EP.221 - TIM HEIDECKER

Hello, Adam Buxton here with news of some live shows, details of which you'll find on my website adam-buxton.co.uk.

On the 10th of October, I'll be on stage at the Wimbledon Theatre with Samira Ahmed, talking about my book I Love You Bai, showing clips and signing things afterwards.

On the 13th and 14th of October, the Adam Buxton Band is playing two nights at the Norwich Arts Centre.

Expect songs from my new album Buckle Up, Great Bants, and afterwards, I'll sign things if you want.

And finally, on the 26th of October, I'll be appearing at the Royal Festival Hall as part of the London Literary Festival.

Expect humorous readings, videos, and music, followed by, yep, signing.

And then, I think that's it for live shows for the rest of this year.

Tickets and info at adam-buxton.co.uk.

I

added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin.

Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening.

I took my microphone and found some human folk.

Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke.

My name is Adam Buxton.

I'm a man.

I want you to enjoy this.

That's the plan.

Hey,

how do you do, podcats?

It's Adam Buxton here.

I do alright.

Thanks for asking.

I'm walking up a farm track in the east of England.

It is

a cold, blustery day.

Angry-looking clouds moving fast above me.

My dog friend Rosie

did not want to come on the walk today.

No effing thank you way.

She was coming out.

We got a few meters up the track and

I just started feeling like a bit of a creep for making her come out.

She was clearly not into it.

So I just walked her back.

She is now with the person she likes most in the Buckles household, which is my wife.

She is curled up by the fire while my wife does law things.

Anyway, look, don't despair.

We're going to have a nice time together.

And right now, I'm going to tell you a bit about episode number 221 of the podcast, which features a rambling conversation with American comedian, actor, and musician Tim Heidecker.

In my mind, this is a companion piece to the last podcast,

which featured a conversation with Fred Armison.

There's a few connections.

They're friends, Fred and Tim,

and

my conversations with them both took place the day after seeing them perform live in the same venue.

Anyway, here's some Heidecker facts for you.

Timothy Richard Heidecker was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1976.

Yes he's living there in Allentown.

It was at college in Philadelphia that Tim met Eric Werheim with whom he has worked ever since as Tim and Eric.

The duo got their TV break in the early 2000s after sending a tape of material to Bob Odenkirk who, along with David Cross, created the influential comedy sketch series Mr.

Show and of of course later starred as lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

In 2004, the first series of Tim and Eric's crudely animated show Tom Goes to the Mare aired on Adult Swim, a late-night block of programs on the Cartoon Network aimed at older and possibly drug-addled audiences.

Shows made for Adult Swim often featured content that was experimental, transgressive, improvised, and surrealist in tone.

It was an aesthetic that Tim and Eric helped define, and they honed it with Tim and Eric's awesome show, Great Job.

Over five series and a couple of specials that ran between 2007 and 2010, Tim and Eric's awesome show featured sketches, characters, and parodies that gleefully emphasized the strangeness and artificiality of most ads and TV shows, especially when they've been quickly and cheaply produced.

Every convention of TV camera work, editing, vision mixing, sound, and visual effects was twisted and exaggerated.

And along with Tim and Eric's artfully awkward and stumbling line delivery, the result was a kind of joyful weirdness that frequently tipped into the grotesque and nightmarish.

This is some incredible analysis of Tim and Eric that I've written here in my notes.

Outside of his projects with Eric Werheim, Tim has acted in films like Bridesmaids, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Jordan Peel's Us, and he played the dislikable lead in Rick Alverson's indie film, The Comedy.

In 2012, Tim and fellow comedian Greg Turkington, also known as misanthropic entertainer Neil Hamburger, started On Cinemar, a web series and podcast ostensibly parodying movie review shows, in which Tim and Greg play bickering versions of themselves with hilarious and faintly unsettling deadpan naturalism.

He's very good at his

unsettling deadpan naturalism, Tim.

Over the years, OnCinema has evolved into an alternate world with spin-off films, TV series, and even elaborately staged court cases involving Tim and Greg and other characters from the OnCinema universe, all of which can be explored on Tim's High Network website, H-E-I Network.

There's a link link in the description to that.

In addition to all that, currently Tim is doing a show called Office Hours.

That's a weekly call-in show that can be seen on YouTube.

Again, link in the description to the channel.

And that's hosted by Tim and his friends and longtime collaborators, DJ Doug Pound and video artist Vic Berger.

In Office Hours, Tim is more or less himself.

at least when taking calls and talking to in-studio guests and he frequently expresses straightforwardly sincere positions on politics and other topics.

But occasionally the office hours team will produce a spin-off video, he can't resist the spin-offs, in which Tim plays a version of himself that's far closer to someone like Joe Rogan.

In fact, in 2021 Tim and a couple of comedian pals filmed themselves waffling inconsequentially about the kind of topics Joe Rogan might waffle inconsequentially about.

And then they looped the footage they shot so that the fake podcast episode ended up lasting just under 12 hours.

There's a link in the description.

My conversation with Tim was considerably shorter, and Tim was not, as far as I could tell, in character.

He was very friendly and warm.

It was lovely to see him.

I'd met him one time before that in Los Angeles in 2017.

He came along to a bug show that I did out there, the Bug Bowie Special.

And he came along with John C.

Riley, aka Steve Brule from Tim and Eric's awesome show.

But this conversation was recorded in March of last year, 2023, the morning after I'd seen Tim performing at Hackney's Earth venue.

