Wearing a divorce-chic leather jacket, slicked-back hair, and a paunchy pea-green shirt, Tim Heidecker fumbles through note cards onstage at the Bell House in Brooklyn. For his sold-out show — the penultimate night of his 30-city 2022 tour — he’s railing against cancel culture as “No More Bullshit†guy, an insufferable hack comedian who believes women in the workplace are nagging witches and COVID vaccines are a lizard-person conspiracy killing 25,000 children a day. He’s been doing the character at open mics in L.A. and on tour since 2007, and after 16 years of honing his anti-craft, Heidecker is the best at being the worst, the Oppenheimer of intentionally bombing. At one point during the set, he blows up at the stage tech and storms into the crowd. There’s something about the way he yells “Shut the fuck up!†that’s music to his audience’s ears — like he’s playing the hits, only the hits are Heidecker threatening to hit people, then accidentally hitting his own face with the mic.
Remorse is not something “No Bullshit†guy feels, but seated at Brooklyn’s Purity Diner on a sunny afternoon during his weeklong run at the Bell House, Heidecker is rankled by guilt. In a plain black tee and sunglasses now, he’s replaying the moment he upset a fan when he was in character the previous night. He was doing a bit where “No Bullshit†guy angrily confronts an audience member — “What are you looking at, dude? You look like you want to fuck me†— only the audience member wasn’t a dude at all, and in the moment he had accidentally misgendered them. Heidecker’s live act hinges on his total resistance to breaking kayfabe, so his mistake posed an in-the-moment conundrum. “Even as the stand-up guy, there’s a line I wouldn’t cross,†he says, but he “really couldn’t do anything about it, because it had already happened.†He says the person he had called out emailed him afterward expressing their discomfort, and he was grateful they felt they could speak candidly to him about it. “I could only apologize, and they appreciated that. That should be how these things go. There’s nothing I can do about it except apologize and let them know that I appreciate them, and they seemed to be okay with that.†Still, he was worried he’d messed up the difficult math of playing personas who are as offensive as possible in ways that don’t actually alienate his audience: “I could feel that they were uncomfortable, and that’s the last thing I want, obviously.â€
For 20 years, discomfort was the point of Heidecker’s comedy. He is best known for the sketch series Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, which ran on Adult Swim from 2007 to 2010 and pushed alt-comedy in a surreal, irreverent, and psychosexually bizarre direction. In 2008, the New York Times compared Awesome Show to “outtakes from a public-access channel that’s broadcast only in hell.†Entertainment Weekly called it “the comedic equivalent of swallowing a hair.†The show’s haunted CD-ROM aesthetics can be seen in television Heidecker would go on to produce, like The Eric Andre Show and Nathan for You, but its chemtrails have seemingly touched everything in media, from the try-hard absurdity of Skittles and Old Spice commercials to edgelord meme humor (“It’s free real estate!â€) and RuPaul’s Drag Race.
During the Tim and Eric years, Heidecker was known to carry the confrontational energy of his stand-up offstage. During a tour stop in Minneapolis in 2010, he conducted an entire nine-minute interview without opening his eyes. In an interview with the “Young Hollywood†YouTube channel in 2012 to promote the DVD release of Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, he ground the whole thing to a halt when a camera guy’s phone buzzed. In a 2013 interview with the “What’s Trending†channel, he claimed he’d just done cocaine for the first time and “spilled†his water on a host’s laptop. Like so many videos that went viral at that time, these clips were funny in a way that felt discomfitingly mean, like watching the class clown make a substitute teacher’s life miserable. His fans lapped it up, while others wondered whether Heidecker was playing a dick, was actually a dick, or was playing a dick at other people’s expense, making him a different kind of dick altogether.
