Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!

Adult Swim has spawned and incubated a number of comic schools of thought during its six-year-long existence.

There's the Sealab 2021 / Frisky Dingo dojo, which often trades upon sexual innuendo and despicable anti-heroes.

And there's the Space Ghost Coast to Coast / Brak school, which typically invokes childlike characters wandering through gently absurdist situations, underpinned by fourth-wall-shattering moments of clarity.

And then there's the wildest and most undisciplined style of them all, as represented by the network's relatively fresh (and recently renewed) offering Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!

The program follows in the footsteps of its immediate ancestor, the extremely uneven, usually depressing, but occasionally brilliant Tom Goes to the Mayor. But while Tom told stories set within a semi-coherent suburban world with a stable cast of characters, the Awesome Show is attached to no such tethers. And while some method of organization or continuity is generally desirable in a television program, the comedic stylings of Awesome Show creators Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim are both accelerated and honed by its almost complete lack of structure.

Equal parts sketch comedy, television satire, and post-production-generated humor (low-tech video "stutter," "freeze" and "wipe" effects are rampant, as are chirons filled by precisely the same kind of nonsense information that clutter up real television shows all over basic cable), the Awesome Show is a wild and constantly unpredictable 15-minute hodgepodge of stuff. Does every sketch score a hit? No. Is it sometimes riotiously funny? Absolutely. Will you be surprised? Unless you wrote it, most certainly. And like the pop-culture shotgun that is Robot Chicken, Awesome Show's rapidfire rate of idea delivery tends to ensure a high laugh-per-episode count every episode — even if the hit ratio varies.

A recent episode followed the adventures of Tim and Eric as they struggled to submit a tape of the Awesome Show to Adult Swim in time to get it aired. The trip from home studio to network headquarters was facilitated by a drunken, mind-blowingly caustic cabbie (played by veteran anti-humorist Neil Hamburger.)

HAMBURGER [totally unprovoked, to Tim and Eric]: You rapists.

TIM: What did he just say?

ERIC: I don't appreciate being called a rapist.

HAMBURGER: Well, then don't rape.

The trip was punctuated by basically unrelated sketches, such as the "Channel 5 Married News Team" — Tim in drag, and Eric wearing a bizarre Sharpie goatee. The married news team featured a report on digestion problems presented by the dazzlingly daft Dr. Steve Brule (asskickingly good character actor John C. Reilly).

The program has been much hated-upon by the Adult Swim fan base. This is, no doubt, due in part to its non-animated (and, in fact, public-access-television-inspired) aesthetic. But the program also represents a foray into one of the most dangerous and exciting realms of the comedy world: sheer individualistic creativity — seemingly without edits or censorship — and damn the consequences.

If Adult Swim is the bleeding edge of TV comedy, Tim and Eric's Awesome Show, Great Job! is the bleeding edge of the bleeding edge. It's a scary place to be. But for those who can handle the manic confusion, it's really pretty awesome.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)