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The celebrity guest lists of their two shows hint at the Adult Swim cachet in hip Hollywood: Jeff Goldblum, Rainn Wilson, Sarah Silverman, Patton Oswalt, Paul Reubens and Fred Willard, among others. Oscar nominee John C. Reilly could even start a second career as a late-night cable cult performer as the dim-witted, pit-stained local news "expert," Dr. Steve Brule. Tim enthuses that all of their guests have been completely cool, with one exception. "Gary Busey was on Tom Goes to the Mayor, and he was completely manic in a violent, psychotic, emotionally disturbing way. It was not fun. But I videotaped an amazing 10 minutes of that experience. We couldn't have written it better."
Tom Goes to the Mayor seemed to run its course after 30 episodes, so Tim and Eric started pitching a new sketch show as a kind of spin-off, using live-action characters from some of Mayor's interstitial segments, such as the Channel 5 Married News Team and the lousy products from the Cinco Corporation. To their surprise, Adult Swim picked up Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Tim sees the value of a cartoon network rolling out a non-animated show. "That's something that everyone can talk about. It has an edge to it."
True to form for Adult Swim shows, the pair was essentially given free reign. Tim can still scarcely get over the creative freedom. "If we'd had to go to Comedy Central, we'd probably have had a fight about whether our show should have a laugh track. Because all other sketch comedy shows had a studio audience, even Mr. Show. If you tried to put a laugh track on our show, it would be very confusing. Sometimes the places would be obvious, and some you'd have no idea. It's an amazing thing for us, working for this network, where there was not even the beginning of a question about it."
If Monty Python's Flying Circus was the Beatles of sketch comedy, Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! may be more like Beck or Gnarls Barkley. It keeps its eyes on the styles of earlier decades while being steeped in contemporary trends like remixing. Watching Tim & Eric is like browsing through a half-hour of terrible public access TV, corporate videos, and a smattering of conventional sketches, all spliced and compressed to 11 minutes with zooms and stuttering effects.
Tim and Eric date their satirical aesthetic to the 1980s and '90s, but Eric says, "I think a lot of stuff that inspires us is almost timeless ... . Some commercials and infomercials have that same bad look, music and editing today that they had in the 1980s." Tim says, "It's the lack of creativity in the source material. If you're selling a girdle, you don't give a shit about what font [the ad] is in. They just use the base setting."
"We're also amused by people who shouldn't be creative or on camera, but are forced to be on camera," says Eric. Tim adds, "When I was a kid, my dad and grandfather owned a local Ford dealership, and they were in commercials that they should never have been in. They're horrible."
Like David Letterman, television's defining ironist of the 1980s, had Larry "Bud" Melman and other unglamorous sidekicks, Tim & Eric features a stable of painfully awkward performers. It's hard to tell whether they're deliberately untalented, or unintentionally so. The current tour features two of the show's regulars: cheesy impressionist James Quall and upbeat puppeteer David Liebe Hart, who performs in real life for The Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Show.
Tim and Eric's work with Hart reveals how they strive for anti-showbiz authenticity and blur the line between affection for and mockery of such entertainers. Tim says all the ideas come from Hart for the positive but inane songs he performs with his ventriloquist dummies. "We sit down at [the] keyboard, where all our songs are written. He [Hart] has a bunch of ideas, and maybe I'll play a little melody, a little arrangement, and he improvises the lyrics. An intern writes down this stream-of-consciousness stuff until we have a song. It happens within an hour and we sit right next to the green screen, so we record it immediately."
Tim and Eric come across as the kind of entertainers who are almost exactly like their stereotypically nerdy, net-savvy audiences, but they're more grown-up than you might guess. Eric has two children, including an 11-year-old son Chester, who has a close relationship to his "Uncle Tim." In fact, Tim likes to send Chester photos of his father in the show's ridiculous costumes over the boy's cell phone, which once caused a stir. "I sent him a photo of Eric wearing nothing but a bikini bottom, and that made a big problem at his school. A lot of child porn issues came up."
