
Crude comedians deliver odd and surreal spectacle
Posted November 7, 2010 at 5:37 pm in Lifestyle
Adult Swimâs Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, the pair behind the sketch show Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, brought its bizarre brand of oddball comedy to Club Nokia on Saturday night. Titled âTim and Eric Awesome Tour Great Job! Chrimbus Special,â the show featured live music, sketches, videos and appearances by some of the showâs strange stars.
Off-kilter comedian Neil Hamburger opened the evening with his dark, confrontational humor. Jokes about dead celebrities and numerous other insensitive quips had the crowd somewhat ashamedly laughing along.
âYou guys keep this up when Tim and Eric come out theyâll put a bullet in your head,â Hamburger said in response to some jokes that spurred small talk from the crowd.
The chatter stopped as soon as the lights went down and Heidecker and Wareheimâs introduction video, featuring the showâs regular David Liebe Hart, came on the screen. The video included the instructions âIf you have to go to the bathroom during the show, go in your pantsâ and âThereâs going to be a lot of farts in this show.â
Itâs this type of shamelessly low-brow and incredibly odd humor that defines Heidecker and Wareheim. The laughs from the tightly packed crowd were not surprising, considering the duoâs popularity on the often offbeat Adult Swim portion of Cartoon Network.
The duo walked on stage wearing sparkly blue and yellow suits and sang, âWhat am I gonna get?,â a song explaining âChrimbus,â the made-up holiday that basically mirrors Christmas.
Throughout the next 10 minutes, Heidecker and Wareheim tossed bags of dried shrimp into the audience as âChrimbus presents,â discussed the holidayâs traditions and chased each other around while Wareheim wore a costume that made him appear naked. Afterward, they thanked the crowd for coming and walked off the stage. The lights came on and the house music turned up, but the crowd wasnât fooled by the apparent âendâ of the show.
Heidecker and Wareheim were absent from the stage for a bit, as videos similar to those shown on their show projected on a large screen behind the stage. Some of the videos were made specifically for the live show, while others were simply popular sketches from the television program.
The truly disappointing thing about the videos was that comedians such as John C. Reilly and Zach Galifianakis were simply onscreen and not onstage. In Los Angeles, appearances by those comedians or any of the showâs numerous celebrity collaborators  would have not only been feasible, but would have added much to the evening.
After a long series of videos, Heidecker and Wareheim returned to the stage to perform the song âWhatup Brahâ as Jim and Derrick, their rapper alter egos. This led to a series of short skits involving these characters, one of which involved bringing two heavy-set male audience members on stage for a wet T-shirt contest â which consisted of Jim and Derrick spraying shaving cream into the unaware audience membersâ faces out of beer bongs.
The screen soon showed a faux-preview for Blues Brothers 2012, humorously sponsored by the company Terminix. Heidecker and Wareheim returned to the stage dressed in the Blues Brothersâ signature suits, hats and black Ray-Ban glasses. They performed a series of surreal and random songs, promoted Terminix and sprayed what they claimed to be pesticide â actually water â on themselves and the crowd.
After the Blues Brothers sketch and an excessively long intermission, Heidecker and Wareheim returned with guitars, percussion instruments and an explicitly titled backing band. They preformed joke classic rock songs for the remainder of the show.
Heidecker and Wareheim were actually played their instruments and sang well and the band was surprisingly good. After a while, however, the whole musical gimmick started feeling less like a comedy sketch and more like a concert for a band that nobody really came to see. The jokes were still there, but the novelty had worn off.
The momentum picked back up as Hart joined the band for âa song [he] wrote about L.A. public transportationâ in which he sang about the history of Pacific Electric. After an encore of his popular song âSalame,â Heidecker and Wareheim thanked the crowd and walked offstage.
Hart, however, remained to sing a few of his songs that the crowd had loudly requested. During his a capella version of the strange âIâm in Love with an Insect Woman (From Another World),â the club cut off his mic and turned the house lights on, providing a weird and confusing end to an incredibly abnormal but definitely hilarious show.
It was sudden and abrupt, but how else to end a show this strange?
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This article is tagged: Adult Swimâs Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, cotton network, tim and eric







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