Do we change or is--have things been--are we in a sort of infinite loop?

November 29, 2021 12:01 PM

Move over Joe Rogan: here's Tim Heidecker's "The Joe Rogan Experience"
Also, it's 12 hours long.
(Or, is it?)

Featuring Jeremy Levick and Rajat Suresh

posted by Atom Eyes (39 comments total)

You really have to be brave these days to speak your mind like these three did today, it is obvious that they care about the truth above all else, which is unfortunately rare to see in the current political climate. I just wish that more people would be so unafraid and go against the grain like Tim, Rajat and Jeremy, even though they will definitely be cancelled by the woke sjw cancel culture antifa crowd.

These are things you can't say on stage anymore! Thanks Tim for being a real guys guy and telling it like it is, saying the things everyone else is to afraid to talk about.

posted by box at 12:06 PM on November 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

Looking forward to this but link goes to an hour and 29 minutes in, did you mean to do that? Non-timecoded link here.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 12:15 PM on November 29, 2021

Smart word is to go long on crab salt stocks and
bouillabaisses.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:16 PM on November 29, 2021 [7 favorites]

that's interesting
posted by wordless reply at 12:17 PM on November 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

Maggie Mae Fish did a video a few months ago comparing an aging conservative comedian character played by Tim Heidecker to actual aging conservative comedian Rob Schneider (link, c.w. it's been a while since I watched but I'm pretty sure it contains examples of offensive humor from both). Personally, I think Tim Heidecker succeeds at being actually funny while satirizing the "people aren't allowed to be funny any more" crowd. Then I see that clip of Jim Breuer ranting and I feel that he somehow wins by not being satirizable (he still loses badly at being comedy, of course).
posted by jomato at 12:40 PM on November 29, 2021 [16 favorites]

Joe Rogan is doing to my generation what Fox News did to boomers
posted by Jon_Evil at 12:56 PM on November 29, 2021 [45 favorites]

I admire Joe Rogan because an old person in an increasingly accelerating world, he's the comforting equivalent to when we were able to look down on people wearing Ed Hardy shirts, and snapback trucker caps. He is still something I ( kinda) understand. Unlike Meagan the Stallion or Apple Air pods.
posted by Keith Talent at 1:25 PM on November 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

I’m curious about what is difficult to understand about Meagan thee Stallion, but I’d rather avoid that derail.

I admire Heidecker’s commitment to playing shitheads with such pitch-perfect precision that I can’t stand to watch him either
posted by Maaik at 1:38 PM on November 29, 2021 [27 favorites]

I made it four or five minutes in. It was boring. I guess I'm missing a joke? Maybe it's ironic? Probably I'm just not the target audience.
posted by The corpse in the library at 1:57 PM on November 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

I can feel my brain turning into mush so i guess they got the rogan thing down pat
posted by bxvr at 2:02 PM on November 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

Heidecker's on top of his game these days. On Cinema at the Cinema continues to be stupendous too.

I hate to say it, but... watching this, I got the appeal of the Joe Rogan podcast for the first time. The format is so appealing—the vague feints towards thought that dissolve right back into stoned comfort. No real meat, but pretenses towards intelligence. The subdued wonder of the dim.

It was lovely white noise. And fantastically on-the-nose, too.
posted by rorgy at 2:05 PM on November 29, 2021 [25 favorites]

it might be helpful to have context for what Heidecker does which are perfect mockeries of incredibly obnoxious things in which he never breaks character and in which all the elements of what makes the thing horrible (like the toxically masculine and very shitty standup that makes up an unsurprisingly large number of that crowd) are summarily wrapped up into a single performance

I don't generally find stuff like this interesting but there's a lot of really insightful work in this - their completely hollow conversation peppered with ten dollar words and misogyny about Henry Deaver, who seems like a pretty direct satire of Jordan Peterson and other kinds of pop evopsych bullshit, really nails how so many fucking people in this toxically masculine stew justify terrible opinions with something they don't understand at all which, even if understood, is totally meaningless bullshit anyway

you learn about the emptiness of Sophists when you study Plato and Socrates and it's uncanny how accurate that characterization is so many thousands of years later for people like Rogan, Peterson, Pinker, etc. Heidecker is pretty much pointing directly at this hollowness, the emptiness and inconsistencies of this 'philosophy', and he does it extremely well
posted by paimapi at 2:18 PM on November 29, 2021 [33 favorites]

crab salts
posted by tristeza at 2:29 PM on November 29, 2021 [6 favorites]

John Darnielle tweeted about this yesterday; I can only imagine for some people a Mountain Goats / Heidecker collision is absolutely peak everything.