And the show that I saw was in two halves, the first of which featured Tim in character mode as a borish stand-up comedian doing an edgy snowflake bashing Netflix type special.

And then after the interval, Tim returned as himself with his his band, the Very Good Band, and played a set that included tracks from his albums Fear of Death, released in 2020, and his last album High School, released in 2022.

That's the one that he did with some help from Mac DeMarco and Kurt Weil.

There were also covers that night and numbers from the 2013 comedy album Urinal Street Station by Tim Heidecker and the Yellow River Boys.

The next day, as well as talking talking about music and what it's like for a comedian like Tim to write non-comedy songs, I asked Tim about some of his early cultural influences, how he's adjusted to parenthood and middle age, and how he deals with the occasional fan who's disappointed to find that Tim isn't part of the alt-right.

I'll be back at the end for a small waffle slice, but right now with Tim Heidecker.

Here we go.

Ramble chat, let's have a ramble chat.

We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that.

Come on, let's chew the fact and have a ramble chat.

Put on your conversation coat, and find your talking hat.

Isn't it great where all people like us are doing this now with the tech?

Do you like that aspect of it?

I mean, not my favorite.

No.

I mean, it's stressful.

And

luckily, I have people now to help me do it.

But

you can do it.

You can do it yourself.

Oh, absolutely.

But, I mean, I've always been a DIY guy.

Yeah.

And that's how I used to to do TV stuff with my comedy partner, Joe.

Yeah, same with me.

But is that how you got started?

Were you doing everything yourself?

Yeah.

I mean, Eric and I were in college together in film school.

Definitely didn't think of ourselves as comedians.

Yeah.

But we were funny.

Like, we enjoyed making each other laugh.

But you were being pretentious artists.

Yes.

I mean, in high school, we were watching, you know, Quentin Tarantino and Scorsese and all the greats of the sort of 90s indie film scene.

And,

yeah, I wanted to be filmmakers.

Comedy at the time, to us, was like Seinfeld.

No disrespect to that, but it just seemed like a million miles away, and it wasn't what we were interested in.

But after we'd done the pretentious stuff, on the weekends, we'd drink a...

bunch of beer and make prank phone calls and do silly weird little art experimental things that were funny but weird and we kept doing that and that was the stuff that seemed to get more attention than our serious artwork you know or whatever that was and it just kind of gradually shifted into that after college we were

just

kind of lost Eric was working as a wedding photographer videographer going off and shooting like bar mitzvahs and weddings and stuff and i was working a desk job and uh we would just get together and make stuff And, you know, like you said, we had some rudimentary home consumer editing software that was just, you know, computers were just starting to be strong enough to do it.

So, what year was this?

Like, maybe 2000.

So, is that digital then, or are you still using tapes?

It's digital at this point.

I think it's just, well,

it would be like min high-eight tapes.

Maybe.

Yeah, it would be still tapes, but it was like digital camborgers.

Yeah.

So, yeah, we were just playing around, and we had eventually made made up enough stuff that felt funny enough to us to kind of spread it around.

And we didn't exactly know what to do with it, but we were playing, we would show it.

The first thing we ever got going was like one of our very early things, like in a museum, like in a art space in Philadelphia, you know, just like playing on some TV somewhere.

So we were like kind of in that weird art world more than the comedy world.

So I moved to New York out of college to try.

I actually tried a little stand-up comedy.

It was like a lot of false, you know.

What was your early stand-up comedy like?

Well,

it was a weird, it was very Andy Kaufman inspired.

It was weird and subversive, whatever.

It was like anti-comedy, if you will, which I don't like that term, but it was a counterpoint to everybody else.

that was doing regular stand-up.

Self-consciously un-mainstream.

Yeah, yeah.

Very, and also not ready yet you know not there yet and the other thing that I didn't understand I think about comedy was I thought I had to do something totally different every time I did it which was maybe a good thing as you're sort of figuring stuff out but it just got to be too stressful to figure out what am I going to do next week I've got to figure out a whole new act so I just stopped and kind of retreated and got a job and played music and lived in New York and had fun.

Yes, it's weird when you realize that most stand-up comedians are just working on about 15 minutes of stuff and they do it over and over and over again for about a year.

And I thought that would be a terrible thing to do.

I didn't understand how you could possibly get enjoyment out of doing that.

But now I get it.

Now I actually do that with my stand-up, which is, as you know, not, it's a character.

It's not, I mean, it is stand-up comedy, but there's something about doing it every night that I've found a way to, it is fun and it is different every night.

And you can, you know, play with it and improve it, hopefully, or react and change it, you know, based on the reactions and stuff.

So I get that now.

But back then you were just thinking, this is not sustainable.

Yeah, I didn't have, it wasn't going anywhere.

And then who were you channeling when you got together with Eric?

I mean,

did you have people

that you admired?

Yeah, we loved Mr.

Show, Bob Odenkirk and David Cross.

So we loved their, mostly their filmed bits, their commercials or, you know, parodies.

I loved Kids in the Hall, which funny, I saw Robert Popper last night at the show, and I was talking to him, and he's like, we don't know the Kids in the Hall here.

Yeah, that's what it did used to be on.

Yeah.

They showed it in the 90s.

Yeah, but it was big in my growing up.

So there was that.

There was more like also just like David Byrne was a huge inspiration for like his movie True Stories.

we loved.

Yeah, I loved that too.

Yeah, and there's moments in that.

Who's the guy that did Swimming to Cambodia?

He was the

Spalding Gray.

Like, we loved him in that movie and then watched all his stuff.