But the 47-year-old sitting across from me at the diner — who recounts Randy Newman quotes about being kind and grateful to fans — is not a dick. If anything, he’s menschy. Eating a club sandwich and sipping tea, he’s the photo negative of his character in On Cinema at the Cinema, the web series he launched after Tim and Eric ended, in which he plays an abusive, tyrannical movie critic with a deranged set of beliefs at the intersection of Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and whichever of Trump’s sons scores worse on basic aptitude tests. Heidecker appears to be the rare case of what I like to call a Reverse-Corden: callous comedic persona, nice dude in real life. While his characters are torturing their underlings at work, running for office as corrupt alt-right conspiracy theorists, and making crappy, self-indulgent music, Heidecker is producing TV series for his former interns (Chad and JT Go Deep), facing the wrath of conservative trolls while he stumps for the DSA and calls out his transphobic contemporaries, and, most recently, releasing wistful dad rock with bare-naked, sincere lyrics. As his characters continue to grow more deplorable, Heidecker only grows more earnest, like an alt-comedy Dorian Gray.
Heidecker began making comedy shorts in 1994 when he was at Temple University with Eric Wareheim. Wareheim’s first memory of Heidecker is charmingly benign: “We were in a huge film lecture together, and we were just talking about band names. We’d write a band name and pass it to the other person.†One of the band names Heidecker wrote made Wareheim laugh so hard that they were asked to see the professor after class. “I was like, This is the start of a beautiful friendship.†(That band name? “TGIF.â€) Wareheim remembers Heidecker’s first swing at anti-stand-up, too: The two were at a local pub when Heidecker stood on a chair and acted like he was going to give a speech, and then said nothing at all. “He just stood up there, just causing this really uncomfortable moment, which is what we live for,†he says. “And then all night we would do prank phone calls and film each other, just anything to crack each other up.â€
The first video they worked on together after college, 2001’s “Cat Film Festival,†is an oddball lo-fi effort, with the two of them breathing heavily into tiny microphones, their words disrupted by cheesy wipe transitions and lame graphics. In these early videos, the seeds of what would make Tim and Eric great were there: Their visual style hearkened back to the crappiness of educational videos (“Internet & Beyondâ€) or low-budget children’s media (“Tom Goes to School,†an unsettling blend of rudimentary paper cutout animation and live-action). They took corporate-speak and leaned so hard into the inanity that it curdled into something uncanny — all quiet pauses and murmuring. The antithesis of laughs. “I was not interested in it as a piece of entertainment,†Heidecker says of their work.
At the time, Heidecker wasn’t influenced by comedy at all (he didn’t watch SNL or pay attention to traditional stand-up), but by the “weird awkwardness†of artists like David Byrne and the Talking Heads. “In that first video we did, Eric was editing it, and there was a jump cut where he had taped over this girl ice-skating. So it jumped and went to this ice-skating thing and then went back to our video,†Heidecker explains. “And he was like, ‘Sorry, this is just rough, we’ll fix that.’ I was like, ‘No no no, that’s the best,’ you know? And I think he knew it too.â€
In 2002, the duo made a website to share their videos, along with flash animations, recordings of prank phone calls, and asinine blog posts. People at Comedy Central took notice, labeling “Cat Film Festival†an “editor’s fave.†Soon after, they met with Comedy Central executives and some agents at William Morris, and tried less conventional means of selling themselves: They sent Bob Odenkirk two DVDs of their shorts, along with a T-shirt that said “Great work on that proposal,†and an itemized bill for the whole package. “I do get things in the mail. I do throw them in the garbage. I did not do it on this one thing,†Odenkirk says. “The bill just killed me.†The DVDs included a rough version of Tom Goes to the Mayor, the duo’s animated series about small-town bureaucracy and an inept entrepreneur, Tom Peters (Heidecker). Odenkirk wasn’t actively looking to executive-produce a series at the time, and he downplays his own role in the mythos of Tim and Eric beyond helping get them through the door at Adult Swim — which led to a series order for Tom Goes to the Mayor in 2004. “Look, they took the ball and ran with it. If I gave them a little attention at the right moment, that’s really about it,†he says. “All I remember is going in and laughing and saying, ‘You should do more of this.’â€
In 2004, Adult Swim was dominating the basic-cable ratings with Family Guy reruns and originals like Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and even among those irreverent cartoons, Tom Goes to the Mayor was an outlier: a strange bit of character work in a sea of colorful shock humor. At the channel’s first-ever upfronts event, Adult Swim senior vice-president Mike Lazzo was at a loss for words when it came time to play Tom Goes to the Mayor for ad buyers. There were over-pixelated graphics and stage makeup that was too caked on. “It was our operating aesthetic for a long time,†says Heidecker. “It goes back to the idea of failure as a core comedy principle. A pathetic attempt at something big flopping a bit is always funny.â€
Odenkirk, who appeared in many of the 11-minute Tom Goes to the Mayor episodes that aired on Adult Swim, puts Heidecker in the same category as his Mr. Show collaborator David Cross, someone with “a certain kind of natural ease at being funny, that I do not think I have, and most people don’t have.†The even rarer thing that Odenkirk sees in Heidecker is how he pairs that “natural ease†with genuinely hot-blooded examinations of American life. He calls Tom Goes to the Mayor a portrait of “the stupid, and childish, and blinkered desire to be an entrepreneur,†adding, “There’s a lot going on in Tim and Eric’s work that is really smart cultural criticism, that is so much smarter than pretty much anything Saturday Night Live has ever done.†(And that’s coming from someone who worked there for four years.)
