As a comedian, Tim Heidecker has spent over two decades probing the murky depths of the male psyche.
From the dark surrealism of the sketch comedy duo Tim & Eric to the deadpan in-jokes of the “On Cinema” universe, Heidecker has crafted an arsenal of hilarious yet haunting caricatures of toxic masculinity: the lecherous boss, the hapless grifter, the “anti-woke” crusader, the puerile man-child.
For those of us who spent hours of our bleary-eyed youth watching Heidecker’s absurd brand of anti-comedy, part of his magic stemmed from his staunch unwillingness to break character. On a 2017 appearance on the Stephen Colbert show, Tim and his comedy partner, Eric Wareheim, arrived dressed in full clown regalia. In a classic Heideckerian twist, Tim quickly derails the interview by recounting the grim details of his recent divorce. “I didn’t want to get into this,” he tells Colbert, choking up beneath a bright red wing and foam nose. “It’s been a really hard couple of months.”
I’ll be the first to admit that it was difficult, at first, to fathom the idea of Tim Heidecker as a Serious Musician. Nearly a decade ago, when I hit play on his 2016 album “In Glendale” — a collection of brightly earnest indie rock songs — it took me a few minutes to realize that there was no gag coming. A few tracks later, a second revelation arrived: the music was not only serious, but pretty damn good.
Today, Heidecker — who will perform a mixture of music and comedy at the Danforth on Feb. 4 — has emerged as not only a prolific musical artist (he’s released six studio albums since 2016), but a talented songwriter with a knack for capturing the existential contours of societal decay.
In October, he released “Slipping Away,” an album that seeks to reconcile the cynicism and paranoia of our current era with the all-too-human need for hope and joy.
“I like to think of it as a record about a man in a mid-life crisis, who is also facing a world that’s in a mid-life crisis,” Heidecker told me. “A world where it feels like something terrible is about to happen.”
“But it’s a lot of fun,” he assured me. “It’s not a happy subject matter, but I try to approach it the way Warren Zevon or Randy Newman might approach it, with a little bit of dark humour.”
“It’s not an emo record or anything like that,” he added, stretching the word as if to draw out its inherent irony.
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I caught up with Heidecker via Zoom at the start of his current North American tour, which he describes as “a bit like a revue”: fans can expect music, comedy and “all kinds of stuff.” In Toronto, the show will open with a set from Neil Hamburger, a stand-up comedian and persona created by alt-comedy legend Gregg Turkington (a character Heidecker calls “the funniest f—king guy in the world.”)
Heidecker, 48, lives in Glendale with his wife and two young kids. He told me he was looking forward to embracing the cold in Toronto next week. It’s a city he’s visited at least 10 times, including an extended stint last year to film the vampire mockumentary series “What We Do in the Shadows.”
“That was a lovely experience,” he recalled. “I stayed right downtown and played a ton of pickleball at an indoor racket club.” The food was also a highlight — specifically the schnitzel at Allen’s on the Danforth (“fantastic”) and the seafood at Joso’s in Yorkville (“so f—king good.”)
Chatting from inside what looked like a tour bus, Heidecker came off as thoughtful and sincere — a far cry from the obnoxious maniacs he’s spent much of his career portraying.
Born in Allentown, Pa., Heidecker met his comedy partner Eric Wareheim at Temple University; they hit it off immediately and began collaborating on what would evolve into the demented comedy world of Tim & Eric.
The duo started off creating short films and sketches in the early 2000s. With a bit of help from comedian Bob Odenkirk, they landed a sketch series on Cartoon Network called “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”
Running between 2007 and 2010, the series — which was loosely inspired by the type of bland public access television programs you might stumble upon late at night — consistently pushed the boundaries of alternative comedy, with garish colours, aggressively disjointed sound and film editing and actors often sourced from Craigslist. The result was a disorienting, abrasive experience, not unlike that of a nearly bad drug trip.
