Filmed in 2008, right as the MTV burnout skater-cum-pranksters like Bam Margera were jumping the shark, it’s one of the best distillations of mid-aughts, Jackass-ian culture you’ll ever see. Jim and Derrick represent the prime example of that genius. Occasionally, Tim and Eric would ditch the central conceit of their show and put together a half hour imported directly from inter-dimensional cable. In 2021, there is nothing more unsettling than low fidelity. Everything looks a little queasy and weird in Grum’s universe. Grum, an exceptionally poorly rendered children’s mascot, is Tim and Eric’s tribute to that strange late-’90s catalogue. With each passing year, the early 3D-animated canon - think Shrek, A Bug’s Life, and the first Toy Story - grows more uncanny through the lens of modern technology. We never saw much of the Video Dating Gamer after this season-two segment, but we’ll always thank Rainn Wilson for his education. This is what all gamers look like, especially if you meet them on a VHS dating service. By season three, it appears that Channel 5 has let her have a show about cleaning cat hair, which of course devolves into an on-air breakdown and screaming fit. In a sketch that sends up QVC, Bamford hosts a program called The New You, where she shows you “how to rejuvenate and revitalize yourself … through lotion!” Unlike later seasons, where it appears that famous guest stars are doing their preconceived idea of what an Awesome Show character should be, this is a showcase for Bamford doing her signature mom impression. Bamford, already a wacky character in and of herself, appeared in seasons one and three as Maria Bamford. Both groups gave their productions an indie-music-kid ethos inspired by Neil Hamburger, and Heidecker and Wareheim welcomed all of the above onto their show to play some wacky characters. The first few seasons of Awesome Show reveal Tim and Eric’s strong creative symbiosis at the time with the “Comedians of Comedy”: Patton Oswalt, Brian Posehn, Zach Galifianakis, and Maria Bamford. After spending a media career as one of the anodyne talking heads on shows like CBS’s Rockstar, Navarro was now correcting the Dunnman himself, dressed in a mesh top and leather pants, about the precise pronunciation of “Navarro.” It’s the perfect example of two universes colliding. The best example, in our opinion, is Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro, who entered the “Dunngeon” hosted by Richard Dunn in season two.
Yes, it is funny when Patton Oswalt shows up and seamlessly plays along, but this kind of comedy is at its best when someone completely outside the ecosystem appears onscreen. In the world of Wareheim and Heidecker, everyone can be a star.Įverything in the Tim and Eric tradition - from The Eric Andre Show down to Tom Goes to the Mayor - relies on a certain indelible unscrupulousness in whoever is guesting on the show. (Some of the cult favorites Tim and Eric produced, like Richard Dunn, were pulled off the street.) This is our list of the 30 best characters in Awesome Show history, played by stand-up royalty and anonymous weirdos alike. But the pair were also more than happy to pan through the benthic underside of Hollywood, trolling Craigslist for walk-ons who could provide the unsteady, amateurish tone the show relied on in a truly fluent way. Everyone from John Mayer to Will Ferrell has gone down the rabbit hole with them. They also found a surprising number of A-listers willing to play along with the mayhem. After all, the duo had a precise grip on the exact sort of limbic, haunted, late-night public-access show they wanted to make. Many of the best characters on Awesome Show were played by Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. You can still hear the echoes, more than a decade later. Would you need to play a pitchman for rentable juvenile clowns on the brink of an emotional meltdown? Or were you simply asked to hold your arms up in a weird way as you made the case for artificial bones? For 50 episodes and five seasons, there was no more fertile and fucked-up terrain in comedy. Anything could happen once you were on set. Guesting on Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! took serious bravery. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photos by Adult Swim Reilly, Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim, Paul Rudd.
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