Tim Heidecker’s stand-up special subverts expectations — from parody to character performance.
I discovered Tim Heidecker’s comedy as an after hours sketch TV show named “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”. It resembled some similar content from comedians like Andy Milonakis and Tom Green, but with fewer of the ’90s style prank-the-public moments. It felt very unusual, especially at the time, when most TV comedy offerings ranged from the Tosh 2.0 guy (I can’t remember his name) to several flavors of The Simpsons. This is why it feels so unusual to watch one half of that comedy duo, Tim Heidecker, release a conventional, hour-long stand-up comedy special.
Heidecker’s special is available on Youtube for free; I would recommend watching it if you are interested in what I have to say about it. If you have not watched it, maybe I will change your mind. This is not a traditional review, but more of an analysis from the perspective of a longtime fan, who is just OK at writing. Please do not critique my review; I’m not interested. Mostly, I need to write this so I stop long-replying to twitter comments about the special.
The special is billed as “a send-up, a parody, a character, a performance piece, or whatever you’d like, but at the end of the day, it’s jokes!”. This description is unique for its sincerity, which seems intended to give an honest description of a comedy style that relies somewhat on opacity— i.e. if you describe the joke right away, it’s not funny. This strategy introduces some early problems: “why parody stand-up?” and “how do you make an un-funny person interesting to watch”. The marketing also reveals an interesting contrast to Heidecker’s other work. They are not selling a character, but rather a real person playing a character; that is an idea rooted in stand-up, and more recently subverted by alternative comedy. Borat is billed as a real person, and Tim Heidecker’s numerous characters are typically billed as real people, whereas someone like Jeff Dunham is not billing his racist puppets as real people. The description for a recent season of Tim Heidecker’s web series “On Cinema” promises that he will “be supplying viewers with their expert analyses all while dishing out Hollywood surprises.”, which fans of the series will understand as a tongue-in-cheek description delivered by one of his fictional character in the series. That series is described as a movie review show, but it is mostly unrelated bickering between two strange men. On Cinema is one of Heidecker’s most recent comedic projects and it relies on being coy about its intentions, which is not the strategy used for his stand-up special.
Even the editing of Heidecker’s stand-up special is uncharacteristically honest. Without revealing too much, he extends a long, inane bit about people who prefer Coke over Pepsi by continually repeating it — the rationale being that a special is being taped and he needs a “clean” version of the delivery. It feels very lame to describe it, but the fluency of the delivery sells the idea. In another form, such as Heidecker’s action-movie parody series “Decker”, the bit might have been ham-handedly edited to signal to the viewer that the character, as well as the editors, are inept. In his stand-up special’s form, the joke is delivered straight, as if you are an audience member to a live experience. This format shift opens up the stand-up special to a non-traditional audience for Tim Heidecker: viewers who are willing to judge a performance on its own merit, rather than as an episode in a long career canon. The small universe his character inhabits is built up over the special, and as such, exists separately from any meta-context. It is a very un-pretentious way to invite an unfamiliar viewer into the experience. This might be why the traditional divisiveness surrounding his work is less present or why mainstream broadcast giant Howard Stern took the time to praise Heidecker’s special on his show as “hysterical”. The stand-up special is not an “in joke”; instead, it stands (I don’t have a better word) on its own.
The abstract physicality of Awesome Show can also be found throughout the special. There is something unsettling and strange about the bulging-eyed, tremelo inflected shriek that Heidecker’s character delivers as a send-up to the overall concept of attending an opera. I found myself experiencing a creeping dread and fascination when Heidecker delivers an overly-detailed description of a dead dog as a set-up for a pivot into political humor — the tone is almost reminiscent of the kinds of lingering, grotesque imagery that filmmaker David Lynch is known to include in his work. The loud, over-acted expressions from Heidecker combined with the subtler, barely contained anger throughout lend an unusual complexity to his character.
The format of the special also raises an interesting question: what does the outsider comedy of Tim Heidecker look like with a traditional laugh track? In his live special the audience is made up of mostly fans of his work, who all laugh at moments that are sincerely funny to them. The laugh track does not exist as a joke in itself, which you might see in Tim and Eric’s most recent series, “Beef House”, a bit of an absurd version of a sitcom format. The kind of format manipulation found in Beef House, where a character’s reaction shot may linger just a little too long with background laughter existing throughout, is totally absent in the stand-up special.
During the special the laughs actually serve their traditional purpose of signaling a punchline. In a set that is made up of a series of anti-punchlines — jokes intended to fall flat — the laughs are the best indicator of the intentionally funny moments. An example of this effect happens when Heidecker delivers a cruel and offensive routine about “head meds”, or drugs designed to treat mental illness. There is a palpable discomfort when he delivers his punchline mocking a person suffering from mental illness. Then, in a quieter aside afterwards, he mentions his “wife is on these head meds”, which elicits the first real laughter from the segment. The bad jokes are funny, but the subtler ones elevate the concept.
The audience is responding to the Heidecker character unintentionally revealing himself as a monster — a casually vile partner. In other words, the comedy of the special is not that a person is bad at stand-up comedy, but that a person is who is bad at stand-up comedy is accidentally painting an extremely unflattering portrait of himself. You’re watching a terrible man show his ass. There is a sense of schadenfreude in watching him fail at stand-up comedy and a continued dramatic tension as he reveals aspects of his own character. The poorly formed jokes bear the hallmark of somebody who understands exactly what makes a joke poorly formed, and so in a very contradictory way, the jokes are good. The crappy punchlines work, both because they are not actually crappy and because the audience has decided to dislike this character, so they feel good that he is failing. In this way, he is not mocking stand-up comedians, but using their corny tropes to mock an antiquated stand-up fanbase on legitimate merits.
Stand-up comedians are becoming dinosaurs, partially because so much of the material unavoidably feels lazy. The stand-up medium (hah) is also historically misogynistic and historically aggressive towards marginalized groups. I hope most readers understand that the reason some comedians lament no longer being invited to college campuses is not because they are being persecuted, but because their casual mockery of those different than them has become disliked. I would agree with Jerry Seinfeld’s assessment that stand-up comedy is approaching an extinction, but mostly because traditional stand-up comedians have struggled to strike a balance between being challenging and being mean.
The evolution of the special’s bit, from a stand-up hack to a character portrait of an odious man is where Tim Heidecker’s typical subversion lies. The gradual understanding of the special’s added dimension brings the original marketing tags full circle, with the “parody” description leading, then followed by an invitation to form your own interpretation. There are aspects of the special that I think remain unpolished: specifically, a long setup for a Taylor Swift pun that does not pay off. But then, at other times these jokes work, like the long, accent-aided impression of a baby Mike Huckabee. What separates these jokes, I think, is the presence of a sincere contempt from Heidecker in the latter situation; his feelings aren’t written but they come across clear in the delivery. He says: “…in comes fat, little Mike”, a small break in character that marks one of the funniest moments of the hour. I think Tim Heidecker’s comedy is regularly misunderstood, however I believe I have the perfect interpretation, and I am flawless.