Tom Goes to the Mayor was canceled after two seasons — not long after IGN called the show a “ratings black hole†that wasn’t only tanking “but taking everything else on the schedule down with it.†But in 2007, Adult Swim green-lit Tim and Eric, slotting it far from primetime on Mondays at 12:30 a.m., where it would find a young, insomniac audience loopy enough to get on its wavelength. Chappelle’s Show and Wonder Showzen had wrapped up the year before, so the cable landscape was primed for “edgy†comedy. Yet where those series swerved into satire of racial stereotypes and politics, Awesome Show felt entirely divorced from real-world concerns. It depicted television as a sewage plant overflowing with cynical personalities, cash grabs, adulterers, miserable child stars, and nightmarish infomercial parodies (“Dick Dousche Penile Cleansing Rag,†“Diarreaphragm Colonic Fecal Damâ€). Heidecker and Wareheim yelled, burped, and groaned their way through sketches, casting the least-polished extras they could find to fill out bits starring Maria Bamford, Paul Rudd, John C. Reilly (whose character got his own spinoff show in 2010), Will Forte, and Zach Galifianakis. It felt anti-establishment, like the TV signal was being hijacked.
Bamford likens the show to noise music: It’s not for everybody. (“I say that being a comedian who is definitely not for everybody,†she says.) “He knows what he thinks is funny, and he sticks to his guns,†says Rudd. “It’s like Jack Black or Zach Galifianakis: Neurosis seems to be kind of at the core of a lot of comedic sensibilities, but he doesn’t have that. It’s kind of the opposite. It’s this cool confidence.†A confidence rooted, according to Mark Proksch — who plays a lousy, clueless Hollywood impersonator and actor in On Cinema and its spinoff, Decker — in Heidecker’s “ability to ignore the negative voices in his head that the rest of us listen to when it comes to actually pursuing and accomplishing something. Which is not to say he’s overly confident or egotistical. Rather, he just doesn’t listen to those voices and actually accomplishes his ideas. Which is a remarkable trait.â€
Even more remarkably, Tim and Eric found a devoted fanbase, congregating in comment sections and at live shows, who saw Heidecker and Wareheim as the height of comedic avant-garde. But those who hated them really hated it and expressed that hate on Reddit and message boards, complaining, “Adult Swim has gone to shit,†and calling Tim and Eric “one of the worst shows ever put on TV.†Sitting at the diner, Heidecker takes a beat, like it’s been a while since he’s thought about why his onscreen sensibility clashed so spectacularly with popular culture at the time. “There’s a lot of young man’s anger in that show that’s kind of disguised as absurdity or silliness,†he says. “I don’t always want to do that. Or if I did do that all the time, it would be awful. It’d just be, like, Fuck this guy.â€
By the early 2010s, Heidecker and Wareheim had become the live-action mascots of Adult Swim, pivoting right off of the final season of Tim and Eric to spinoff series Check It Out! With Dr. Steve Brule (2010-2016), anthology series Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories (2013-2017), and a whole slate of web series for the network in 2019, as well as producing The Eric Andre Show, all through their production company, Abso Lutely. Adult Swim was happy with the duo’s ability to maintain a low budget while consistently pulling in the network’s target demo of young men ages 18 to 24, and so they continued to green-light new projects. In 2012, they wrote, directed, and starred in their first feature, Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, produced by Adam McKay and Will Ferrell. It opened at No. 42 at the box office, in extremely limited release, before heading straight to video on demand at a time when that sort of move was a death sentence for filmmakers. “The people that liked it liked it, but most people didn’t see it. It meant, ‘Let’s go back to Adult Swim and make something else,’ as opposed to, ‘Now we make movies,’†says Heidecker. “It was a real transition point for us.â€
