Herb Sundays 130: Tim Heidecker

The satirist/musician/comedian recalls tour van classics.

Herb Sundays 130: Tim Heidecker

Apple Music, Spotify

Art by Michael Cina

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“here's a playlist i made called after the tour with waxahatchee - it's music that i listened to on the road during the 2-week tour - spending time with a bunch of music is full of "hey do you know this?" and "oh I gotta play you this" plus one of mine for good measure.” - Tim Heidecker

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The bio for Tim Heidecker is long and winding, so here’s a list instead. If none of these register, you can move on to the playlist, but here goes: Tom Goes to The Mayor, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job, Check It Out! With Dr. Steve Brule, Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories, Abso Lutely Productions (Comedy Bang! Bang!, Nathan For You, The Eric Andre Show, Decker), On Cinema, Office Hours Live, Various TV/Film acting (“Us,” “Eastbound & Down,” “The Comedy,” “Bridesmaids,” “Portlandia,” and “I Think You Should Leave.”).

Despite this impressive body of work, Heidecker's output has always been challenging to reconcile and even harder to defend. Playing Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! (2007-2010) for partners and well-meaning friends was agonizing in practice, the immediate response to their indifference or dismissal was regret. The excuse I would give (and still do) is that you need to "watch more” as one clip is merely the shading of the whole, barely a complete image. There were even elaborate posts (this Cathy Fisher one is canon) written about how to turn loved ones into work. Inevitably, the skit following the one you wanted to share would be so puerile, so insanely stupid, that it would erase your chance at another look. Another potential fan lost. As a longtime fan, I was thrilled he agreed to share a playlist. It gave me an excuse to revisit the man's oeuvre at mid-career. After listening to a handful of Heidecker podcast interviews from 2014 to the present, I was able to reconnect to the source.

World’s Best Dad, by Chantal Anderson

It’s helpful to see Heidecker through the lens of a musician, mainly because he is one, but in retrospect, it explains his journey. Tim plays long games with those he collaborates with and is in bands with folks like Gregg Turkington or Eric Wareheim, so to speak, to allow himself to get certain ideas across. Tim and Eric’s magic as collaborators, starting in college at Temple, remains his original lodestar, the alchemical agent that gave them both voices. Indeed the boys arrived at a moment when comedy was being re-absorbed as weirder, more auteur-ish, and found form in passed-around VHS tapes like the South Park pilot, Heat Vision and Jack, and the compilation clips of lost/found television and training videos TV Carnage which were the vanguard in pre-YouTube circles. Tim, a theater kid, and Eric, an A/V type, spent High School in the last days of pre-digital, Eric filming weddings and ferrying VHS tapes across town, a nadir (or a high point) of the video age. It’s this clumsiness that they seized upon, and while their references are often pegged as public access TV, the formative spine is just "local TV” or the work of amateurs, both theirs and others.

Armed with an Andy Kaufman commitment to the bit, Tim & Eric helped redefine both the pacing and feel of comedy and advertising (and remain directors of ads, often uncredited), the downstream effects of which are felt in social media today, including cooked accounts for Nutter Butters, or any self-aware or self-sabotaging advertising. Humor (and rage, which we’ll get to later) became the de facto voice, more lizard brain, and free association more than anything. Heidecker recalls finding words for their style in and finding it in Steve Martin’s book Born Standing Up (2007) that they were: "trying to capture the feeling of being with your friends and you’re laughing at 3 in the morning and don’t know why”

It’s the stolen moments of Tim’s work that remain some of the best. They are the DVD extras, the related social media banter, and the b-sides. Tim’s interviews, both in and out of character alone, are some of my favorite Tim moments. In T&EASGJ! era, friends and I would be delighted when a new YouTube interview with Tim & Eric would surface. Depending on how clued in (or clued out more likely), they would adjust their angle of attack, trying to enliven the dread of a boring interview, doing it for us but mainly for them. The glee of friendship, of the inside joke, that's their legacy. Besotted with banality, such as (unpaid) exuberance for Papa John's And Shrek's The Third (2007). Literal hours of footage dedicated to espousing this stuff are wonderful. The tone they achieve is now indistinguishable from the breathless tone podcasters are expected to achieve when plugging their sponsors. It's not highbrow but achieves velocity with the sheer volume of footage shot (an early digital revelation). The why is lost under the momentum, laid bare, is a wanton desperation to be involved. 