Yeah, all his funny hand movies.

Yes, we just ripped that off.

Like, we just took that right off of that scene.

That great scene where they're at dinner.

Yeah.

And he's kind of conducting it.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that was big.

You know, the Cohen brothers, I think their earlier movies were inspirational with the way they had characters that were not people you'd see in movies all the time.

Yeah.

And then actually, when I moved to New York, a friend of mine had gone to England for a semester or something and came back.

He was a big tape collector.

And he came back with this gold tape.

Not literally gold.

It was just

full of gold.

It had the day today.

Yeah.

And it had jam and it had the other one,

Brass Eye.

And we passed that around a lot.

We watched that a lot.

That's funny that you came back with that tape.

Around the same time, the hot tape over here was the South Park, the first South Park.

Oh, yeah.

Definitely.

Yep.

I loved those guys.

I loved their movie that they made Cannibal, the musical.

I thought that was inspirational.

There was definitely the feeling that there were subversive, young, do-it-yourself comedian brains out there that wasn't brick wall stand-up comedy for the masses.

And we were going to do, we could do something kind of cool and artistic that was also funny.

Yeah.

And so did Eric carry on being the kind of technical point man with the editing and yeah, yeah.

I think for a while he did, and then we got very lucky early, relatively early.

We were like in our late 20s, but we had sent our early stuff to Bob Odenkirk, who was not a household name.

I don't know if he is here, but he's

now.

He is now.

Yeah, but back then.

But back then,

he had done Mr.

Show and he had done some other things.

But we'd loved him and knew him, but he was not a famous person, you know.

But he saw our stuff very early on.

I sent it to him.

He loved it, which is unbelievable because if you look at it now, it feels very primordial.

and called us and became sort of like our mentor and was just really wanted to know who we were, what was our scene, you know, and we were like, we don't have any scene, we're just these two friends.

And we came out to LA and he introduced us around.

And same time, Adult Swim was starting to come out.

And through a few phone calls and stuff, we got one of these to them.

And they ordered a series of Tom Goes with the Mayor.

So then when that happened, we hired a couple people to do the editing and do the art.

And did they, was it quite easy to explain the sort of aesthetic to them?

I guess it it was.

We didn't seem to have to.

I remember if you look at the original one, it's basically two stills of two guys, and it's Photoshopped with this filter on it and a very crude drawing in the background.

And we got the deal and talked a little bit about

what the show was going to be and sort of fairly deep into that process.

We're like, Do you want it to look like this?

You know, like, are you okay with it?

Like, we didn't even know.

We're like, should it just be a regular cartoon?

And they're like, no, no, we like that style.

Whatever you guys want to do.

Were you playing music around that time?

Not really.

I mean, I would write music for the show with another guy, Davin Wood, and I would, that was kind of my department.

Sometimes Eric and I would both come up with something or the bones of something.

So I was doing music, but it was not the music I would end up doing later.

I was just funny, you know, like you do, like just goofy stuff.

You're a very good singer.

I didn't even realize.

I mean, I knew you could sing.

Yeah.

But until last night, seeing you live, playing with your band, the Very Good Band.

Yeah.

And they are very good.

I mean, it sounded great.

You've got a good sound guy, but everyone can really play,

including you.

And I mean, you're good on the piano.

You're good on the guitar.

And have you ever taken singing lessons then?

No, it's a good idea, and I'll tell because I kill my voice.

I do here.

First of all, the yelling from the stand-up character

is very hard.

And then the singing singing is less, actually, less hard on the voice, but there are a couple numbers where I really go for it.

I go for the Robert Plant or

I don't know who it sounds like, but it's the growl, high growling.

And you've got a

belting cover of Victoria by the Keeks as well.

Yeah.

Which I was singing along with.

Victor.

So that's that's pretty high.

What's up there?

So I think I should take singing lessons just to be able to do it better every night.

But I've got my routines and my little warm-ups, and then not talking after the show is key, which is the sad part of it because

I do this show that, as you could tell, seemed probably like a lot of fun to me.

You know, it was like a very jubilant, joyous, and kind of triumphant night.

You know, it just all worked.

It was this thing that we've been working on for a long time, and the crowd was really great.

At the end of the show, you got to go to the green room and be like, thanks, everybody.

You know, great work.

Yeah, that's a great show.

And I want to be,

you know, drinking and talking loud over the music.

But I have to just be very serious about it.

Yeah.

And

I've been doing that.

But Vic Berger is in the band, and he was on Cloud 9 backstage.

He couldn't believe it.

I mean, it's really, this is the first big tour like this he's ever done.

And to have, you know, a thousand people like cheer for you, for him specifically.

you know, that's just exciting.

That's a moment to remember.

He was very good.

He was high.

But I've been doing this long enough with Eric.

We've done tours and stuff where you do, unfortunately, I think, you separate that feeling a little bit.

Have you always been so disciplined, though?

No, I mean, the first time Eric and I went on tour, we did this little club tour after the show had been out.

And it was, again, a kind of a new idea, at least in America, to tour a TV show, you know, that we were going to use it as like a promotional device and do sketches from the show.

I don't think there were a few people that might have done it, but we found that.

And this is an awesome show.

This is an awesome show.

And we did a show, a couple shows on the East Coast, and then after New York, I had lived in New York, so I went back to do the shows, a bunch of friends there and stuff.

And I didn't understand monitors.

I didn't understand like controlling my, and the show was a lot of it was me yelling at the audience.

And then we did the show, and after the show, went out to some bar, you know, drinking and talking in some loud bar for an hour or two.