By then, Heidecker had already begun to branch out into acting in other people’s projects. He was cast as the silent fiancé to Maya Rudolph in 2011’s Bridesmaids, and that same year, he appeared in Rick Alverson’s Sundance indie The Comedy alongside Tim and Eric alumnus Gregg Turkington, known for his radically offensive, anti-charismatic stand-up persona Neil Hamburger. The two launched On Cinema as a throwaway podcast to pass the time on the set of The Comedy, parodying what they saw as a rising vacuousness in movie coverage, and while they never had a master plan for the series, it quickly blossomed as a passion project. Turkington played an obsessive, pedantic fan of the idea of “movies,†Heidecker a delusional, narcissistic, rage-fueled, surface-level Christian conservative grifter and science skeptic. Each season, he pushes the character in increasingly violent directions that end up lampooning real-world events before they happen, like their 2018 live Oscars night special when Heidecker stormed a stage and yelled, “You say one more word I’ll fucking smack you in the mouth!†four years before the Slap. Unlike Tim and Eric or Bedtime Stories, Turkington calls On Cinema a “a soap opera-slash-psychodrama masquerading as a movie-review show.â€
After a year of releasing weekly podcasts, they launched a web series, On Cinema at the Cinema. It premiered on Thing X, a short-lived comedy website started by ex-Onion staffers and Adult Swim. In June 2013, between seasons two and three (On Cinema used to move cheap and fast), Thing X shut down and all of its content migrated over to Adult Swim, which is when On Cinema director and co-writer Eric Notarnicola joined the project. Together, Heidecker, Turkington, and Notarnicola drew inspiration from the Tea Party, birthers, and Gamergate to more strategically develop Heidecker’s character’s arc. (“We’re all algorithmically linked into the worst shit,†Heidecker says.) The new incarnation quickly bred a fanbase that discussed “Tim†and “Gregg†on Reddit and Twitter as though they were real, bought memberships to the fake “Victorville Film Archive,†and endlessly circulated memes from the show.
Heidecker calls the fans’ ongoing devotion to On Cinema “crazy.†It drew enough viewers that one On Cinema spinoff, Decker, crossed over from Adult Swim’s website to old-school linear television television in 2016, where it averaged over a million weekly viewers. “What Tim does is he reaches out to a demographic that is constantly being barraged by negative, toxic, angry stuff,†says Eliana Athayde, who tours with Heidecker as the bassist in his band. “They’re being pummeled by stuff that’s like, ‘You should be pissed off. The world’s against you.’ I feel like Tim throws out a lifeline to those same people, and invites them to be introspective, and to ask questions.†Odenkirk sees a similar appeal in Heidecker’s blowhard conservative act: “It’s the white guy in your life who is a bit of a tyrant and feels entitled to being a tyrant. In real life, you probably wouldn’t laugh at him. It would be very upsetting and unnerving, and you’d be mad at him for having the audacity to subject everyone to his anger and his tantrum. But in a TV show, you can laugh at them safely. And you desperately want to.â€
“He does such a great job at playing the truly mediocre,†adds Jordan Peele, who cast Heidecker as Josh Tyler (and his tethered, Tex) in his 2019 movie Us. Peele created the role specifically for the comedian. “Not to shatter the magic of his unspoken notions, but this stand-up character that he portrays is so close to being possibly who he is that it’s almost undetectable. How do you submit to your own mediocrity in order to access that type of thing? I think it’s just such masterful comedy.â€
