Tim And Eric Awesome
Show, Great Job feels less like
conventional sketch comedy than a series-length illustration of Michael
O'Donoghue's famous quip about making people laugh being the lowest form of
comedy. Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim's mind-bending pop-art provocation
contains its share of yuks, but it's less interested in earning chuckles than
in annoying, offending, and confusing viewers. Like much of Adult Swim's
proudly provocative output—the duo also created Tom Goes To The Mayor—it seemingly can't be judged a success unless
a good portion of the populace hates it with a ferocity normally reserved for
child molesters and Nazi war criminals.
Though any description is
bound to come off as reductive, Awesome Show is largely an extended riff on the half-assed
surrealism and excruciating awfulness of public access television, that
unwatched wasteland of cheap stylistic tricks, amateur performers, and
incompetence pushed to comic/horrifying extremes. Heidecker and Wareheim play
many of the characters themselves, often hidden under layers of ugly make-up
and thrift shop outfits, but ringers from both the comedy world (Zach
Galifianakis, David Cross, Paul Reubens) and the realm of genuine, unironic
public-access weirdness (ventriloquist David Liebe Hart) join them throughout.
The trippy, free-associative
humor of Awesome is surreal,
Dadaistic, gleefully absurd, and many other pretentious adjectives critics use
to indicate that a comedy is into some seriously weird, fucked-up shit. Over
the course of the first season's ten episodes, the show moves steadily from
funny-ha-ha to funny-strange, but just when it seems to be sinking into fatal
self-indulgence, Heidecker and Wareheim double back into the land of funny.
Though it isn't always apparent, there is a method to the duo's madness, even
if that means structuring an entire show around the little-known profession of
gravy robbery and people turning into cats. Thanks largely to the participation
of Bob Odenkirk as creative consultant and a regular performer—most
notably in a series of fake commercials for bizarre products like B'owl (a
bat/owl monstrosity) and B'ougar (a creature with the body of a bear and the
nightmare-inducing cry of a cougar), Awesome feels like Mr. Show 2.0. The comedy hasn't evolved, necessarily, but it has
gotten a whole lot stranger.
Key features: The usual grab bag of special features, including
commentaries on every episode and intermittently funny deleted scenes.