I never had much time for anti-comedy in the Tim & Eric vein; I always found it kind of easy and lazy. But the "crab salts" clip that John Darnielle shared hit 10/10 for me, and I'm looking forward to listening to this, and I've really been enjoying I Think You Should Leave, so maybe I was totally wrong about that whole thing.
posted by Shepherd at 2:52 PM on November 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

So you are sayin', "They are the hollow men, They are the stuffed men, head piece filled with straw, alas, Their voices when they whisper together are quiet and meaningless as wind through dry grass, or rat's feet over broken glass?" Anyway.
posted by Oyéah at 3:15 PM on November 29, 2021 [7 favorites]

I was impressed with how strongly he nailed the Rogan tone and methodology of saying the opposite of the profound while always making it seem like some cogent points are really being made. It's like self-inflicted doublespeak in a way.
posted by GoblinHoney at 3:17 PM on November 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

This is everything, but I love Tim Heidecker, who may be the the most sophisticated and incisive comedic mind of my generation and has a big future. Not to put too fine a point on it, of course. I wasn't a big T&E watcher, but ever since The Comedy I've been sold.

For this, the listener has to see the time-wasting rambling garden path "conversations" as comedy in itself. Halting dorm room blather and totalizing pronouncements and logrolling. A 3:55 or so there's an extended bit on atheism ("but that doesn't mean I don't believe in God.") and how someone found "the horn, the devil's horn." "Wow that's fucken crazy."

Plus it's 12 hours, which almost certainly is mocking...I don't know how many 3hr episodes Rogan does per week, but it used to be "a few," along with some other podcasters who like to hear themselves talk and just sit with their friends a few times a week until listeners are presumably spending most of their time getting caught up. Click anywhere in the 12 hours and it will be the same. It's fractal, the river (more of a creek) of banal references and simple logic elaborately broken. It's like A Thousand Plateaus: written so you can open it anywhere and just start reading. The SpaceX hat with a Fuddrucker's sponsorship is a nice cherry on top.
posted by rhizome at 3:23 PM on November 29, 2021 [13 favorites]

I never had much time for anti-comedy in the Tim & Eric vein; I always found it kind of easy and lazy.

Totally get that, but once you understand everything he does is from the perspective that our culture is total trash, you see the nuance in how he picks away at it.

Tim and Eric Show was satirizing the cheesy 90’s / 00’s television meant to salve for very real problems that everyday people experience. The corporate sponsorships, the talk shows that are really uncomfortable, the sitcoms where nothing is funny, the products being sold that solve zero problems…it’s all a mirror image on how empty society felt with corporations selling things in our faces all the time. And this was before the internet 2.0 nightmare of ads following you from your personal profile on a social media site to your inbox.

He’s got that philosophy thing going that is really sharp and precise and needed when you see it. His stuff is just better and better, too. I’m so glad he’s going after Joe Rogan - what a boring, idiotic voice among many.
posted by glaucon at 3:49 PM on November 29, 2021 [6 favorites]

is there a direct download available for the audio somewhere? as in an mp3?
posted by glonous keming at 6:00 PM on November 29, 2021

It’s in his podcast feed as three 4-hour segments.
posted by something something at 6:10 PM on November 29, 2021

Toad's Horse Shampoo is a pretty complete product...
posted by Windopaene at 6:55 PM on November 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

I'd have to be very very bored to want to listen to that .. no, even then I wouldn't want to listen to it
posted by anadem at 7:03 PM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'm a big Tim & Eric fan (admittedly, it took me a little bit to get into them, as I initially disliked Tom Goes to the Mayor), and also of their work as individuals, to a lesser degree, but this... It's like, Andy Warhol filming 8 hours of the Empire State Building: a great idea to consider in the abstract for all the ways it disrupts our thinking about art, but who the fuck wants to suffer through actually experiencing the thing? To paraphrase the great Shirley Bennett, "Come on, Tim Heidecker, some of us have work in the morning."
posted by Saxon Kane at 7:45 PM on November 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

Much as with the Empire State Building film, though - the point of the art would be lost if you *didn’t* make it extreme, but the audience needn’t absorb the whole thing to get the point. I think if you listen to 15 minutes you’ll get it - and then you realize it’s *48* times that long and it really washes over you how horrid that is.
posted by JoeBlubaugh at 8:16 PM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Would it be a spoiler to say that this is actually about an hour long looped ten times?
posted by angrynerd at 8:33 PM on November 29, 2021 [8 favorites]

Lay off the crab salts angrynerd. Your spiking immunities are overwhelming your perception, of, um, space and like, time...
posted by Windopaene at 8:45 PM on November 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

Loved that Maggie Mae Fish piece, even though it was an unfortunate reminder that R*b Schn**d*r still exists.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:53 PM on November 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

Would it be a spoiler to say that this is actually about an hour long looped ten times?

Heh. Perhaps I was a bit too coy with the pull quote in my title...
posted by Atom Eyes at 8:56 PM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

This shit is impeccable. I too remember when we could just play on mother's lawn! Thank you for taking me back to that simpler time, and helping me learn something along the way. It made me think, and there's not many safe spaces out there where you can do this sort of fearless ideation without looking over your shoulder at the PC Police coming to "cancel you". Just wow.

