March 4-10, 2004

cover story

Tim And Eric Go To Hollywood

Class clowns turned high-comedy absurdists, Tim and Eric get ready for the big time.

by Joey Sweeney

In Humpers -- a 10-minute short film written, produced, edited, acted and distributed by a couple of film school students from Temple --two businessmen meet for a quick conference in a city park on a weekday afternoon. One of them is tall, talking on a cell phone with headgear, and is pretty obnoxious; the other one is on the meek side, seemingly just happy to be employed. They go over a proposal quickly, and agree on terms. Suddenly, there’s a jump cut, and the city opens up for them.

They're at Penn's Landing, humping traffic pylons. They're on South Street, humping cyclone fences. Out on the Ben Franklin Parkway, ecstatically humping median strips.

Their business clothes have been traded in for Richard Simmons-esque hot pink shorts and half-shirts that expose their torpid, late-20s beer bellies. A pumped-up, Europop version of the kid's tune "Cotton Eyed Joe" seems to be emanating from the sky itself. After so much putzing around with annual reports and proposals and conference calls, they are finally free.

They are humping.

They are Humpers.

Humpers, as much as any of the other short films by Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim -- to date, they’ve made around 75 of them -- captures what has grown to be the duo’s milieu: Frustrated geniuses stuck in a corporate world of doublespeak and sweet, foreign modern absurdity. Like other touchstones of this emerging school -- take the 1999 movie Office Space as its Rosetta stone -- the Tim and Eric films aren’t so much about sticking it to The Man as they are about poking you, Mr. Rank and File, and cheekily rousing you out of your fluorescent-light-and-cubicle-induced walking slumber. If the whole world of comedy is like the 1968 Democratic Convention (and, increasingly, it is; mean and desperate humor abounds, from midget grooms to Broken Lizard), Tim and Eric are like that solitary wiseass sticking a daisy into some poor schlep private’s bayonet.

In the last couple of years, Tim and Eric's videotapes and DVDs and Web site -- timanderic.com, which is actually how the duo prefer to be identified -- have established both a comedic sensibility and very well-thought-out identity.

Between peddling a few hundred copies of the DVD at rock shows and screenings, as well as being a favorite e-mail forward of anyone who encounters their site (itself an amazing survey of the Tim and Eric oeuvre), Heidecker and Wareheim could well be on their way to being something that's not often seen in the world of comedy anymore: a great team in the spirit of The Smothers Brothers or Ackroyd and Belushi.

When they're in the midst of group therapy send-up films like Versatio, in which the pair talk through their feelings so far that they become detached, surreal feeling-borgs who make no sense at all, or IM Love, where they both lie in a cybersex conversation and recast themselves as hot, horny lesbians, that sense of the classic comedy duo is put into high relief.

It's impossible not to look on and smile and feel like something is being said that has not been said in a long time -- and something that they definitely did not learn as sleepy-eyed students majoring in radio, TV, and film at Temple University in the mid-'90s.

"Right away, freshman year," Wareheim says proudly, "we knew [film school] was a joke, and we were pissed." Thrown into the same TU dorm, early on, the duo became fast friends, despite their seemingly disparate social worlds: Wareheim at that point was a straight-edge, emo-listening, uptight vegan dork; Heidecker had long hair, a goatee and smoked lots of pot. What brought them together was a disenchantment for their circumstance, but more importantly, a shared sense of humor.

"Right away," says Heidecker, "there was this sense that it was important to make the other person laugh."

"The first day of class," says Wareheim, "we got yelled at -- and I mean yelled at -- by the professor for not paying attention and making up fake band names."

As time went on, their disdain for the horrid cliches of film school -- endless meditations on Maya Deren and Susan Sontag, natch -- stretched out to their fellow students, and Tim and Eric's school assignments began to take on the air of pranks, or more like publicity stunts with no publicity.

"We weren't the nicest kids," says Wareheim. For one assignment, Heidecker, who was stumbling his way through a photography course, simply gave up and decided to purposefully flub the assignment. He took snapshots of other people's photos drying on the lines in the school photo lab, had them developed and made a mobile out of them. When he presented it to the class, Wareheim had his back: He donned a T-shirt with an iron-on of Heidecker's face and helped him hang banners around the classroom that said things like "TOGETHERNESS" and "Photography Is Fun!"

