A Review of Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job!

I’ve noticed that no one on the internet seems to have been able to write a good review of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and that everyone who engages with it either: doesn’t like it all and perceives its agenda in a way that I think is erroneous; feels ambivalent about it and perceives its appeal in a way that I think is erroneous; or likes it but not at all for the same reasons that I do. In essence, I almost feel like my response to it is unique among those who seem to have written about it (who, admittedly, are few). Consequently, I have decided that I am going to attempt to describe the show, and explain my feelings about it. The description begins first.

Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! is basically a series of sketches compiled into episodes that are only about ten minutes long. However, it is utterly unlike any sketch comedy show I’ve ever seen. I think this is for a number of reasons that nobody seems to have been able to elucidate in any of the accounts of the show I’ve read (although, I think there is a reason for this: it is so weird that it is almost impossible to explain in the abstract.) Most fundamentally, I think it is so bizarre because of its utter disregard for conventions of comedy – or indeed the conventions of any TV show. There is a very strong sense of anarchy one gets while watching the show. In fact, one quite literally never knows what is going to happen next. It is true that, like most sketch comedy shows, the Tim and Eric Awesome Show has recurring characters and settings, and that these are often funny in rather conventional ways (i.e. many of them parody certain things). Yet the show also includes fake advertisements, usually for “Cinco products”, interposed frequently into the show, it has skits that seem to come out of nowhere and whose characters never feature again, and there is the thing I found the most odd when I started watching it: the fact that the show features highly eccentric LA ‘entertainers’ (the main ones of whom I now know are the deeply strange and borderline insane but also deeply sincere and kind evangelist, musician and puppeteer, David Liebe Hart; the truly abominable comedian and celebrity-impressionist, James Quoll; and the old, frail, word-slurring, possibly senile actor Richard Dunn), a fact which was mainly fascinating to me before I researched the show in depth because it was so hard to tell whether these people were comedians who were pretending to be utterly weird and oblivious to what was going on or if they were really just oddities Tim and Eric had found who had no idea that they were being used in a show where their purpose was to be laughed at (my research confirmed it was the latter, which actually makes the show weirder I think). And all this is leaving aside the numerous small things which make the show so weird and unpredictable: the utterly incongruous graphics and special effects used, the often bizarre transitions between skits, the way an invisible hand often draws “Great Job!” on the screen near the end of a sketch followed by a voice saying the phrase, the frequent focus on genitalia, the disconcerting sound effects that are used whenever someone is licking their lips or touching some part of their body, the trope of making the video ‘jam’ as if it’s malfunctioning or distort and melt near the end of a sketch, the frequent reappearance of this disturbing, mustachioed babychild called “Chippy” – the list goes on.

So the show is weird. And it is true that this weirdness was initially more just weird to me than funny. I originally discovered the show through Youtube clips online, and while some clips were funny to me (like this one I saw of an “acting seminar for children” run by the hilariously pretentious and intemperate and deranged character called Tairy Greene), others just seemed, well, weird. Not funny. But increased exposure to the show over time, and then beginning to watch the episodes, sort of attuned me to Tim and Eric’s comedic wavelength, and soon the utterly bizarre bits seemed pretty funny too.