Peele is pulling at a thread Heidecker recognizes. “I can play it fairly easily, because I’m this far away from just being that. I mean, I grew up in a pretty conservative area, with fairly normal conservative-leaning family around me,†the Allentown, Pennsylvania, native says. “If I didn’t have this spark of comedy and music and theater growing up, through school and through some really great teachers, if I didn’t get that bug, that just as easily could’ve been my path.â€
An hour into his Bell House show, Heidecker excuses himself backstage, sheds the skeezy pomade look of “No Bullshit†guy, and reemerges in a bathrobe to perform a full, hourlong set of songs with total sincerity. In 2016, he released In Glendale, a folk-rock album full of self-reflection and ennui, performed with a straight face. He’s since followed it with three more studio albums; they’re pensive and heartfelt, but often still funny in the way a Randy Newman song is funny. On “I’ve Been Losing,†from his latest album, he sings, “Oh, I’ve been working / Working myself up to the fact that my best days are behind me.†It’s so plainspoken and vulnerable that it’s almost embarrassing — the exact kind of thought that the men who Heidecker portrays in his comedy would never have because they’ve insulated themselves in their big puffy egos against any emotions beyond pride and anger. Over the course of his career, Heidecker says his ambitions that didn’t fit the Tim and Eric mold “kind of got put away for a while,†and now, “as I’m being a little more open and myself, people are confused by that. So maybe this helps say, ‘This is who I was, this is where I came from.’â€
The year that he released that first album is also when he started his weekly live podcast Office Hours, co-hosted by On Cinema fan turned bandmate Vic Berger and Tom Goes to the Mayor intern turned auteurist Tim and Eric editor Doug Lussenhop, where he fields Zooms from fans and talks with his friends (and sometimes his daughter, Amelia), though he occasionally works out extended impressions of Joe Rogan and Bill Maher, too. He started tweeting out of character about his political anxieties and frustrations during Donald Trump’s presidency — a move that made him lose much of his more conservative-leaning fans. “I think a lot of those angry young men were disillusioned and disappointed to find that I wasn’t also, like, angry at ‘wokeism.’ And it’s like, no, I’ve been this kind of liberal-minded guy since college,†says Heidecker. “And to label me like I sold out to Hollywood or something? No. This is just how me and all my friends think about things, you know? I didn’t get cynical about the idea of civility being something to aspire towards, or the democratic process being something that should be for everybody. That stuff doesn’t have anything to do with my comedy. As I get older, that gets strengthened.â€
At the Bell House, fans are on their feet for his opening number, “When I Get Up,†and they sway along to one of his newer songs, “Buddy.†A girl near me has her phone out as she FaceTimes the show to her friend. Heidecker’s Catholic school upbringing shows when he tells the audience “Peace be with you†and gets them to say “And also with you,†noting, “This does feel like a little congregation in here.†Despite the relaxed, good vibes Heidecker’s earnest music creates among the crowd, his biggest barnburners are tracks from his comedy album Urinal St. Station, made up entirely of pee-drinking themed Americana rock songs like “Hot Piss,†“Honey Tonk Piss Club,†and “Someone to Piss on Me.†(Vice named it its 2013 album of the year). It makes sense, then, that coverage of his non-parodic music career, while positive, has had a boy-who-cried-wolf quality to it: No, he’s really being serious this time. This isn’t another bit.