"There was one kid who was like, "Hey, that's my photo!'" says Heidecker.

"Meanwhile," Wareheim says, "the photo professor was like, "Wow, let's discuss this!'" Born of desperation and laughter and a spot-on affinity for the absurd, the timanderic.com aesthetic was born. They breezed the class. For their next assignment, they did a pilot for a game show called Name That Chicken.

Things you are likely to see in Tim and Eric films: Rainbows, unicorns, PowerPoint presentations, pop-up Instant Messenger windows and John McCain. If there is a striking disparity in that list for you, you’re starting to see the Tim and Eric ethos: It’s all absurd, it’s all bullshit. Where that turns from just sheer indie-world grousing, though, is the level of joy that is brought to Tim and Eric’s flights of fancy. The visual aesthetic of the videos is very bright: They essentially use the language of advertising (especially infomercials) to create a tweaked-out world where meaning gets detached and whimsy bleeds out into psychedelia. In Tim and Eric’s world, Batman fights weird chicken ladies with a bong, and the mayor will open up the whole town for you if you just show him a childish drawing of a plate of spaghetti.

And as often as not, there's singing.

Wareheim is 27 years old and looks like he could be the Peter Sellers of basketball. He grew up in Audubon. He's about 6-foot-6 with black messy hair and has dark black glasses. Something about the guy just looks wacky, but he's also excellent at playing delusional straight men, suit-and-tie types who just might also be acid casualties.

Allentown native Heidecker, 28, is shorter, more traditionally handsome and fair-complected in a way that allows him to be a comedy chameleon with ease, whereas Wareheim's continual mutations seem like a joke about just that.

As a comedy duo, they're naturals. Even in casual conversation, they slide in and out of character, finish each other's sentences and generally riff nonstop. Lest it seem like this is just boy-genius showbiz posturing, the craziest part of all is that they're sweet guys. They're more like hyperactive teenagers, at this point, than the cliche of miserable, hardened and bitter comedy types.

And as fraught with excitement as Humpers -- and Batman, and Unicorn Farm, and the other films that have populated their self-made videotapes and DVDs for the last few years -- most certainly are, it's a series called Tom Goes to the Mayor that is about to become Tim and Eric's bread and butter.

"Tom is sort of this everyman character we use," says Wareheim. "Lots of times, I'll call Tim "Tom.'"

Tom Goes to the Mayor is essentially the story of a young entrepreneur, Tom (Heidecker) who continually finds himself in meetings with a small-town mayor (Wareheim); in each meeting, the pair are continually and sincerely wowed by each other's unbelievably bad ideas: pirate-themed restaurants, the widening of historic streets for a Lobster Day Parade, and so on. Crudely animated with photocopy art and loaded with the mayor's continual non sequiturs, it's a running joke about rising to the level of one's own incompetence. It's like Dilbert, but meta; it's one of the most direct substitutions for Tim and Eric themselves in the duo's whole pantheon of videos and bits. Tom and the Mayor might as well be from different planets, but their enthusiasm for pursuing their own ridiculous ideas is sincere, and there's a strange sort of "I'm insane, you're insane" vibe between them.

It’s not terribly surprising, then, that the show has been picked up and ordered as a pilot for the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim suite of programs. A loose confab of cartoons geared for grown-ups, Adult Swim has, in the past few years, become a home to some of the most cutting-edge humor on television, frequently outstripping even the venerable HBO as a home for groundbreaking (and often out-and-out weird) new comedy writing.

Anchored by shows like Space Ghost (a talk show that uses an obscure old Hanna-Barbera hero as its host, tweaking real-life guests) and Aqua Teen Hunger Force (a sitcom starring an animated burger, fries and a shake), Adult Swim is pretty much one of the best things on basic cable right now. It's subversive, it's hip, and as often as not, funny as all get-out.