Woke up the next day, and I had nothing.

Like, my voice was gone.

And it was so scary.

I'm like, I'm on, this is my job.

I'm on the road.

And really, the main thing I'm doing is talking.

And I just blew it.

You know, I just like blew my voice out.

So it came back like the next day, and I kind of faked it that night.

But I still think about that.

Every night I come off stage.

I'm like, don't do that again.

Yeah, that's alarming.

And then every morning I wake up after a show like today I go mm-hmm.

Okay, I'm all I'm still good.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you're looking incredibly well.

Are you sort of on a healthy

regimen?

You're not dying, I hope.

No, but are you fighting off the booze and stuff like that?

Since

I guess 2020,

I came back.

Eric and I did a tour the day before the pandemic hit.

We finished our tour.

So it was like, whatever.

But I was pretty heavy around that time, and it was a good time to make some lifestyle changes.

Yeah.

And the only thing I really did was I did this intermittent fasting, which is, I just don't eat till noon.

I don't eat after six.

And I took like lots of long walks, mostly to kill time, because there was lots of free time.

And so from noon till six, you're just eating and eating.

And just bagels and donuts and pot roast and everything.

No, I mean, I just, I kind of just cleaned up my...

I never was a big drinker, but I guess I, I didn't drink as much because after you're not eating, you don't drink as much.

Long walks.

And long walks.

And

I found the long walks to be such a great creative thing.

Like, I know on your podcast, you go out for big country walks.

Yes.

And I find if you can do that, people say, what do you do about Writer's Block?

Or what do you do about come up with ideas?

If I'm like working on something and I'm stuck, I don't put headphones in.

I go down and start walking down my hill on the street.

And, you know, it's just the blood flows and i just get ideas something pops up so i found those to be very helpful and uh yeah the weight just kind of came i also think like i don't know the science of this but i feel like you get older and like your metabolism changes and i think that's part of it but yeah i just started working and kept at it feel good yeah yeah i can't do that show that you saw with an extra 30 pounds yeah you know i wouldn't make it i can barely make it now.

Like it's hard on the body.

Yeah, I'm sure.

No, it was really impressive.

But your voice was amazing.

I was so knocked out by it.

Like

how strong it was and

what a

beautiful instrument it is.

Oh, thanks.

I'm very, I mean, all singers are self-conscious about their voice.

Most, I've heard lots of people, you know, John Lennon hated his voice.

And

everyone hates.

I don't think I'm a great singer.

But in the live world where it's loose and the band is behind me and I'm all warmed up, and I think I can do a pretty good job.

Yeah, it looked so fun.

And you're so at ease.

What's impressive about the new record about high school?

Yeah.

Is that you do sound so at ease?

Like, I'm always very interested to see how comedians, especially, make that transition, how they go about making music, especially someone like you whose aesthetic is so particular.

Yeah.

And you're kind of playing with perceptions of you as as a character and whether you're irony, right?

Whether you're sincere, whether you're sort of meta,

all of it's being played around with.

So, how do you approach music?

Did you think hard about it, or did you?

I mean, you had an early incarnation as a musician as a sort of more straight-ahead comedy act.

Yeah, or you did a sort of straight-ahead comedy album, right?

Yeah, we've done a few of those, and it's been a process of figuring out how to deal with that.

First of all, like I started listening to music that kind of fit in the middle of that, which was, you know, Randy Newman.

Yeah.

Somebody I knew when I was a kid and I knew who he was and everything, but I'd never really listened that closely to his records, you know, to the 70s classics that he made.

And when I listened to those, it clicked to me that I was like, he's doing similar things.

You know, he's playing with humor and irony and character work, but he's also making really good music and pretty sad music often.

And I thought that could be something I could try.

But I knew that, yes, of course, I had built 10 years of

this identity obfuscation.

10 years of mind fuckery.

Yeah, which was really fun and still is.

And then I just thought, well, this is just another layer of that, but it's another challenge for the audience to be like, oh, we're getting this other side of this person that I thought I knew.

And I say this a lot, but I think if Andy Kaufman hadn't died, he would eventually have had to do something else besides hiding behind irony.

I think, I mean, it just would have gotten old.

Yeah.

And I think if I just stayed in a character or removed and

sort of fucker, fucking people and fucking up, you know, whatever, fucking

everything.

That would just be exhausting for everybody.

It would be obnoxious, you know?

Yeah, but that's your stock in trade.

You're an obnoxious genius.

Yes.

And I still give myself permission to do that whenever I want.

But to,

and Eric and I were very strict about interviews and appearances and stuff that we were going to be kind of, we're not going to sit and talk about like we're talking now.

Yes, yes, yes.

For a while.

And now we've both kind of just been like, well, who cares?

So I don't know.

And I also just, you get older,

the things that you thought were funny when you're younger aren't quite as funny anymore.

And, you know, you just, you

want to explore other sides of doing stuff.

So.

Do you think being a parent has changed that as well?

Well, yes.

I think originally I didn't think that was true, except there's a period when my daughter was born where...

A, I started writing more serious songs because I think I had things to say about my life that were kind of interesting to me.

But there are some check it out episodes that heavily feature diapers and I thought, oh, that's where those ideas were coming from.

I think a lot of men wearing diapers and some baby stuff.

But yeah, I don't know.

Certainly I have two kids and it's definitely, you know, the older you get, the more you feel it.

And the more I try to be more grateful and empathetic towards the people around me and not expect as much.

I mean, the 2020 album was called Fear of Death.