Desperation is a big part of the Heidecker oeuvre. Tim & Eric plumbed the depths of the Valley looking for a vital force to power the show, the headshots at the “bottom of the pile,” or the industry types that were too fried or too fringe for the mainstream (including themselves); the headshots at the “bottom of the pile,” or the industry types that were too fried or too fringe for the mainstream (including themselves), was where they found some of their brightest spots. I recently saw Awesome Show! stalwart, the puppeteer and actor David Liebe Hart, sitting outside the Hollywood Bowl likely knowing there would be concertgoers who were fans who would spot him. The fear was that these artists were laughed at, not with, on the show. But there were fans around him, and he was signing stuff. He was a star. Maybe Hollywood will find us all.

Indeed, if I learned anything from looking at Heidecker, the greatest gift given is a willingness to be misunderstood, that Kaufman heat, the kayfabe (he would probably never intellectualize it), a joy in going all in. But Tim has adapted his fuel source sightly but is no less brave. What we want from youth is not only the sincerity and hopefulness we fear we've abandoned but also the coldheartedness to do things we need to do. This can also be true for older folks; they can get on with it.

Indeed the irony is that we thought Heidecker was a troll, an apathetic jerk (his role in Rick Alverson’s The Comedy (2012) for one), a “druggie,” but Heidecker vows he was never really that big on them. Instead, Tim derives pleasure from the right hit; he’s a moralist more than anything, which may shock his long-time fans, who relish his access to the darker ends of comedy. 

Heidecker’s natural appeal is a perceived grumpiness, a coiled rage that he lets loose through his characters but rarely his own tongue. To risk hyperbole, Heidecker is one of the great satirists of our time, and his own disgust has guided his work in the past few years. He’s retired a confrontational side of his persona, remarking that Kaufman would have likely done the same had he lived.

One of his greatest works, so eerily prescient and painful, is his stand-up special, An Evening With Tim Heidecker, which premiered in October 2020 in an already strange pandemic landscape, one of the great works of the moment, blurring fact and fiction. The culmination of his inconsistent standup, apparently, just plumbing the depths of desperation that contemporary comics are hitting in the “anti-woke” era of specials. He describes the character, who shares his name, of course, as “flailing,” just a guy who thinks it’s enough. He recalls doing this bit for the wrong audiences, opening for Aimee Mann, for example, and just feeling the intense hatred from the crowd.

A year later, in a spoof of the Joe Rogan podcast, Heidecker recruited two comedians he admired and did their own faux podcast episode, another facsimile of the form. Heidecker, naturally in the Rogan chair, is credulous and enamored with the rollicking nothing they are discussing. He’s too sly to charge at Rogan on a pure political front as most do or play caricature as a buffoon, but instead, the elongated chatter with no real purpose is merely commenting on the low entertainment value on display. Less popular but even funnier to me is his Bill Maher take, where he apes the pushy Maher's incredulity, an inverse of Rogan's style, bullying his guest Fred Armisen into submission.

Mid-period Heidecker is something less loud but equally important to the whole. Office Hours (2021-present), is sort of a Morning Zoo radio archetype but in earnest. You sense that Heidecker is happy to be in a sane place, a safe one. His music has become less overtly comedic and now deals with plainspoken observations about fame, fatherhood, etc. Once you disarm your shield, you appreciate this tenderness, this love of craft. He already has an impressive catalog, including 2019’s What The Brokenhearted Do..., 2020’s Fear of Death, made in collaboration with Weyes Blood, 2022’s High School, and as of past Friday, Slipping Away, his debut for Bloodshot Records. The bio says: “Even the simple act of making music, as portrayed in the cleverly constructed writer’s block anthem “Well’s Running Dry,” can lead to an earnest reflection on insecurity and aging. “As soon as I wrote that, I worried that it’s not cool to talk about,” Heidecker says. “But a second later, I thought—well that’s challenging and exciting. Let’s push past that.” It’s Heidecker’s love of songwriting from shapeshifters like The Beatles, Dylan, Randy Newman, and Warren Zevon that informs his work and his bravery to evolve deeper into his own voice. Heidecker is looking at his legacy, staring it down. What more is there to do? Who am I next? It’s a joy to witness, maybe a touch uncomfortable, but ultimately something to be freed by.

“I first met Tim on a film set off of a pier in the East River. It felt awkward (some woulda called it kismet; likely it was just plain old good research). See, I was shocked to arrive and find we were both wearing a well-worn pink polo, jorts & blown-out chucks. He was in front of the camera as the main character named ‘Swanson’ in a film called The Comedy. Funny, I’d always thought that was my job. I woulda been proud, but this role is a real asshole. Tim, however, is not. Tim is exceptionally funny & sweet. I got over the awkwardness as our shared love of the still fresh ‘dad rock’ vernacular emerged. We carried no shame (nor children, but we both had dads). Little did we know it then, but he was about to embark on a prolific musical period where he — already a comedy master and soon to become a father himself — contributed a great deal to the musical subgenre.” - Chris Swanson (Co-Founder Secretly Group & All Flowers Group)

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