(Among Heidecker’s most enduring characters from the Tim & Eric era are the flirty Channel 5 host Jan Skylar — a member of “the only married news team in the tri-county area” — and “Spagett,” the ludicrously inept host of a hidden camera prank show. Another sketch with incredible staying power sees Tim and Eric portraying Doctors Jimes Tooper and H. Donna Gust, space “experts” who trade progressively ridiculous analogies to explain the nature of the Universe.)
I asked Heidecker about the influence of the late filmmaker David Lynch, a master of surrealism, on the tone and feel of those early sketches.
“He gave us permission to explore that combination of comedy and darkness,” he said. “I was just watching (Lynch’s 1977 body horror fantasy) ‘Eraserhead,’ and I forgot how funny and insane it is. I don’t think we even considered it possible to do that before finding and digging into his work — that you could jump in and out of humour and darkness.”
“Tim and Eric Awesome Show” baffled most critics, but attracted a cult following among weirdos, stoners and alt-comedy fans. It also became a place where high-profile comedians and actors might drop by to get a little freaky: over the years, the show featured recurring appearances from John C. Reilly, Will Ferrell, Zach Galifianakis, Ed Begley Jr. and Paul Rudd. It also laid the groundwork for a generation of comedy surrealists like Eric André, Nathan Fielder and Tim Robinson of “I Think You Should Leave.”
“I don’t know if our stuff will ever receive the appreciation that we all probably think it deserves,” Heidecker reflected thoughtfully. “It gets talked about as very influential and groundbreaking and all that stuff, but I think it’s underrated personally.”
But if Tim & Eric represented the bleeding edge of alt-comedy, it was Heidecker’s next project, “On Cinema at the Cinema,” that shattered the limits of the genre’s storytelling conventions.
Launched as a podcast with Turkington in 2011, “On Cinema” started out as a simple, deadpan spoof of Siskel and Ebert, starring Heidecker as the surly, easily distractible dilettante and Turkington as the mind-numbingly pedantic “movie expert.” As the series moved online and found its footing, “On Cinema” evolved into a sprawling black comedy, centred on the toxic, codependent friendship between Tim and Gregg.
Over time, the show expanded into bizarre new directions, incorporating a host of new characters and increasingly insane subplots involving drug abuse, alternative medicine, divorce, alt-right politics, cryptocurrency and murder.
Today, “On Cinema” — currently in the midst of its 15th season — is best understood as a giant fictional universe, not unlike the MCU — a universe that has spawned an ever-growing list of spinoffs, including movies, multiple music projects and faux TV series.
“It’s like we’ve been writing a novel for 20 years, an absurd ‘Confederacy of Dunces’ type of story that doesn’t seem to ever want to end,” Heidecker told me. “For years I’ve explored the idea of the male toxic persona and what it means to be an American man in the 21st century, and that character has been such a great deposit for my thoughts on that.”
I asked Heidecker a question that is on the mind of every “Timhead” and “Gregghead”: how long will the show keep going?
“It’s inspired by the hell world that we live in, which gives us new ideas every day. And it doesn’t seem to get old. When I got cuts from the latest season, I was still laughing like I did 10 years ago.”
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In recent years, Heidecker’s satire has sharpened and shifted focus. Concurrent with the rise of Trumpism and the ongoing culture wars, Heidecker has carved out something of a niche skewering the bland mediocrity of mainstream comedy and the vapid, pseudo-intellectualism that currently dominates the manosphere.
In 2020, Heidecker released his first ever standup special, debuting a persona he’d been working on for years. Referred to among fans as the “No More Bulls—t” guy, Heidecker casts himself as a blustering, painfully unfunny, “anti-woke” comic, serving up blandly misogynistic one-liners and pining for a time before liberals made it impossible to get a real hamburger and a Coke. “If I wanted a Pepsi I would have asked for a Pepsi!” he screams at the audience, his eyes bulging with rage.
