What's Inside a Man: Tim & Eric's Tim Contemplates Humor and Horror and Toes with a New Series 

As recently as the mid-aughts, Tim & Eric were just a couple of guys you once heard your Pasadena hair stylist mention as her poker night friends whose TV show just got picked up by Adult Swim. Now Tim (Heidecker) & Eric (Wareheim) are the household names of cutting edge scatology and anti-comedy. After the run of their first show Tom Goes To The Mayor, their second series Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! assaulted willing audiences with a cacophony of unsettling characters in uncomfortable positions. Inspired by cable access, infomercials, local news, and the horribleness of everyday life in America, the show is adored by fans who loved the subverted and mocked expectations and remains unwatchable for those who don't quite get it.

Fans and nonbelievers can both look forward to the newest Tim & Eric joint, Tim & Eric's Bedtime Stories, which premieres Sept. 18 on Adult Swim. An anthology show in the vein of The Twilight Zone, Bedtime Stories tells a different unnerving tale each episode. The production values are higher, and the pace is slower, and in many ways it seems more straightforward than their previous successes, but those essential Tim & Eric elements (rotting meat shots, inexplicable facial hair) remain very much intact. Much like Awesome Show, the new series presents an opportunity to be simultaneously delighted and disturbed.

SF Weekly: Your new show, Tim & Eric's Bedtime Stories, is a bit of a departure from Awesome Show, Great Job! It's less outwardly zany, and it's more traditional format-wise.

Tim Heidecker: We're getting older and sort of following our guts, versus the kind of shows we were making, about what is going to be appropriate for the kind of stories we want to tell and the kind of shows we want to make. We don't want to get pigeonholed by the perception that we just do these lo-fi weirdo things. We're diverse guys who like to try new things.

In a recent interview you said about the new show that it won't make people feel good. You even refer to it as a "punishment for living in a shit world." Was that a conscious intention, to punish?

Yeah, we're like S&M guys. No, no, nothing like that can ever be too conscious. It's a feeling I think we all have. I think that's in all of our work really, that sort of attitude, that thinking. It didn't really occur to me until I started watching what we were doing. And it's sort of only then you can step back and see what you're up to.

Awesome Show, Great Job! provokes laughter I think sometimes because it's so loud, wild, or strange. Bedtime Stories, from what I have seen, certainly has those same elements, but it's more subdued. Is the goal of the new show still to make people laugh? Make them laugh in different ways?

I think in the new show we're less conscious about where laughs might happen. There's going to be things we laugh at that are maybe different than what an audience might laugh at. But we're looking for people to be engaged and involved in watching the stories in a way that is different than Awesome Show, which has more jokes and a different pace, different viewing experience. They're meant to be broken up into little pieces. Obviously Bedtime Stories can't be. Certain scenes could work on their own but generally it's like, sit down, we're going to tell you a story. It's a nightmare. It's a real nightmare. You're going to laugh, but you're going to feel weird afterwards. You're probably going to have to watch some Seinfeld or something to palate-cleanse before you go to bed.

Have you always been interested in horror and speculative fiction?

I don't look at it as horror in the sense of slasher movies. More like Roman Polanski, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch. Uncomfortableness, suspense, something off, something wrong. Coen Brothers. Psychological tension and drama with humor and strangeness.

The plots, the endings of the first two episodes, make me wonder whether there's any sense of hope in the worldview that's shaped this show?

Well no, there's not much hope. There are certainly less dark episodes in the run. But there are consequences for these characters in the show, things happen to them. And in 11 minutes there's not a lot of room for redemption.

Where did you find inspiration for these episodes?

They all come from a real place. In the "Toes" episode, it came from thinking about plastic surgery and seeing signs all over L.A. for freezing your face and doing all kinds of insane things. That kind of makes you start thinking, for whatever reason, how sad it would be to be a podiatrist. Just seeing feet every day. And people's cosmetic neuroses they have about themselves. There aren't too many stories from my own life, they're based on just being around in the world. There's an episode we have with Jason Schwartzman. I was in Australia, and there was this big glamorous watch ad with Leonardo DiCaprio. And it was sort of, why would he do this? What is the point of spending any time sitting in a studio? I wonder if they could've just like, drugged him and done that. That would be kind of cool, if they just went up to Tom Cruise, like, "I'll give you a million dollars if you just take this pill, and we can use your body to take pictures and we'll return you, and you'll never know the difference." We were just joking around about that, then it became an episode of the show.

I love the "Toes" episode, the final scene. Did you have that final scene in mind when you began that episode?

It's like Jaws, when Richard Dreyfuss opens up the shark. That's what I was thinking about. That we would be gutting this guy; the joke, the humor is that he's being treated like an animal. Like it's just a big fish, and you expect the license plate to come out there, you know? We had this joke that got cut, I thought it was pretty funny, but it wasn't funny in the show, it didn't play, but the boy was going to lean down and pick up a piece of paper and go, "Hey look, my dad ate my homework!" That was an alternate ending in the script, and we got a better ending we put in there. But just this idea of callous disrespect for the human body that we have. A dead guy is a piece of meat filled with homework and toes.

I laughed really hard at that ending.

There you go, so it's a comedy.

You have a live show coming around that's unrelated. Can you give an idea what that will be like?

If you've seen us before, it's just sketches and songs and routines and we try to put together a real spectacular sort of Broadway show that we do every night. And Steve Brule's [John C. Reilly] going to come out and give a TED talk. We're just trying to make a fun two hours for our lovely fans.

If given an opportunity to brag, what would you brag about?

I'm proud of myself and my wife for celebrating my daughter's first birthday this weekend. So I've kept a human being alive for a year.