Cartoon Network’s late night-shows range from serious Japanese anime to bizarre live-action comedies. The “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” season 1 DVD is probably Cartoon Network’s most creative comedy yet, featuring phone pranks, an Oscar award show parody and hilarious infomercials.
Because “Tim and Eric” features vomiting, sex jokes and toilet humor, this show is not for everyone. This comedy sketch show by Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, however, features some of the best side-splitting satire jokes that I have ever heard.
One hilarious parody includes badly-made instructional videotapes for kids. These segments feature teacher named Pierre, a disco dancer who looks like James Brown. He teaches kids “useful” skills, from dance to hip-hop and meditation. In one special skit, Pierre teaches Tim not to eat uncooked hot dogs. Tim, of course, eats the hot dog and develops a cracked lip and dies. As a lesson for kids: Don’t eat uncooked hot dogs, or you will die of a cracked lip.
One skit depicts a wacky scene in a locker room, where a girl in underwear flirts with a pizza man. After trading sexual innuendo remarks, the girl asks the pizza man to make love to her, but the pizza man conveniently teaches the kids about abstinence. The joke is so out-of-place that it just cracked me up.
I love the show for its brutal satires of television programs, such as infomercials for products oversaturated with weird features, and a parody on fighting video games called “Hacky Sack Extreme.” There are even satires of exciting “professional” sports, where soccer is dumbed down to the name “no-hands ball” and baseball is “stickball.”
However, the best parody is on the Academy Awards, in which the comedian host, Pat Dudley, makes jokes and hand motions so that the audience conveniently claps and laughs on cue. He also welcomes back Tim and Eric as a comedian couple, after a clip reveals their breakup after Eric is shown falling down a flight of stairs. In fact, the stair-falling scene was actually a cheap stuffed mannequin of Eric dropping three stories down to the ground. The whole show is so cheap and overdramatic that I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
I’m also surprised at how much work is actually put into the show. In a making-of-the-show segment, viewers are shown complicated costumes and weird vomit goo used in the show. Also, the “Tim and Eric” show features tons of remixing of audio clips, where segments are repeated endlessly and at different speeds.
I never thought I would say this, but the cheap production of the show and the off-kilter jokes really make this one of the best comedy shows I have ever seen. I’ve never had more fun watching such jokes as the cheaply produced toy commercial on “B’Owl,” a toy which is a mix between a bat and an owl and is pronounced as “bowel.”
Even though this show is not for kids, this is an excellent satire of tired television images from creepy kid shows, fighting games and sports shows. I have to say that Tim and Eric did a great job in producing a hilarious live-action comedy. I only wish that each episode could run longer than 15 minutes.
