There is nobody on television like Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. The writers/directors/actors behind Adult Swim’s dark, dark, dark comedy series Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories have their very own strain of lethal aburdism that no one else comes close to imitating. Their shows (Tom Goes to the Mayor, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!) aren’t for all tastes – think of them as the Frank Zappa of TV comedy – but the duo’s new anthology show is probably their most approachable offering so far.
Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories, a series that features the guys themselves and guest stars including frequent collaborator Zach Galifianakis, returned on Friday evening for a special called Sauce Boy, a pastiche of mafia movies with a very Tim and Eric twist, and with an actual Goodfellas star – Johnny “Roast Beef” Williams – in the guest slot. To cap it off, there was a new song performed by Bonnie “Prince” Billy, written by Wareheim, at the end.
The Guardian: You guys start off with a really well-observed parody of an AA meeting.
Tim Heidecker: I think that particular scene is straight out of The Wire. Like, one of those moments where Bubbles is doing the AA thing. That scene’s in The Sopranos, it’s in a million movies. We start a project or an idea just having a conversation about what, really, haven’t we done yet. The longer we keep doing this, the smaller that question becomes, but we thought, hey, we’ve never done that sort of Mafia-world sort of pastiche – the Goodfellas/Sopranos world. We just never got near it and it was kind of obvious to us that it’s a really fun world to play in when you can introduce absurdities like diaper-eating. That informed so much about how it’s going to look, and once we got there, we thought: “Let’s go full-bore into this world that we actually love.” We’re fans of that stuff.
The various Bedtime Stories are all so different in terms of subject matter – what holds them all together?
Eric Wareheim: I think it’s just a universal tone of “life is a real nightmare”.
Tim: A larger theme in Sauce Boy is that no matter how hard you try to change, you can’t. You are who you are. That’s a horrible thought. If part of your life involves doing something that’s despicable to you and the people you know, you’re stuck with that. With this show, we try to balance some of those darker, more philosophical ideas or views of the world with actual humor and crazy concepts and performances that are a little out-there and weird. We don’t want to be too heavy handed with our grim outlook on the world, but we want it to be about something and to make you think about something.
Eric: I was thinking about Sauce Boy this weekend, and it reminded me of Happiness, the Todd Solondz film. The dad is a pedophile, but there’s no way he can not be a pedophile. He has to go through life making these decisions. My character, in Sauce Boy, is a normal dad. He just has a really, really dark problem. And he does want to fix it! He wants to be near his family and he wants to cure himself. But that darkness can’t be cured.
You guys have a really interesting venue in Adult Swim, where things are allowed to be dark. Nobody fixes a huge problem in 30 minutes on an Adult Swim show. Things are funny, but things are still terrible.
Tim: With a lot of the episodes, it starts light and ends dark, you know? We watched, I think, the whole episode, one of the first ones we did, with an audience. And at first there were some laughs, and then the laughs started dying out, and then by the end of it the credits rolled and everybody kind of sat there going: “What the fuck. I feel like shit now because that guy just got buried alive.”
I think this has the same effect. Eric’s walking away [at the end of the episode] and that beautiful song from Bonnie “Prince” Billy is playing and you’re just like: “Oh, shit. You guys got me to feel something.” You’re not just like: “Well, that was silly!” I hope you feel kind of … a little pit-of-the-stomach or something.
Comedy feels like it keeps getting darker and darker, since, I guess, David Letterman and Conan O’Brien. Do you guys feel a drive to keep humor from being anaesthetizing?
Tim: With those two particular examples, there’s a lot of display of intelligence there. And, like, cleverness. I guess there’s a larger attempt to present the world as an absurd place, and I think we grew up on that kind of comedy and sort of a nihilistic view of the world, that nothing is sacred and nothing matters – that informs a lot of what we write and what we do.
You do a lot of commercials work, sort of on the side. How do you feel about it in conjunction with your bigger and more ambitious stuff like Bedtime Stories?