Tom Goes to the Mayor would ideally sit in the middle of the Adult Swim lineup, occupying the same sort of dreamy comedic netherworld as The Brak Show. The animation might get cleaned up a little, but it would essentially exist as it does on timanderic.com: Cut-out Kinko's Shrinky Dinks of Tom and the Mayor giggling about lobsters and national security.

What is surprising, however, is how Tim and Eric are about to arrive in relatively mainstream media outlets. As it happens, Tim and Eric have found themselves in a comedic moment that is resonating on college campuses and rock clubs throughout the land. It’s basically indie rock, but it’s comedy. Fueled by the DIY ethos of the music scene -- both Heidecker and Wareheim have played in local bands through the years (The Series, Sola and the Tim Heidecker Masterpiece) -- they’re suddenly at the front of a mini-movement where comedy, rock ’n’ roll (and maybe even politics) are all about to converge.

The godfathers of this wave are two guys named Bob Odenkirk and David Cross -- or, to scores of fans all over America, the Mr. Show guys. Mr. Show was a short-lived, late-night comedy series on HBO in the late ’90s. It only ran for three seasons, and indeed, probably wasn’t much watched during its initial run, but thanks to word-of-mouth and DVD reissues, it has become the emergent comedy cult smash of our time. It also introduced the world to Jack Black and Tenacious D. Beyond that, though, Mr. Show was important because, for one of the first times since the late-’70s, it injected a very punk stance into the brick-wall-and-microphone world of American comedy. The show turned sketch comedy on its ear, free-associating from one sketch to another and often ridiculing the tired tenets of sketch comedy itself. In many ways, it -- along with the TV carnage comedy of Robert Smigel, the Triumph the Insult Comic Dog guy -- is a direct precursor to what Tim and Eric do.

After college, in the mid-’90s, Tim and Eric continued their balls-to-the-wall penchant for stunts and pranks: They made fake bands like The Tim Heidecker Masterpiece and Hypersexuality and threw parties around them and even started to make prank calls and videos with the A/V equipment Wareheim had at the ready for his then-day job as an event videographer. But things fizzled when Heidecker moved to New York to pursue acting and instead landed in an office job rating video games -- until a friend who hosted a variety night at The Knitting Factory began to tap them on a regular basis to make short films that now stand as the beginnings of the timanderic.com milieu. Not knowing what else to do with the videos they were making on weekends in Philly, they started to submit their stuff to open calls and film festivals, at one point landing at the open video call at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

"It was this big fancy video artist thing," says Wareheim, "and we were like the non-artists -- we were on a little tiny monitor and you could see it when you went to get your beer. It was like, OK, you can be in this, sort of."

But when the first version of Tom became a surprise hit at the Philly Film Festival in 2002, "it gave us the drive to send our stuff around some more."

So the pair started cranking out videos, often scripting them in real time over IM while they were at their day jobs.

"I was at work, not doing much," says Heidecker, "and we'd already had, like, five good things that we'd done in the last few years, so I just started looking people up and sending them our stuff: Robert Smigel at Saturday Night Live, some managers that I'd heard about and Bob Odenkirk. And, like, three weeks later, I get a call on my cell phone, and he says, "This is Bob,' and I didn't believe it, but I could hear Tom Goes to the Mayor in the background. And he's like, "I'm watching this thing that you sent me, and it's FUCKING AWESOME! Who are you guys, what are you doing?' And he's just telling me all these stories about people I don't know, and he's like, "This is why you guys are different' -- he was already sold on it. Talking shit about other comedians and why they're not good."

"I get a lot of DVDs and CDs sent to me," says Odenkirk. "Improv groups, rock bands, whatever. I don’t usually watch or listen to ’em, I just throw ’em out. But I will pop one in every once in a while, and when I saw Tim and Eric, it was really funny and smart and dry -- and I’d never heard of them, no one had ever heard of them. Usually, everybody knows everybody; in L.A., if you make a 5-minute film, people will live on it for five years. Right away, I got it and I thought it was funny. The voice was really unique and really developed. Some of the people I showed it to didn’t get it, but I was more surprised at how many did and saw something great in there."

