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Green Room: Eric Wareheim

By Pete Cottell
Eric Wareheim and Tim Heidecker

If you’re an aficionado of Adult Swim, you know Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. But the comedy duo’s lo-fi aesthetics and sense of retro-futurist dread are familiar to anyone who’s stayed up all night bingeing on bad public-access TV.
and
relied heavily on awkward timing and disturbing film glitches, but it was Heidecker and Wareheim’s subversive pisstakes on America’s commercialized dystopia that really fueled their disturbed universe of A-list celebrity cameos. Take, for example, John C. Reilly as a “special” news personality in
, a spinoff driven by the irony that Brule is neither a real doctor nor a properly socialized adult human capable of anchoring his own show. The live show, Tim and Eric & Dr. Steve Brule, plays out like a vaudevillian showcase of abstraction: Rather than relying on weird tape edits, an endless barrage of beloved characters and musical acts creates a circuslike atmosphere. In advance of the show, which hits Portland tonight, we chatted with Wareheim about guest-star freakouts and the duo’s new series. (Read an extended Q&A with Wareheim here.)

WW: Your show attracts actors of all stripes—Paul Rudd, Will Ferrell, Alan Thicke—because they know it's an actor's playground that allows them to loosen up and goof off. Has an actor unfamiliar with the show ever had an on-camera freakout?

Eric Wareheim: Back in the Tom Goes to the Mayor days, we had an infamous Gary Busey scenario. He showed up and had no idea what he was there for. He literally tore up the script because he hated the lines so much. He fired Tim from the show—he was a total lunatic. It was one of the greatest Hollywood experiences I've been a part of. He made Tim leave the room, then brought him back an hour later and counseled him on how to be respectful in Hollywood and how to be a good writer. It was unbelievable. He had, like, three lines in the episode.



Your new horror series, Tim and Eric's Bedtime Stories, eschews the lo-fi, frenetic aesthetic in favor of hi-fi production and Twilight Zone-style vignette storytelling. How do you hope it's received?

We think Bedtime Stories should be screened in a movie theater because it looks so good, but the reality is that some kid is gonna be watching it on a torrent file while he's listening to Slayer and also having cybersex and playing a video game at the same time. I think that's how kids watch things nowadays. I hope people will give it the respect to watch it in a dimly lit room on a large plasma-screen TV, but I know 95 percent of people will probably watch it the other way.

SEE IT: Tim and Eric & Dr. Steve Brule is at the Newmark Theatre, 1111 SW Broadway, 248-4335, on Wednesday, Sept. 10. 8 pm. $45.50. Read an extended Q&A with Eric Wareheim here.

WWeek 2015

Pete Cottell

Pete Cottell

Pete has written about lots of stuff.