“We contextualize everything. Everything needs a placard now; everything needs to be set up,†says The Comedy director Rick Alverson. “He’s muddying those waters in a way that feels productive. For a person to say, ‘Is this a comedy record? Or is he being sincere? Is he not?’ — all of those things coexist in modernity, and ultimately, we’re more rounded, whole people when we experience the world that way.â€
Months after our meeting at the diner, after two years of touring as the “No More Bullshit†guy and starting to feel “trapped in a character,†Heidecker has taken his experimental comedy project even further, working out something onstage he hasn’t tried before: “stand-up as me.†Heidecker says it’s a vulnerable thing, going onstage for an audience who he’s trained to engage with him as an antagonist and a clown, and tell stories about his kids. “That can be a little embarrassing, learning, if something funny happens to me, how do I make that into an actual joke worth telling? And why am I telling it?â€
“Throughout everything I do, if it’s like, This feels weird. This is hard. This is uncomfortable for me, that’s usually a good sign. It doesn’t just feel like I’m resting on my laurels.â€
His character work continues elsewhere, though that comes with its own challenges. His 2020 Showtime series Moonbase 8, made with Fred Armisen and John C. Reilly, was not renewed, and after a series of mergers and layoffs that led to Warner Bros. Discovery, Adult Swim shut down its digital-video department and dropped On Cinema. After eight TV-producing credits, 12 TV specials, and bushels of digital content since 2004, Heidecker’s relationship with Adult Swim is over. He and Wareheim had been working on a “culty apocalyptic†sci-fi series for FX, but in early 2022, after a year and a half of fielding a “spiral of notes,†the network passed. “It’s just like, what the fuck is this business?†asks Heidecker.
So in 2021, he launched the HEI Network, a subscription-based streaming service that allows him to keep producing On Cinema and its spinoffs, supported entirely by fans. The platform doubles as a joke within what is now a full-fledged On Cinema universe. Tim-the-character presented it as a “return to values,†OAN-style, anti-lamestream media outlet for coverage of “cars, video games, Christianity, crafts, music, fatherhood, personal responsibility, and so much more.†He’s also been able to use it to premiere one of his character’s better grifts, a worthless cryptocurrency called Hei Points that subscribers can actually hold and trade in digital wallets. Within a month of the service launching in April 2021, it had 8,000 subscribers. Two years later, they’ve nearly doubled to 15,000. (The Office Hours Live Patreon, which exists outside of On Cinema, has over 7,000 paid subscribers.) “I would ultimately rather have a big company make it,†Heidecker admits.
With acute awareness of how difficult it is to be an actor and writer right now, Heidecker spends a lot of time mentoring younger comics, particularly those who got their start doing offbeat, ahead-of-their-time material not unlike Tim and Eric. He’s worked with John Early and Kate Berlant (themselves the template-setters for yet another generation of young alt-comics) since their webseries 555, most recently executive-producing Early’s HBO special. And in 2021, he filmed what might be the best Joe Rogan Experience parody video out there with comedy duo Jeremy Levick and Rajat Suresh.
Interns and young below-the-line workers from Abso Lutely have gone on to create their own projects. One of the most interesting comedic voices to come out of the Abso Lutely-verse is filmmaker Vera Drew, who refers to Heidecker and Wareheim as her “dads†— Wareheim is quick to give praise, while Heidecker serves as more of a critical eye: “Tim doesn’t always like my end result, but likes my process and likes working with me, and likes finding out what’s good about the thing.†Drew’s acclaimed underground feature directorial debut, The People’s Joker, was pulled from TIFF in September 2022 when Warner Bros. threatened legal action. (She cast Heidecker in the film to do what he does best: play an angry, huffing, puffing, rage-baiting commentator.) Drew showed the movie at underground screenings until it finally debuted at the queer Outfest film festival in July. Drew gets teary (and laughs at herself for it) when she describes Heidecker’s influence on her career, rising from an Abso Lutely intern and entry-level digital-imaging technician on Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories and Check It Out! With Dr. Steve Brule in the early 2010s to directing and co-executive-producing Tim and Eric productions like Channel 5 and Beef House.
She recalls the time she invited Heidecker to be a guest on an episode of her web series This American Drew in 2016. “I instructed him to be really mean, and told him, like, ‘I want you to try to make me cry,’†she says. “But this was during the time when he was just starting to do interviews out of character — doing interviews where he was actually nice to the interviewer, instead of fucking with them. What I got out of that interview was this weird, sensitive version of Tim.†That version gave her “this crazy, amazing practical advice†that she says changed the course of her life. In her words: “You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what your strengths are. The only thing I can really point to and say is working for you is your authenticity. So if you’re asking me for practical advice, I would say move towards your authenticity.â€