A year later, Heidecker’s podcast, “Office Hours LIVE,” went viral after sharing an incisive parody of “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
Wearing a SpaceX baseball cap, Heidecker delivers a pitch-perfect Rogan impression, leading a meandering, hours-long discussion with comedians Jeremy Levick and Rajat Suresh, touching on a host of right-wing hot button topics like cancel culture, psychedelic drugs and nutrition.
“I think Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson will run for president, and I think he will win” Heidecker-as-Rogan states confidently to his credulous guests, predicting the disintegration of the two-party system and the current structure of society, thus paving the way for “a benevolent monarchy, a magnanimous kingdom.”
It’s extremely funny, but there’s also a thread of exasperation that drives this mode of Heidecker’s satire.
“What I consider mainstream comedy now just seems to be made up of full-on bootlickers and servants to the state, you know? Rogan, Theo Von, that whole podcast world,” he said. “I saw this clip of them and they were drooling over the idea of going to Mar-a-Lago. And then they’re all at the inauguration … there’s just something really not cool about being such supplicants for people in power. I don’t find anything interesting about that.”
“Then I watch their stuff and it’s this very boring s — t, you know? I watched this clip somebody sent to me (of Rogan and his guests) talking about watching “The Wizard of Oz” with “Dark Side of the Moon” as the backdrop. And I’m like, this is s—t that I would talk with my friends about in high school. This isn’t what a billion people need to be listening to on their way to work.”
With Trump back in the White House, Heidecker is adjusting his approach to comedy, at least in a live setting. On the first night of the current tour, the opening act fell through. He decided to revive the “No More Bulls—t” persona to fill the gap.
“It’s a very fun world to live in for 20 or 30 minutes and it was easy to write those jokes,” he said. “But at the same time, I felt like, what is the point? I can say horrible s—t, but everybody at my show is already on the same page. It’s not really effective when it’s just confirmation bias.”
Heidecker confirmed that the comedy portion of this tour will be different than in previous years.
“I never want to be boxed into anything,” he said. “I always want to try something else, and I want you to see something else from me.”
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Music has always played a role in Heidecker’s craft — there’s the Tim & Eric catalogue, which includes beloved tracks like “Petite Feet” and “Goatee,” plus a long list of karaoke songs from hell. And of course there is Dekkar, a goofy post-grunge rock band that emerged from the “On Cinema” universe. Heidecker has also collaborated with an impressive list of indie rock stars, including Mac DeMarco, Father John Misty and Weyes Blood.
But on “Slipping Away,” Heidecker and his “Very Good Band” — who cite Crazy Horse and the Band as their key influences — sound better than ever, from the lilting groove of “Well’s Running Dry” to the expansive jam that concludes the album’s finale, “Bells Are Ringing.”
There’s a quiet darkness that hovers over songs like “Bows and Arrows” and “Something Somewhere,” but the album also contains moments of tenderness and hope. “And if it rains, well, that’s OK / We can take shelter behind homе plate / Either way / We’ll hеad out after the bottom of the eighth,” Heidecker sings on “Bottom of the 8th,” a charming homage to fatherhood (his daughter Amelia also appears on the album).
Written during the pandemic, the album’s relatable mixture of worry and hope feels perfectly suited to the current cultural moment.
“It’s really no different than ‘On Cinema,’” Heidecker suggested. “We’re all feeling a certain way, and we’re all dealing with stuff in different ways, so let’s sing about it, or let’s make jokes about it. Let’s bring it out into the open and see if it’s helpful.”
As our conversation wraps, I ask Heidecker how he manages to balance his career, which seems to swing wildly between these moments of exaggerated caricature and earnest songwriting.
“Everything I do always starts from the same place: is it fun to do? Is it enriching? I don’t collect things, I don’t really have any hobbies. I just like making music and I like making funny things with my friends,” he said. “Sometimes you’re in the mood to be silly, and sometimes you want to work from an emotional place. Sometimes you need to get some stuff out.
“I’m just so grateful that there are people out there that like my music,” he added. “I do these shows and people sing along to my songs, and it’s very moving. I’m sure Bruce Springsteen feels the exact same way.”