Eric: Tim and Eric was pretty popular in the commercials world, as you probably know, and we’ve trained two guys that look very similar to us to do this, and they kind of go out and we give them a couple of pointers and they watch some of our sketches and then they do it. It’s not really us.
Tim: There are actually a bunch of Tim and Erics out there, doing different stuff.
You’re sort of Tim and Eric Incorporated. You subcontract out.
Tim: We always hope we’re so busy that we can’t do commercials. Oh, shit, we’re shooting our movie that week! Or something. [sighs] It’s a mixed bag. It’s always fun to make anything. And we get to work with our crew and try different stuff and we’re very pragmatic about what it is we’re making and what the expectations are. It plays to our craftsman side. We’re capable of doing this, and people seem to want this kind of style. I’d rather not get ripped off; I’d rather see how much of it we can control and make some money so we can put a swimming pool in our backyard.
The Absolut ad with Zach Galifianakis is really funny work, independent of whether or not it’s a vodka commercial.
Tim: That just seemed like a con job. For us, that was a straight bank robbery. To just make whatever we wanted as long as we had this product in it? We don’t really see the big difference because we’re making stuff on Adult Swim and we’re getting budgets and getting paid by the advertisers, so we can’t really take a very strong anti-product stance because we’re funded by Prell and Cap’n Crunch and everything.
Eric: When we talk to our fans, they’ll include that stuff. They’ll be like: “The vodka movie is one of my favorite things!” A lot of millennial fans don’t know the difference between a sketch that was in Awesome Show or a scene that was in Billion-Dollar Movie or a commercial. It’s all on YouTube and it says Tim and Eric. Even Dr Steve Brule, some people don’t know it’s a show. They see a clip and say: “Oh, I love that one sketch you did!”
Is Steve Brule coming back?
Eric: Oh yeah, baby.
Tim: We just shot season four and we’re editing it. It’ll probably show up some time early next year.
How do you take notes on this show? Or on any of your shows?
Eric: We’re almost note-free now. It’s a really great, creative process.
Tim: Too note-free.
Eric: In the beginning, Lazzo was really involved and really helped us define Tom Goes to the Mayor. He really knows his shit. Tim and I can easily derail a whole TV show into madness, and he’s really great about saying, “OK, bring this back a little bit here.” With our latest, with Brule and Bedtime Stories, he really gives us complete freedom.
Tim: I think, unfortunately, that’s, sadly, very rare in this business, because you have a lot of executives and middle-manager types piping in with their own ideas, which makes the process elsewhere very annoying and hard, asking why someone’s hair is blonde.
That’s literally true among the people I’ve talked to. Producers ask why a dress is purple.
Tim: And a lot of times it’s people just actively creating jobs for themselves. They think: “If I don’t have notes, there’s no point for me to be here!”
How did you guys start working together?
Eric: We met in film school at Temple University and were in the same film program. We started making stuff in class and on the weekends, and that’s how it all started.
Was it a natural progression from there to Adult Swim?
Tim: No. There was a good long period of wilderness time. We came out of college not much more prepared for the world than we went into it. I don’t know what we were going to do with a film degree. So we just started making films. We just kinda worked day jobs and we were coming together on weekends, not for any sort of career trajectory but out of a love of making stuff. As a thing to do instead of drinking or watching sports. These little short films piled up and we identified that there was something special about it, and we said, “I wonder how far we can take this thing?”
Eric, you’ve made a bunch of music videos, right? Do you pick the bands, or do they pick you?
Eric: It’s a combination of both. Some of them I’m friends with, and some … I’m pretty picky. I do it as a fun side project. The only way I can really get into it is if I’m super passionate about the song or there’s this really crazy idea I’ve always wanted to try but never had the money for.
When has the latter happened?
Eric: I did a video for Major Lazer called Bubble Butt. I’ve always wanted to get all the big-booty girls together from around the country. It’s kind of a dance spree with girls with really enlarged booties. So that was a passion of mine came to fruition.