Yeah.

So was that a genuine sense of mortality that you were wrestling with at that point?

Yeah, definitely.

I think it really snuck up on me, but as we get into our 40s and 50s, you start realizing that it's going to happen.

Yeah.

It's profoundly frightening, right?

You know, and it's like, oh, this could happen at any time.

And I don't think you have that feeling when you're younger.

I mean, a lot of, I didn't, didn't think it was anything to worry about.

And so it's snuck in.

And then it just, it comes from the unconscious.

Like a lot of the songs I write, I don't think too literally about them as I'm writing them.

They just kind of come out.

And then you go, oh, that's what I'm thinking about.

And then you can think more consciously about it and write more specifically about that subject,

which is the same with high school.

It was like, I started singing Buddy.

I've been thinking about you.

Okay, that's interesting.

What is that?

Who am I?

You know, you don't, I don't know.

It's like a mystery.

Who am I thinking of?

Oh, I'm thinking about this guy that I went to high school with who died.

And that becomes just this little, then you go, oh, this is about my high school days.

You know,

it's true.

It makes you think about things that you wouldn't have thought about if you hadn't just sort of blurbed out this little piece of unconscious writing.

Yeah, I heard you saying somewhere that that process of remembering first your friend

unlocked a whole slew of memories and

things that you hadn't thought about for a long time.

I had a similar experience when I was writing a book a few years ago and going back over old diaries and things like that.

And it's quite weird how you can unlock very specific memories, isn't it?

I'm sure it's some kind of, I'm sure there's a technique for it, but like conscious remembering is good we don't think about this stuff all the time.

Right.

But I hadn't thought about Kurt Vonnegut in a long time, or I didn't think about how influential he was to me.

And then I think thinking about my teenage years, thinking about, I have one song on the record called What Do We Do With Our Time?

And it was, it's really just sort of like, well, what was I doing?

You know, like, I didn't have a computer, really.

I didn't have a cell phone.

You know, so it's like, what were those hours spent doing?

And so I was thinking about that.

And, oh yeah, I used to read.

I mean, I still read, but that would be one of my regular activities, read books.

Do you listen to audiobooks?

I don't, because I don't have the...

I do sometimes.

I'm listening to

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Oh, okay, fun.

And it's mostly to give me nightmares before I go to sleep.

Yeah.

But mostly, yeah, to like, it's kind of boring because it's very detailed.

You know, it's like going into the day-to-day.

But I do it usually to kind of fall asleep.

But because I don't have the attention span to listen to people read as much as I do read, read.

I read rock biographies.

So do I.

I got the greatest book from a fan last night, a rock book that I've been looking for.

I've only heard about this book.

I'm going to show you the cover.

My Beatles Hell.

And it's...

Is that Photoshop?

Yes, it's a Photoshopped image of a smiling older lady in front of an image of the Beatles.

Yeah, and let me read you.

The back of the book, I mean, this was like written by...

Robert Popper or Neil Hamburger or something.

She was the secretary for Brian Epstein.

Oh, right.

So it's a real person.

It's a real person.

The tragical history tour of Beryl Adams.

I love the name Beryl.

Beryl Adams was Brian Epstein's first secretary as he forged his musical dynasty and molded the Beatles into the world's most successful pop band ever.

She was once married to the homosexual cavern disc jockey Bob Wooler and counted among her string of lovers Epstein's biographer Ray Coleman.

Those are the two first bullet points.

Beryl disliked John Lennon intensely, regarding him as an overbearing bully, and always knew that Paul McCartney was a much smarter cookie, the guy with the staying power.

That's kind of fucked up to say, right?

And then, this is good.

She was arguably the first woman to manage a pop band, the Kirkbees, who could have hit the big time if handled right.

They weren't and didn't.

I love they weren't and didn't.

And she's the manager, apparently.

It's crazy.

One of the best bits of the show for me last night was you in the music section.

So a reminder that the show that I saw that you're touring currently, the first half an hour, 45 minutes or so, you're doing Tim Heidecker as a obnoxious, sort of right-leaning, broish comedian.

Yeah.

And then you go away and come back with the band and you play your own numbers.

And it's a mixture of, you know, you'll include some wee wee songs in there as well.

But there's a section where you go over to the piano

and start talking about Bob Dylan.

Yeah.

I think I did realize that you love Bob Dylan.

I know you did a couple of parody songs a while back.

Yeah.

But tell me about the Bob Dylan bit.

That was one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

The Bob Dylan bit

is

the most fun and surprising every night for me because it's one of those comedy things.

You're like, I don't really even know why this works.

I know why I think it's funny, but the fact that the audience is there with me is a miracle to me.

You know, it's just amazing.

But it's a song that I tell the story on stage.

It's a song from an 80s record from Bob called Lenny Bruce.

It's about the comedian Lenny Bruce.

And listening to the song at home, it just struck me like what an absolutely strange

and stupid song it is.

But it's also very pretty.

You know, it's like a pretty ballad.

So I just play the song and stop and talk about the song.

But it has these great lines.

One is, you know, I rode with him.

in a taxi once, only for a mile and a half, seemed like it took a couple of months.

And you're just like, that's not a nice thing to say.

I can't, it's not a nice thing to say about somebody.

Your Bob Dylan impression is very good as well.

I can turn that.

What's the secret of the Bob Dylan impression?

Well,

I have to do him as a, when Bob's older, he kind of speaks with a little bit of sass to him.

That's right.

It's a bit.

Like he's started on theme time radio.

