the respectacle

tim and eric of tim and eric awesome show great job are interviewed in this month's believer. as a new fan of the shows it's interesting to learn about the parameters they set themseleves as well as their specific aesthetic goals. i recommend reading in full but here's a chunk i found particularly edifying as a viewer:


BLVR: How bad, or good, was local Philly-area cable TV when you were growing up?

TH: Terrible. Just atrocious. I grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania. There was a show I loved called Al Alberts Showcase, which was on on Saturday afternoons. Al was an old man who would have these four- and five-year-old kids on his show. The kids were barely able to put a sentence together, but they were made to sing old standards. Bizarre.

EW: What I really liked, maybe even more than cable TV, were these old videotapes of high-school performances from the ’70s and ’80s. I was president of the A.V. club in high school, and I came to fall in love with that amateur style—in both the production and entertainment sense. Everything was so earnest and yearning and, in the end, very sad. It was riveting.

BLVR: Why was this amateurish style riveting for you? Did you find an authenticity with these old videotapes you couldn’t find elsewhere?

EW: Yeah—it was real. There’s a real person up on that stage; it’s not an actor in front of the camera. There was an awkwardness I always found fascinating. Why are they shooting this? Why are they performing this? Shit, why am I watching this? It was mesmerizing.

Tim and I still have this theory that the realistic will always outdo the inauthentic. Always. That’s the main reason we haven’t hired a professional sketch troupe for the Awesome Show. Real people, for better or worse—mostly worse—will always be preferable.

When we started Awesome Show, we knew we didn’t want to hire graduates from the Groundlings or Second City. If we were going to parody, say, a commercial for a local car dealership, we’d want to hire a real person who would just read what we told him to read. We knew we could get solid performances this way that we couldn’t have gotten otherwise.

TH: Even when we were doing Tom Goes to the Mayor, from 2004 to 2006, we would bring in nonprofessional actors and record their voice-overs. These people would produce such laughs—such genuine laughs—that it really improved the work. It made everything just sound better. These weren’t photocopy cutouts of people purposefully acting strange.

BLVR: I’d imagine it’s not too difficult to find these types of performers in L.A.

EW: Oh, it’s so, so, so easy. You’re just inundated with them in L.A.! Everyone is so desperate to be a star. Literally, practically every person who lives here has some sort of acting aspiration. Every once in a while, Tim and I will sift through these low-end websites and pick out hundreds of amazing headshots.

When these actors come in, they more or less don’t know what the hell they’re doing. And that’s exactly what we want. We stick them in front of the camera and just experiment.

BLVR: Are you concerned that once these actors become too self-aware, they’ll stop being funny? I always thought that was the case with Larry “Bud” Melman on Late Night with David Letterman, in the ’80s and early ’90s. As soon as he found out he could be intentionally funny, he ceased to be.

TH: Very much so. We have to guard against that all the time. Some of these actors want to act in a certain way, either to play up a joke or to sell a certain line—and it’s our job to tell them not to do that. We tell them to just act normal. Otherwise, it’ll never be as effective. In fact, it would be really lame.

BLVR: One of the things I like about the Awesome Show is that even though most of these performers are quite bizarre, you don’t mock them. They’re on the show and they’re doing their thing, but it’s almost like they’re part of the family.

EW: Part of the fun, right. And that’s really important to us. We never, ever want to seem like we’re manipulating them too much. We were never into bringing people onto the show and mocking them. Howard Stern sometimes does this, and we don’t like how he treats his gang of crazy people. It’s too brutal. Sometimes it’s funny, but mostly it just feels exploitative to us. I’m not into that idea of mean comedy.

TH: Not to sound too mushy, but we are also fulfilling a lot of these performers’ deepest dreams and wishes—which is to be on television. There is no other opportunity for these people to appear on TV. This is it.

BLVR: It also helps that you’re down in the mud pit along with the rest of them; it’s not as if you’re lording above them with your intellect and good looks.

EW: Exactly. We never put ourselves on a pedestal and make ourselves look like the cool guys. Even if we tried to do that, it would be impossible. We look terrible. You can see our double chins hanging out. We’re wearing makeup. Our faces are covered in Vaseline. We’re disasters.