Reading through one forum of people discussing the show online, the predominant opinion of the show was that people didn’t find it that funny (unless they were high) – just weird and weirdly compelling. Two reviews I read of the show described it as “anti-humour”. However, as I’ve made clear, I find it genuinely funny without the aid of any drugs. Indeed, the show is really not unabashedly crude by any means. It clearly has satirical concerns, for example: many of the sketches skilfully satirise various aspects of bad TV and TV shows, corporatism, materialism, advertisements, backward Americans, the creative process. Plus, as I've made clear, the bizarre and ‘random’ and surreal bits that some people (and I guess me at the start) believe is complete “anti-humour” are also hilarious. Often, I think it's actually really quite clever the way they find imaginative ways to make the downright bizarre or incongruous really amusing, how they make the show so risible. Tim's inappropriate and strangely hilarious grins when playing the dopey, derisory TV host versions of himself (which appear in most episodes) or just at random times for no reason (like in the Brownie Mountain sketch in the last episode of season 3 after they've eaten the mountain in the dream and are theoretically terrified), Eric's bizarre, Dugonglike face (exploited so many times it is wrong to name only a couple of examples), Tim's brilliant ability to plausibly stumble and stammer through his words when playing dopey, derisory versions of himself or dopey, derisory characters, the completely incorrect emotional reactions from characters in sketches (like the complete unconcern and normalcy of everyone in the office when Larry is on a murderous rampage in Larry, or Eric's ecstatic rictus when Tim is describing Richard Dunn's "debilitating, degenerative bone disease" in Muscles for Bones, or Ben Hur's look of disgust after drinking a cup of urine in Snow being followed by the resumption of a normal expression and the continued drinking of the liquid), the extremely odd non-sequiturs and unexpected shifts in tone (like when Eric is reading Tim's letter in Friends and is smiling and laughing to upbeat guitar music then, upon reading, "There's one other thing, I'm dying"" instantly starts frowning to some melancholic piano tinkling, or when  Tim and Eric announce the successful collection of 1 million bones in Muscles for Bones and there are celebrations and virtual confetti floats down on the screen and then suddenly Tim says "Throw that number out, because we're going for 5,000,000 bones", or when Eric is being attacked by the invisible rascal in Missing and looks as if he has died and then there is a sudden cut and he is grinning madly and remarks, "He bit me"), the moments of random brilliance that just make you laugh for some reason (such as when they give the sports that flash up on the screen during the song "Sports" in Sports names like "Sand Sphere" and "Ice sticks" and "Ball Toss", or when Steve Brule reveals it is his birthday while talking about diarrhoea and Jan and Wayne break out into a strange birthday song, or when Tim's face becomes as vividly red as a tomato in Embarrassing after Eric starts teasing him about his tiny baby penis, or when the teacher in "Biology for Foreign Men" depicts the penis with the most bizarre, inaccurate straight-line drawings), the genius non-diagetic sound effects inserted into the show (such as the strangely hilarious foghorn sound the trumpet suddenly makes late in Jazz or the Pacman sound that is inserted into the scene at the start of Brownies when Eric is stuffing his chocolate-smeared face with more deliquescent, black substance or the sound of colliding pool bools that occurs when Eric is jangling his testicles in Balls, or the various, disquieting moisture sounds in the "Handsome Man" sketch), the absolutely hilarious facial expressions of the amateur actors at various points in various sketches (James Quall's deranged face is exploited at various times, for example, as are David Liebe Hart's exaggerated smiles and anxious expressions), the absolutely hilarious acting of both amateur actors and professional comedians in wonderful roles (the work of David Liebe Hart and Richard Dunn in the sketch "Getting it Dunn" is absolutely amazing, as are Ron Austar's creepy segments and everything done by the dumpy, hideous, middle-aged man known as Palmer Scott, and then there's Zach Galafianakis' amazing roles as Tairy Greene and the Snuggler, and Will Forte's amazingly disturbed characters, and Neil Hamburger in Hamburger (delivers one of the greatest non-sequiturs in the show while in the taxi: "You rapists"), and how could I forget the inimitable John C Reilly whose segments as the demented, mentally retarded advice-dispenser Dr Steve Brule are universally works of the most profound comic genius, with such adroit diction, delivery and facial expressions  -- you've got to watch them), the brilliant songs in the show (to name but a few examples, "Pizza Boy", "Sports", "I sit down when I pee", "Chubs", Jan and Wayne's hymn in Muscles for Bones, Zayn's re-education song, David Liebe Hart's songs, "I can wait", "Things I like"), Tim and Eric's brilliant assumption of dopey, derisory TV characters in general (their best examples of this are probably when they are hosting the Jazz show and when they are the two physicists making the documentary on the universe), Tim and Eric's brilliant assumption of eccentric, dopey, risible versions of themselves, often in situations where they confront each other (for example in Dad's Off or Embarrassing or Presidents or Tennis or Puberty or when they are competing to be the sexiest), the Beaver Boys (I have no idea why the music and the Shrimp and White Wine addiction and their strange high voices are so funny but they are -- the sketch when they have an imbalance that needs to be corrected at the hospital is just too good), the sketches of pure comic genius (the "Burps" sketch is one that comes to mind, and it is capped off by Tim and Eric just laughing themselves to tears, something I found contagious; also "Quall of Duty" and "Celery Man"), the wonderful and often really caustic parodies of really bad American TV (the first part of the Rascals interview on Missing (which parodies how unnaturally joyful and ebullient everyone always seems on American chatshows, the Jim and Derrick Show, the first part of Snow, all of Season Cinco Episode 1, Comedy), the rare fake TV ads that are great (the greatest one of all is undoubtedly also the most incisively satirical, the sketch "Prices", and my favourite Cinco product is the "Innernette") -- all these things are so fucking great. There are so many brilliant aspects to the show and the more I watch it the more I actually appreciate it. This is weirdly so. I said earlier that I needed to get "attuned to their comedic wavelength", and I think this is profoundly true. I think is true of them more than it is true of any other comedians, because much of the less familiar stuff that they do that some people find alienating and unfunny comes out of this very distinctive style of surreal humour of theirs that takes a while to get but eventually ends up being tremendously, lung-achingly funny. Perhaps it is kind of similar to some more serious music, in a way. When you listen to a kind of difficult album, like Sufjan Steven's album Illinois, for the first time, often it's hard to like it or to maintain your concentration on it. I think what normally happens for me with slightly difficult music (by which I basically mean everything that's not really repetitive and immediately catchy) is that, on the first listening, I don't really pick out the melodies and patterns and sonority so well, I just kind of receive everything in one big, muddy sonic mess, and I prick my ears at anything that sounds odd or out of place or unusual, rather than what is beautiful. In Illinois, for example, I think when I first heard the album, I thought the first track was strange, that a lot of the arrangements seemed kind of thin or odd in some way, the whole thing seemed kind of plodding, and the song that I already liked, "Chicago", remained by far my favourite. On later listens, though, I started to find the songs beautiful and to appreciate certain elements of their composition and arrangement and their lyrics and their placement on the album and so forth, and I begin to think, "Wow, Illinois is a really superb album, a tour de force, a triumph, what a man Sufjan is". It was similar with Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job!. At first, it is only the familiar, more recognisable parodies and commonly funny stuff that provoked laughter, and most of the rest seemed gratuitous, odd in a totally unfunny way, kind of coldly and relentlessly cynical and mostly chaotic. But soon I was laughing at almost everything. I saw the beauty. Yes, it is beauty. 

It is truly a great show. Great job!
  

I just scrolled down David Liebe Hart’s official Twitter page and I have confirmed that he is borderline insane. He has an extremely tenuous grip on reality. But he has a beautiful soul.