It's all the theme time radio stuff.

I can't do the early stuff at all.

Because the cliched Bob bulb impression in the early days is that he spread like that all the time.

Yeah.

But now he sounds a bit like Chris Rock.

Yeah, kind of like

Wolfman Jack or just this like radio voice.

And what's funny about the theme time radio is he's clearly reading what he's saying, you know?

So there's this reading it for the first time on the air kind of attitude about it.

That's really funny.

I don't know if I should say this, but one time I met Lenny Kravitz backstage.

Yeah, that's like Ira Glass, isn't it?

That kind of.

I'm pretending that you're just thinking off the top of your head.

Yeah, yeah, but you really read that.

Much as I like Ira Glass.

And did you read the Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dillon?

I have it.

I've scanned it.

I'm not fully through it.

That's a good audiobook.

Oh, that's what I should get.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think the one criticism of.

Well, I mean, the book seems crazy.

Yeah.

Like his little monologues in front of the songs are some of it i mean i love his writing uh loved his memoir but there is a problem i mean it's whatever he wants to do i don't really care but there's like one woman miss yeah this book it's like come on but i don't think there's anybody in his life that's telling him anything that he doesn't want you know that i don't think there's anybody checking him and there's a lot of people like that which makes like when you get older you got to be careful especially in that level where you're just like do you have anybody like gut checking you on anything?

No.

So it's like, dude, put a Joni Mitchell song in there.

Yeah, it sort of seems perverse at a certain point.

I appreciate that he's drawing on a,

well, it's mainly songs he loved as a youngster.

Yeah.

And obviously there were going to be a lot more men around than there were women.

So it's not like he's made a self-conscious decision just to include women.

Yeah, it's not like he doesn't like women.

Yeah, yeah.

But yes, you sort of think, as you say, there's so many others that he could easily have included.

It would have been easy.

But whatever.

Yeah.

But it is, I mean,

I was going to say, though, he does a lot of the audiobook, and the monologues are really quite funny.

And yeah, there's a couple that do make you think, oh, come on, mate.

What are you doing?

Where he just sounds like a sort of guy who's fed up.

You know, he's been listening to a few podcasts.

He thinks this whole woke thing's gone a bit far.

Right.

And he's just a bit fed up.

These old guys, too, yeah, they get bit by the conservative thing.

Yeah.

It's inevitable.

Talking about Bob Dylan being a grumpy old guy, and there's a lot of them around these days who get to a certain point and they're just like, oh, come on, it's all gone too far.

This is ridiculous.

And, you know,

I imagine...

you like me have a small part of you where sometimes you do feel like oh come on yeah yeah we're not allowed to say that now yeah it was like last week we weren't allowed to say the other thing and that was perfectly fine and now it's right, you know, but you do your best to kind of check your privilege and move on and yeah, you know, I think that's all it is.

Yeah, exactly.

But I remember you being more political about seven seven or eight years ago or something when the first stirrings of all that were starting a little bit and when things were starting to get a bit alt-righty in the comedy world.

Yeah.

And you pushed back a little bit in a fairly straightforward way.

Yeah.

You know, in a non-ironic way.

Yeah.

You did a song called The Cuck Song?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a Yankovic version of I Am a Rock.

Oh, yeah, there you go.

I am a Cuck, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, I was getting it bad.

And it was very,

it was a little scary at times.

But as soon as I kind of was, I mean, when Trump, I've been goofing on him for a long time, but when he really started to come about, I couldn't resist, you know, mostly through Twitter, but just like, God damn it, this guy is insane, you know, and this movement is insane to me and scary but also really funny like trump is the funniest person especially when back in the days when he was on twitter oh it was the greatest i mean it was not intentionally funny of course it was just absurd that i couldn't imagine anything more absurd than this guy and so i would just goof on it and i wasn't i mean i would occasionally tweet stuff that was sincere or platforming somebody that was promoting some progressive things or you know supporting bernie Sanders at a certain point or whatever it was.

And I just became the target of this.

And

so did a lot of people, not just me.

But I think there was this moment when,

because Eric and I's stuff could be, first of all, it's very apolitical in a lot of ways, except that it wasn't because a lot of it really was about American consumerism and capitalism out of control.

It was like buried in there, but it wasn't Jon Stewart.

It wasn't like coming from a current events political place.

So it really wasn't any way to know where we were politically necessarily.

And so that small community of young men, probably a lot of them were fans of our show, you know.

And then to see me come out and be a general progressive man.

Someone with a social conscience.

Yeah, that I've always kind of been.

I mean, certainly since college.

So it shouldn't have been a surprise, and it probably wasn't a surprise for most people, but there was this sense of like, and this was a time when Obama's in the White House, and, you know, the middle left is the party in power.

So I understand that the young, disaffected,

I hate politics, I'm losing my country kind of white, young suburban kid, is going to feel ostracized by that and then see these comedy weirdos that they might have identified with not be that.

I can understand some of them being disappointed or losing them as an audience or something, but then they've took it too far where they're sending death threats.

Oh, really?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know how serious any of it ever was, but it's like that stuff you see the trolls send, you know, that you're going to get sent to the gas chambers.

And, you know, if I ever meet you, I'm going to beat the shit out of you.

Or, you know, I just get that.

from time to time.

And that's on social media.

On social media.

And

I loved Twitter because I thought once I sort of came out of my shell and wasn't just the guy from Tim and Eric, I could say whatever I wanted.

And it was like, oh, this is great.

