Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!
DVD
Season Cinco
Starring Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim, Richard Dunn, David Liebe Hart, James Quall
Cartoon Network
Release Date: May 17, 2011

To watch Adult Swim’s Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! is to subject yourself to an experience akin to sitting in the audience of a lethal injection while dwarves in clown makeup throw individually-wrapped slices of cheese on the walls and floor-mounted speakers blast out the immortal eardrum-bleeding ditty “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” by Tiny Tim at different volumes and various revolution speeds. When it’s all over you will find that you’ve laughed, cringed, recoiled in stark horror, and sat in front of your television set wondering just what the fuck that was all about. This is a show that the late comedy writer Michael O’Donoghue, a.k.a. Saturday Night Live‘s Mr. Mike, would have found immensely entertaining. After all, what is O’Donoghue’s Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video if not a Tim & Eric prototype, only much stranger?

Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!
Season 3
Starring Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim
Warner Home Video
Release Date: August 4, 2009

In the past six months I’ve watched two full seasons of Adult Swim’s live-action sketch series Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and I’m afraid to say the show is growing on me. Each episode runs barely twelve minutes and the individual skits usually wrap up around the one-minute mark, but there are still more laughs per capita in a single episode of Tim and Eric than in an entire season of Saturday Night Live.

Unlike most sketch comedy series show creators, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim know the limits of the idea that drives each sketch and never wear out its welcome. While I often laughed hard at the show, it took me some time to really understand what it was all about, but now I do. Tim and Eric Awesome Show has more of a Canadian comic spirit than an American one. Each episode plays like a compilation tape of highlights from shows broadcast on some strange alternate universe version of a cable access television station staffed by a freewheeling collection of misfits and miscreants hopelessly convinced that they’re not engaging in amateur night theatrics. The influence of classic Canuck cathode comedies like SCTV and The Kids in the Hall can be seen in every episode and with each season the show continues to improve. The writing and performances continue to wallow in the wildest off-the-wall ideas the show’s cast and crew can conjure up, but as evidenced in several episodes there’s an increased confidence in their willingness to go completely for broke with their ideas.