“The ultimate Camp statement: it’s good because it’s awful . . .”
—Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’”
Too little has been written about Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, the hyperactive sketch comedy series about to begin its fifth season on Adult Swim, where it airs sometime around 1:30 a.m. on no particular morning. The show’s creators and namesakes, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, have designed a trash compactor brimming with castoffs from the era of VHS and Betamax—a dark paean to the recent past, when the Internet was newfangled and cell phones were equipped with extendable antennae. It’s the most subversive thing on the tube right now, eminently watchable in the tradition of history’s bloodiest automobile accidents.
What’s it about? Good question—but no absolute answer exists. As its title suggests, much of it features two average dudes named Tim and Eric, and much of it is, in fact, awesome. Tim and Eric suffer from half-affected, half-sincere camera shyness, but they nevertheless spend a lot of time in front of the camera, riffing on how wonderful it is to be there. Then they twiddle their thumbs—sometimes literally—until some berserk pastiche of pop culture or techno-futurism lurches into the next slot. From there, the show might as well be written via random word generator. (Unsurprisingly, Awesome Show’s most obvious antecedent is Mr. Show, which also [a] starred two crude dudes, [b] used vertiginously self-reflexive sketches, and [c] had Show in the title. The similarities almost end there.)
Ordinarily, we can safely assume that sketch comedy aspires to make us laugh. Though the best of the genre has always mined uneasy or taboo territory for social commentary, the more provocative material is typically interlarded with some friendly standbys: flatulence, corpulence, people falling over. This is part of the deal. Monty Python’s Flying Circus had the nerve to namedrop existentialist philosophers, but it also featured plenty of obese men puking on waiters.
Awesome Show, which Tim and Eric have accurately described as “the nightmare version of television,” reneges on this comic contract. It’s not that the show is all highbrow pomp and circumstance—just the opposite, in fact. It offers lowbrow churlishness with none of the redemptive wit, an unnavigable canal of excreta and juvenilia. Though it’s definitely composed of sketches, it’s as often just as horrific as is it comedic; just as the audience begins to presume that the show wants to amuse us, it spits in our eyes. It depicts laughter as a nervous affliction:
An Awesome Show episode is only eleven minutes long, and this brevity lends itself uncommonly well to the aggressive bricolage that is arguably postmodernism’s calling card. With frenetic, ADHD-addled pacing and doggedly low production values, each episode appears to have been cobbled together with obsolete videoediting software, the kind you’d buy on twelve floppy disks for MS-DOS in 1991. In 2009, it’s difficult to get anything to look this bad—no doubt Tim and Eric fuss over the coarser aspects of their craft. (How can this close-up be less flattering to its subject? Can we flatten and pixelate this image more? Could this cut look jumpier, this angle more asinine?) The result is a lurid, second-order pleasure: the viewer laughs less at what’s said than at how poorly it’s said. Awesome Show is the first of its kind to plumb the depths of the relationship between laughter and discomfort, to ironize every last nanosecond of its pithy running time.
If, along with unadulterated hideousness, there’s one unifying aesthetic at work, it’s that of public access television, the local broadcast free-for-all in which every community nutcase gets his fifteen minutes of fame. Public access has been parodied before, most iconically in Saturday Night Live’s “Wayne’s World,” but never with the balls-to-the-wall panache of Awesome Show, which is as ugly and volatile as the real thing. Because they ape an institution whose very appeal is its scattered, amateur-hour inconsistency, Tim and Eric benefit from a nice paradox: the farther afield their premises roam, the more assured their vision becomes. When a sketch falls flat, the temptation is to view it as a testament to their commitment—they’re unswervingly true to the artlessness of their source material.
When they spoof television—and they do, a lot—they cast the wide net of true TV enthusiasts. In its four seasons thus far, Awesome Show has lampooned the gee-whiz pop astronomy of NOVA (cf. “Universe,” season four); the testosterone-driven police procedurals of late-’90s primetime (“C.O.R.B.s,” a.k.a. “Cops on Recumbent Bicycles,” season three); the vanilla hodgepodge of Time-Life cassette anthologies (“The Very Best of Pusswhip Gangbang,” season four); MTV’s insipid reduction of skater culture (“Jim and Derrick,” season three); the grueling desperation of PBS telethons (“Muscles for Bones,” season one); and far too many more.
The fake ad, another mainstay of sketch comedy, is also abundant here, but where its predecessors offered takedowns of slick corporate campaigns, Awesome Show delivers savage low-budget send-ups: they draw from a bottomless well of personal injury hotlines and local car dealerships, four-a.m. infomercials and suburban bargain basements. (This is not to say that Tim and Eric have no truck with capitalist greed and excess—they’re just not looking for it in the loftiest of places.) Their spot for an imaginary MIDI organizer, for instance, is cheap, obscure, and anachronistic:
On the part of its audience, Awesome Show supposes a dizzying familiarity with TV’s sanitized take on mass culture. To savor every reference, you must have been in front of your television for upwards of six hours a day, every day, from 1985 to 2003.
At other times, though, this oversaturated, public-access conceit is abandoned in favor of a Lynchian surrealism; if Lynch, to whom the duo have acknowledged a debt, were to adapt Everyone Poops, the result would probably look a lot like an Awesome Show segment. The two sketches below, among the show’s finest, find the duo most at odds with the conventions of sketch comedy:
Both of these sketches threaten, at first, to carry some cogent satirical message; they traffic in two major parodic commodities, the business lunch and the nuclear family. If this were Saturday Night Live, the viewer could easily guess their trajectory. In their second halves, though, each derails in a mess of disquieting non-sequiturs and glitchy editing sequences, strange enough to leave even a seasoned absurdist wondering what the point is. Why are these children belching? What the heck are we supposed to make of a line like, “Mention my name, you’ll get a good seat”? Are we supposed to be amused, or just afraid?
Even among the jaded Adult Swim crowd—a loyal fanbase of nightowls, stoners, and students, fed a stable diet of Family Guy, Robot Chicken, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force—Awesome Show has provoked fierce debate. Couched in terms of who “gets it” and who doesn’t, the bickering sounds a lot like what must’ve gone on in New York nightclubs during the ascendancy of free jazz: Awesome Show’s detractors find it abrasive, indiscriminate, boorish, and nihilistic. Its advocates find it abrasive, indiscriminate, boorish, and nihilistic. A sensibility this divisive, this headache-inducing, the thinking goes, must be breaking some ground. Despite the repulsive immaturity of its subject matter, Awesome Show reflects the maturity of its medium: such an involuted attack would not have been possible twenty or thirty years ago, when TV was less self-aware. Tim and Eric know you watch a lot of TV, and they know that you’ve heard the warnings about watching a lot of TV but do it anyway, and they know that you know that they know TV is seductive, and so on. Though the medium has been self-reflexive for decades, not much of its programming has dared to see how far the hall of mirrors goes, and what, if anything, is at the end. Awesome Show tries, and duly terrifies. For reasons that its creators would never avow to understand, this makes for cunning satire, and refreshingly funny satire, to boot.
