Tim Heidecker
When we think of the people who work with and redefine language the first ones that probably come to mind are usually novelists, poets, playwrights — philosophers if you’re feeling fancy. Comedy tends to be overlooked though it can, in its various forms, be a boundary-pushing and experimental method of expression. One such boundary-pusher is American comedian Tim Heidecker. Heidecker is a comedian, writer, actor, director, and musician best known for his TV collaboration with his comic partner Eric Warenheim in Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Good Job, the web-series On Cinema at the Cinema, and, more recently, for his debut stand-up special An Evening with Tim Heidecker. Heidecker is notable for his absurdist approach to sketch comedy, his deconstructions of comedic form, and his commitment to blurring lines: between jokes and real life, character and self.
The most emblematic of Heidecker’s work is the above-mentioned sketch show Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Good Job. In its editing, presentation, and content the show borrows and repurposes the aesthetics of American TV — specifically the non-prestige corners of its media landscape. The show reproduces the channel-flicking fervour of consumption, weaving together comedic sketches based on cheap infomercials, public access television, corporate training videos, and early web content, capturing the absurdity and informational scramble of these unvarnished, ubiquitous forms. The use of this media-pablum aesthetic paired with humour based on non-sequiturs and absurdism creates a show that might be best described as comedic Dadaism. Dadaism was an early 20th century art movement focused on irrationality and nonsense, collage and repurposing, and a rejection of the sensibilities of art — all these qualities can be found in something like Awesome Shows’s ‘prices’ sketch in which Heidecker and Warenheim wear cheap salesmen’s suits and advertise a series of random dollar prices using garish graphic effects: “I got $19.99 for sale, for 20 dollars […] come on in, buy $35.50 for, for 40 dollars.”
Some have dubbed Heidecker’s style as ‘anti-comedy,’ as his work eschews straight-forward jokes and comedic set-ups, though he rejects the term, noting that he is still always seeking to make people laugh. A better term perhaps would be ‘meta-comedy,’ as his comedy tends to play on things the audience are familiar with, using flat delivery, awkwardness and other methods to bring out their inherent comedy — as with the ‘prices’ sketch mentioned above, a satirization of sales pitches and media flurry.
Heidecker’s recent stand-up special might be the pinnacle of this meta-comedic tendency. The special acts as a parody of stand-up specials, in which he plays a hack comedian named Tim Heidecker, playing off all the tropes of failed comics — he flubs his lines, forgets jokes, tells long, circuitous asides, and generally delivers a horrible failure of a stand-up set. And it’s hilarious. Heidecker plays with the audience’s expectations of comedic language; at one point he tells a simple joke: ‘I recently listened to the music of [country singer] Keith Urban. Sounds like maybe he should change his name to Keith Rural,’ to uproarious laughter, not because the joke is good, but because of the audience’s meta-comedic understanding that the joke is pat and terrible, a perfect encapsulation in wording and delivery of the hubris of the bad joke-teller. The intrigue and appeal of this kind of comedy is that it rewards knowledge of the form, it is an acknowledgement of the rules we have all internalized about comedy, and acts as an exploration and deconstruction of them — how are jokes communicated? Why are some jokes funny and some aren’t? Why is it sometimes funnier to tell a bad joke than a good one? The more comedy you’ve seen, the more interested you are in language, the funnier it can be.
You might’ve noticed that I described Heidecker’s stand-up set as one in which he plays a character, one that happens to look like him and have his exact name. This is another feature of his work that tests the boundaries of comedy. Like Andy Kaufman before him, Heidecker explores the potential of comedy as performance art. What does it mean to play a version of yourself with the same name as you in which you are a horribly unfunny failure, a fool, and a man with a failing marriage? (these elements being the underlying plot of the stand-up special).
These are ideas Heidecker has developed throughout his career. Heidecker and collaborator Gregg Turkington both play fictionalized versions of themselves, hapless movie reviewers this time, in the web series On Cinema at the Cinema — a show in which their movie reviews are always hilariously side-tracked by their bizarre personal lives. These characters have developed a surreal universe of media around them such as the series Decker, the movie Mister America and the special The Trial of Tim Heidecker — in which their lives beyond the web series are explored. What makes this set-up especially interesting is the way the show’s cultish fanbase has taken to social media, playing along with the characters and plotlines of the show, effectively creating a large-scale, collaborative, and improvisational piece of performance art. Comedy is drawn from all these shows by the constant question: where does the character Tim Heidecker end, and the real Tim Heidecker begin?
I hope this People segment on one of the past decades’ most influential comedians made you think, if you hadn’t before, about the constructive and communicative nature of comedy, and the literary nature of all character and performance. If you are interested in the mechanics of comedy, performance art, the corporatization of art, or artistic and linguistic movements such as deconstructionism and Dadaism and want to explore these heady topics in a fun way, dive into the surreal and absurd world of Tim Heidecker, find for yourself the fun in nonsense and the irrationality of logic.
Text: Jamie Stedmond
