doesn’t seem like anyone’s done anything BUT deconstruct comedy for at least two decades…we’ve run the gamut from Tim &Eric-style anti-comedy to Hannah Gadsby’s comedy-as-sociology-lecture, can we start constructing some jokes please
Well, I like good straight comedy as well as meta-comedy and deconstructed comedy if it’s done well. But it’s not like there’s a shortage of undeconstructed comedy out there. Good recent/current series include Brooklyn Nine-Nine, GLOW, What We Do in the Shadows (absurdist but not meta), Fleabag, The Good Place, Bojack Horseman (*very* meta about showbiz, but its comedy is pretty straight and laced with a constant stream of ridiculous puns), Never Have I Ever.
Bojack was the perfect comedy that had a group therapy session buried in it. The first two seasons had the balance right, the last half of the show couldn’t get him out of the tailspin because they didn’t want to. I loved the humor, it was a perfectly written witty dramedy I’ll never revisit because it just drove the will to live out of me. I feel like Tucci and Bird was onto something when they nixed it so soon but it also didn’t have the deep pathos I guess people wanted to open a vein over?
If I wanted Pepsi I would have asked for Pepsi!
He’s a genius.
I very much enjoyed this. I’m a fan of Tim already, but I was sort of skeptical of an hour of his “smug, oblivious Trump guy” routine, which I had seen bits and pieces of of. This hour was a lot more “constructed” than I expected, and full of very, very funny moments. This was a work of detailed and thoughtful satire. Very, very solid work.
I was never cool enough to get Tim & Eric, but “making fun of terrible jokes” seems slightly less ambitious than “doing the work to write actually funny jokes.”
Tim did a set opening for a musician I saw a few years ago. It was an anti-comedy set that was deliberately “bad.”It was the most excruciating “comedy” I ever had to sit through in my life. And it was sprung on us with no warning. The audience fucking hated it.But, you know, he was being bad on PURPOSE! Ha ha, oh so clever and meta.
One of Patton Oswalt’s Netflix specials has him talking about the tour he did with a really bad magician support act, and how he’d be sitting in the back of the audience laughing like crazy at the magician’s incompetence on stage. But of course the magician wasn’t trying to be incompetent.
I like his story about the world’s worst clown.
Paul F. Tompkins has that great story about opening for his buddy’s indie band and getting ice thrown at him, because people can usually handle some music before the comedy, but if you put comedy on before the music, they lose their whole ass minds.
This very much feels like On Cinema’s Tim Heidecker, all the way down to his feud with Mike Huckabee.
Metasigh. I metafucking metahate him.Or dooo Iiii? (Look at camera. Make stupid asshole face. Insert fart noise. Insert random Avid effect.)
Not even ten minutes out and he’s going to the crowd. I’ll fully admit I wanted to give him some lee way, but…it’s bad. Bad is being nice. I get so called “alt-comedy”. This is the alt without comedy. Literally spent 30 seconds on U2. Which got no laughs or response at all. Went on about Velvet Underground, and then the Beach Boys. This is the sad sake of comedy for comedy’s sake. Go home bro. No one cared about your New Years Resolution. I would like to know the pills you’re on.
I watched this because I continually want to give Tim and Eric a second (third, fourth, etc) chance. If I can get into his standup, his straightup comedy, I’ll get it and enjoy it.I was wrong. There are certain brands of comedy (see also Borat, also out this week!!) where a lot of folk don’t get it, but, like myself, I got it in the past, and I’m fine that you’re doing it again. On the other hand, I’m trying to figure out who the audience for this is for. And when I say “audience”, they were hardly there. Laughter was lacking. Tim wasn’t dying, but he was barely surviving on stage. I’m hardly a comedic expert, but Jesus, when you are going to the audience after less than ten minutes into your set…Stick with scripts. And 22 minute shows.
I settled down to watch this and I wanted to laugh. I really did. But the longer I waited to laugh, the harder it got to laugh, setting off a vicious cycle, so I flushed and went back to work.
Somehow, that screenshot above is exactly what I expected.
I admire his moxy, but watching an intentionally bad stand-up routine sound zero appealing.
Instead of saying “deconstruction” you could just say “parody”. He’s parodying bad stand-up comedy — it’s a straightforward idea.What doesn’t work for me about this is the audience: every sincere laugh he gets undermines the premise. Shouldn’t they be barely tolerating him, at most? Or else shouldn’t he be performing in a food court or something?
Parody is a dirty word. I should know because I made a parody film years back and when you call it that instead of “satire” or “deconstruction,” nobody watches it.
Yeah, I can see that. I blame “spoofs” like Date Movie.
“Comedy” songs suck. Across the board. His are some of the worst.
The Titanic song he did in the style of Bob Dylan was amazing
I just watched THE COMEDY the other night, and man, was it trying. I appreciated the effort, but talk about an unlikable bunch of characters playing an unlikable story out with no one to root for. Sheesh.But don’t get me wrong, he’s a decent actor. He showed some good range and great sadness/deadpan that i think was really well done.
I really, really enjoyed this. He would bring up a topic or a premise and then find seemingly the least-funny approach possible to make it a joke, and the effort required to still be so clever and dedicated to NOT making an obvious or funny punchline is honestly beyond admirable. I can’t wait to watch it again.
I liked this a lot, but I keep a medium-to-strong interest in what Heidecker is doing (I’ve never been sure how or where to get into Decker or On-Cinema, though).
I’m surprised to see people say things like “I can’t believe he went after the audience after 10 minutes”. That was clearly part of the show as written.
If anything, it made me think of British character-comedians like Steve Coogan, particularly Alan Partridge, where a lot of the humour comes from the cracks where the mask slips and you see what a sad, desperate person the character is beneath their bluster. The stuff about “head-meds” felt like this; Heidecker (the character) didn’t sincerely believe people on medication were weak, but he needed to convince himself of it to paper over his failure as a husband.
All the drawing attention to the artificiality of stand-up and use of repetition brought to mind Stewart Lee in particular (although it became something of a trend).
I do wish he chose a couple of his more straight-up songs at the end, although that could have wound up a bit like this Stewart Lee bit: “the last taboo in stand-up is a mad trying to do something sincerely an well. People hate it”: And to be frank, I’m not sure Heidecker can do sincerity yet, or perhaps doesn’t trust is audience to get it – he’s only willing to push discomfort so far and doesn’t seem to be willing to make his fanbase the recipient of it. I think he can do it in a completely separate mode, such as in his singer-songwriter material or indie acting roles, but he seems to keep that miles away from his bread and butter comedy.
I liked that was spit-in-the-eye to the Bill Hicks wannabe angry white man comedians and thought the leather jacket and haircut was a great bit of costuming, but don’t have many more thoughts on that.
If you wanna start On Cinema/Decker start with On Cinema (skip the podcast), Decker starts a few seasons in that I believe.
im not supposed to laugh this much or hard at work.
the clapping is really bothering me.
“That clapping is really bothering me.”
What’s wrong with you? This guy is the literal death of comedy. He hates everything about anything funny.
I’m a fan of Heidecker, but I don’t think this is a good format for him – I got bored pretty quickly. An hour of good standup is hard to do, and an hour of bad standup is… boring. I respect the fact that it is intentionally bad, but that really doesn’t help.