I can say stuff and then I could like interact with the audience in a sort of safe way because it's not them coming over to my house or calling my phone, but I could, you know, get their immediate feedback.

Or they could be, my audience is really funny.

You know, a lot of them are really funny.

and creative.

And so I could tweet something and they'd be funnier than my tweet.

You know, I tweeted about the summer tour I'm doing in the States the other day, and it was like three or four tweets about the tour because there was the pre-sale, and there's the it's on sale now, and you know, a couple of reminders.

And somebody tweeted, like, you should only tweet once about this.

And if people come, they come, and if they don't, well, too bad.

Now, that tweet

I love, and I retweet that with a okay, sorry about that.

Yeah.

Because the great fans that follow me are really funny.

And they're going to now be really funny about that.

They're going to jump on that.

And like, oh, wow, what a great free masterclass in marketing and advertising.

You know, like that kind of stuff.

So there is something fun and funny about getting a look into the mind of some of these weirdos out there.

But I'm sure there's an immediate visceral negative feeling feeling when you see negativity directed towards something you've made.

Of course.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, the thing is that I would say the majority of people who are

getting frustrated, like not the extreme ones, like the extreme ones, I don't know what the hell's going on in their heads.

But the majority of kind of irritable, negative chatter is just coming from people who feel a bit pissed off and disempowered.

Yeah.

And they're just typing before they think.

You know what I mean?

Yes.

And I think a lot of people end up regretting things they say on the other side.

Absolutely.

I had it happen the other day that somebody wrote to me, I did an interview and somebody brought up Chappelle and I've just been critical of him and his anti-trans stuff.

And I was very honest and said, I, you know, this is just me.

I've just never really been a fan of his.

I don't.

I didn't like the Chappelle show.

I certainly wasn't going on writing negative things on YouTube comments about it.

It just wasn't me.

It wasn't for me.

Whatever.

I kind of was saying that.

And somebody wrote me how mad they were that I did this woke interview and that just because he's against things, now you hate him and all this stuff.

And I just said what I said to you.

It's like, in that interview, I'd said that, but I'm reiterating, hey, he just never was really my style of comedy.

And this person wrote back, I'm so sorry.

I didn't realize you would actually read this.

I was out of my mind.

And just this long, like, I love you.

And please forget what I said and all this stuff.

So it's sort of like you can break through to people.

And I agree.

People write write things in the heat of the moment without thinking about the consequences and they don't think that I'm actually looking at any of this stuff a lot of the time.

I think that's the thing still even though you know evidently people are interacting and reading all this stuff people still feel that's that one of the dangerous things about social media I guess is the is that disinhibition effect even though you're aware Right.

People are reading this stuff.

It does get to people.

You were asking about my weight and I would post pictures where now I've lost this weight And years for years, people would make fat jokes about me because I was a little chubby in the face, you know.

And I wasn't ashamed of my body.

I've never been ashamed of my body.

If you see Awesome Show, I'm very exposed in a lot of that show.

But now that I've lost weight, people say, Are you sick?

You look like shit.

You look old.

Oh, no.

And it's like,

would you ever say that to somebody?

in person at a bar

on the street.

Would you come up to me and say, no, so that should try to be the rule you use?

It's like, now, do I say mean shit to Ted Cruz?

Yes, I do.

But

I try not to as much anymore.

Would you ever do a masterclass video?

Eric and I were going to do a fake masterclass.

Of course we were.

Of course we were.

There's no way we could do it for real.

Yeah.

I don't think I've ever seen a full one, but I mean, I'm sure, actually, Eric was telling me, he's like, actually, they're really good.

Some of them are really good.

Some of them are good.

Yeah, but a lot of them are not.

Right.

I think Ringo's is probably not very good.

Ringo's star.

I didn't even know he'd done one.

Wow.

And then what are you sort of enjoying in the comedy world?

Do you find it difficult to watch other people's stuff?

Yes.

I'm terrible.

People always ask me, what are you watching?

What's good?

The Alan Partridge from the Ost House podcast.

Yeah.

That does it for me.

Like, that is

exactly my sweet spot.

Yeah, I got to keep a better list of what I'm actually like.

Because, I mean, I don't know, there's so much to watch from the past that's good.

There's not a lot of comedy in America right now.

Like, my kind of comedy, like weird comedy or high-concept comedy.

The sort of overwhelming thing is the Netflix stand-up specials.

Yeah.

And they all tend to be

fairly similar.

Yeah.

They're lectures.

They're lectures from older

established comedians that have been around for 30 years telling you exactly what you're supposed to think about things.

Yeah.

And from their bubble perspective, which isn't connected to the real world at all.

So I don't care about anything they have to say.

So why would I tune in?

I'm watching that, I guess I'm watching

Bad Sisters with the Sharon Horgan show.

Oh, yeah, I haven't seen that yet.

Very good.

And it's not, it's like a murder, but it's funny.

But yeah, I'm not watching a lot of stuff.

I'm not.

Mainly immersed in the Third Reich.

Yeah, that's some funny stuff.

It's classic stuff.

Wait.

Continue.

Hey, welcome back, podcasts.

That was Tim Heidecker chatting to me there.

Very grateful indeed to Tim for making the time while he was in London last year to waffle briefly.

In the description of today's podcast, you will find all sorts of links.

Tim is one of the more productive comedians out there.

Office hours, etc.

And there's a link to the office hours Joe Rogan spoof they did in 2021.

There's a playlist of bits and pieces from Tom Goes to the Mayor, which was Tim and Eric's very first show back in 2004 for Adult Swim.