Almost overnight, Tim and Eric had not only a great endorsement from one of their heroes, but they had a guy willing to be their representative, taking the timanderic.com DVD around to networks and studios. Energized by Odenkirk’s positive reactions, the pair had made the decision to go out to Los Angeles and see if they could peddle their wares around town and see what would happen.

"We had met the guys who did Heat Vision and Jack [a now-legendary but never-aired Ben Stiller/Jack Black pilot] and they were doing this film festival where they told everyone [including us] to just "make a Batman movie,’" Wareheim says.

"So we went out there," Heidecker says, "and sat through like three hours of the shittiest Batman movies ever."

Tim and Eric’s Batman movie, however, killed, and in a room full of supposed comedy pros, the out-of-towners seemed to be the only people that really followed through.

Almost instantly, they had arrived.

When they returned home, they started cranking out material with even greater speed than before. Suddenly, they were screening material everywhere: film festivals, rock shows, even poetry readings. And every time they thought they were gonna fall flat on their faces, people -- even shrug-shouldered indie-rock hipsters -- were howling, guffawing. Within just a few months, they’d made a bunch of new shorts, had been commissioned to do intermission films for the Field Day festival, and were talking with both Comedy Central and The Cartoon Network. And everywhere, the reaction was the same.

"Everywhere we went, people would look at the tapes, and go, "Whoa. You did this all yourself?’" Heidecker says. "They simply found it unbelievable."

"It reminds me of me," says Odenkirk. "They just do the fucking job. They weren’t waiting for anyone to give them a break. They’re gonna make their comedy, whatever it takes. And they don't resent the suggestions of others, which a lot of people do. One thing that was great about how they’ve developed is that they did things entirely on their own and nobody noticed. There was nobody there to say, "Oh no, that’s not how you do it.’ There was no sloppy or lazy habits to pick up. Honestly, most people don’t work that hard."

About a month ago, the inevitable happened.

Tim and Eric pulled up stakes and moved to Los Angeles, to work on Tom Goes to the Mayor, but also to embark on something that they probably never thought they’d have: careers as funnymen. Tom, of course, is one of a whole hard drive full of bits that Tim and Eric have now, and to the casual observer, it seems like they’re using it as such. Production is under way, and the word is that Tenacious D themselves are going to be in the pilot.

"These guys could do anything," says Odenkirk, who compares Tim and Eric's early work to that of Frank Oz and Terry Gilliam. "I could see them doing feature films. When you have that basic knowledge of the process -- you wrote it, shot it, acted it, cut it, did voices, the whole thing -- you get a real direct and basic feel for what it important in a story, which is so rare.

"Add to that they're very gifted and have their own sensibility, and you've really got something. I think that how far they go all has to do with how willing they are to stop being ironic after a certain point. They could really be anything, except singers: They're just not handsome enough."

Over IM, Wareheim is ecstatic about the quick change in Tim and Eric's fortunes, but also a little dizzied by it. "It's like a fairyland out here," he says, and with each new day comes news from an agent that one great new opportunity or another might be happening.

If it all seems unreal to them, well, it kind of is. Hollywood is a place built on myth and half-truth, and that prospector spirit is something that's not lost on either Heidecker or Wareheim.

"Somebody once told me that what we do is comedy for the post-information age," says Heidecker. "I'm not sure what exactly was meant by that, but I took it as this: Everything has already been said already. There's not much left to comment on -- at this point the comedy is out there to be taken, because everything is ridiculous. It just needs to be placed into a comedic context."

As of presstime, talks are in the works to make a full-blown timanderic.com variety show a reality. This is the duo's dream, to basically have what they've been doing in clubs, on DVD and on video for years to be broadcast all over, if only for the sheer absurdity of seeing all their in-jokes flying out all over the country. They already know the next short film they're going to do for it:

"It's going to be called L.A. Guys," says Wareheim. "It's just going to be us, driving around Los Angeles, coked up out of our minds, with just the worst fake tans and jewelry you've ever seen."

"And then it's going to pan to each of us pulling different people aside, getting really nasty, both of saying stuff like, "You know, it's really me who does all the writing of all this.'"

L.A. Guys, huh?

"Yeah. We're going to send it home to all of our friends."