As far as Tim and Eric Awesome Show,

I've put a link to a compilation that is currently up there of underrated moments from Tim and Eric's season five, which some fans feel was one of the best seasons, the final season.

I was watching it the other night, in fact.

We had friends round.

And after supper, we were playing clips off YouTube.

And I played some clips related to to the talk that I did with Steve Davis, the snooker champion,

at the Norwich Arts Center last week.

The Arts Center was hosting an event called Synth East, which was several days of synthesizer related business.

And as part of that,

I was on stage for 45 minutes or so chatting with Steve Davis, who, as well as being very good at snooker, has for the last decade or so

got into modular synthesizers.

And now he's part of a band, three-piece, called the Utopia Strong,

who tour around playing kind of

far-out progressive music with Steve as the Eno of the group.

And Steve also DJs.

He had a radio show for a while in the 90s and beyond where he played kind of alternative and experimental music.

He's also very into his soul.

So, anyway, we had a good chat, but I had my laptop on stage, and I was occasionally calling up clips from YouTube that I had come across in the course of preparing a little bit for meeting Steve.

And I found some really nice clips of synth pioneers, including Delia Derbyshire, who was part of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

And they, of course, most famously created the Doctor Who theme.

There's also a couple of great clips of Wendy Carlos.

Wendy did the music for A Clockwork Orange.

She did these computerized versions of classical pieces, which were quite controversial at the time, because people felt that, well some people felt that she'd

sort of removed the soul that you get from

an orchestra, a live orchestra, and they found the electronic sounds too harsh and robotic.

but of course when you hear them in Clockwork Orange they work so well.

David Bowie used to come on to a lot of that music from Clockwork Orange I think back in Ziggy Stardust days they would play that before the band came out

and then I didn't realize that Wendy Carlos also did the music for Tron and anyway when my friends came over

We watched Delia Derbyshire and Wendy Carlos and then we watched a bit of Tron, which my friend hadn't seen before

and she was so knocked out by it.

I mean it is an incredible piece of work, Tron.

It's not a brilliant film as far as the actual story goes and how much it makes sense and how interesting it is, but it's like an art film really, at least the parts inside the computer so to speak.

The first section of the film is just out in the real world.

But once you get into the computer, it's this amazing look that they create.

And it's partly very early CG to create the backgrounds and some of the animation in there.

But then there's also

a lot of stuff which is created by filming the actors in black and white in these groovy costumes

that incorporate sort of circuit board designs.

And then they painted, they hand-painted the frames to make everything glow in a computerized fashion, a kind of neon computer glow.

It's just extraordinary and it looks beautiful.

And then you got Wendy Carlos' music on there as well and the result is this very strange

effect that's never really been matched.

Partly, I suppose because it's totally impractical.

I think it took ages and was incredibly expensive and then the film didn't do very well so

they thought right won't do that again but how amazing that it was done for Disney.

Anyway so we were watching all that stuff and then I went out of the room and my wife wasn't too interested in Tron

because she used to watch Tron a lot when the boys were little.

and they would watch Tron.

So my wife ended up watching Tron.

I went out to the kitchen to make some tea and when I came back my wife had commandeered the laptop

and everyone was watching Epic Fails.

They're good fun for a while but usually after about 20 minutes or so of Epic Fails you start feeling dirty

and then we had to go somewhere else for our entertainment.

So I thought well let's try some Tim and Eric.

So we went for Tim and Eric's most underrated moments from season five.

And I was thinking, this probably isn't going to last very long.

But actually we ended up watching the whole thing.

It was pretty good.

But there's also, sorry, that was a long tangent.

There's also links to other things that me and Tim just talked about.

Link to Bob Dylan's song Lenny Bruce, so you can hear what Tim was deconstructing.

Link to the scene from David Burns' film, True Stories, with Spalding Gray

monologuing at dinner.

Made me quite nostalgic watching that again, actually.

I do love that film.

Linked to a trailer for Cannibal the Musical

and linked to a trailer for quite an odd film that Tim pops up in along with quite a lot of other American comedians called Brigsby Bear from 2017.

I saw Mark Comode giving it a very lukewarm review saying nah, some of it's just about okay

and there's some interesting stuff, but too quirky, I think.

Fair enough, it is very quirky.

But actually

for me

it was just the right side of quirky.

It's about a bloke who lives out in the desert with his parents.

A bit like Dogtooth.

They won't let him out of the compound.

They told him that the world outside is desolate and the atmosphere is poisoned.

and they teach him what they think he needs to know

with this

show called Brigsby Bear that they have filmed themselves.

It's like their own educational kids' show that they have made to show their son.

Anyway, I think once this kid gets out into the real world and his parents are no longer there, he feels the need to carry on the Brigsby Bear project in order to bring some closure to his life.

I saw it on a plane.

So you've got to be careful of movies you watch on planes, don't you?

Because your judgment has been clouded by chocolate and red wine and altitude.

But I enjoyed it.

Alright podcats.

Whoa!

Oh man, I just nearly stood on a pheasant that launched itself.

I'm going to head back, check in on Rosie.

Thank you very much indeed to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his production support and conversation editing on this episode.

Thank you to Helen Green.

She does the beautiful artwork.

Thanks to everyone at ACAS for all their help keeping the podcast show on the road.

But thanks most of all to you, and I really do appreciate you coming.

I think we should have a hug.

Come over here.

Come on.

Great to see you.

Go carefully out there.

And until next time,

that we share the same idol space.

Bear in mind that I love you.

Bye.

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