If you are like me and enjoy this kind of really high level, intense intellectual discussion, I highly recommend going back to 2013 (remember when!) and working your way through the excellent podcast Topics by Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter. Make sure to start from the beginning, as they add some important guidelines, precepts and axioms along the way that ratchet up the educational and philosophical atmosphere. It's not meant to be funny, it's not a comedy, but don't worry, they're not afraid of laughing when it's appropriate!

If there's enough interest, maybe we can form a study group on FanFare to examine the 10% of each topic they don't cover. If the mods let us, that is!
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 7:04 AM on November 30, 2021 [4 favorites]

If you don't quite get Tim Heidecker's brand of post-ironic comedy, this Mister Sweet video does a good job dissecting it: The Father of Modern Comedy
posted by AlSweigart at 8:06 AM on November 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

I think I finally got Tim when he invited me to ride the Cain Train.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:28 AM on November 30, 2021 [5 favorites]

This is great satire. I especially enjoyed Rajat responding to almost every new subject with the phrase "now if we go back to ten, twenty... forty years ago..."
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 9:16 AM on November 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

Watched this last night with my partner and loved it (unsurprising since we are die-hard On Cinema heads and HEI Network subscribers). we haven’t watched much/any Joe Rogan so we skimmed a few actual Rogan snippets after for comparison and the ones we saw seemed a lot more weed-smoking oriented than Tim’s take. I couldn’t tell if we just picked the wrong Rogan clips that were only the “smoke weed, have Ideas” with guests and if there’s another subset where it’s totally non-stoned shallow big talk. But we did check one that was some ancient civilization pseudoscientist that Rogan clearly believes and respects fully. Pretty spot on. There’s lots of plot lines of Tim earnestly buying into scammy supplements and frauds in On Cinema so this felt very similar.
Either way I totally appreciate the execution - glad it wasn’t audio only since Tim’s expressions and delivery are always fantastic.
posted by ghostbikes at 9:54 AM on November 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

This is very relaxing to have on as background noise.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:59 AM on November 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

crab salts
posted by dmh at 11:37 AM on November 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

Every generation gets their own Old Man Yells At Cloud.
posted by tommasz at 12:00 PM on November 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is one of the funniest things I've seen in a while, but I also understand that it's so niche I have literally one friend who I can share it with and expect to get it. She thought it was hilarious as well, though, at least.
posted by wesleyac at 2:03 PM on November 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

Joe Blubaugh: I agree!
posted by Saxon Kane at 8:01 PM on November 30, 2021

I never had much time for anti-comedy in the Tim & Eric vein; I always found it kind of easy and lazy. But the "crab salts" clip that John Darnielle shared hit 10/10 for me, and I'm looking forward to listening to this, and I've really been enjoying I Think You Should Leave, so maybe I was totally wrong about that whole thing.

glaucon said it above, but I think the key to finding Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job! tolerable is seeing it, not as a hyperactive "weirdness for weirdness's sake" collage, but as a kind of "What's left when we squeeze the orange dry?" What substance lies beneath all the advertising, all the pop culture marketing schemes, all the things that ape form for form's sake but don't really understand what that form was originally for?

These days, it would target Instagram and TikTok and "influencer" culture (and podcasting, though Tim does a lot with that one in both On Cinema and this Joe Rogan parody). All the stuff that's mindlessly entertaining, clever only in brief sparks that go nowhere, and all the while we know that beneath it all is some kind of hustle, some kind of attempt to get money from you out of thoughtlessness or apathy or delusion or misguidedness. Whether it's selling weird brain pills and face creams or just making you enough of a "stan" that you'll plop down $39.99 for some kind of Merch Item, there's that mindless capitalist enterprise going on beneath. We all know it's bullshit, but it's the only game in town, and it hits a point where it's so obvious that we kinda stop talking about it or thinking about it or feeling like we can do anything about it. But since T&EASGJ! was from another era, it instead used public-access television as its lens, since that's the place where amateurs try to ape the things professionals can glossily distract your eye from, accidentally exposing the game in the process.

There's one episode of T&EASGJ! that's entirely about Tommy Wiseau, who directed The Room, and I think that Wiseau is unironically one of that show's biggest inspirations. What makes The Room great, after all, is that it's a film about a man who gets dumped by his fiancee for no good reason, only the film is so misogynist and deranged that it makes it plainly clear why someone might want to break up with Tommy Wiseau. It's that same idea of someone doing something so terribly, and without the rhetorical prestidigitation, that for once you actually see the thing that everyone tries to keep hidden. (I feel the same way about Rebecca Black's Friday, which not-coincidentally also feels like it could have been a Tim and Eric bit.)

There's a great thing in the director's commentary for Mister America, which is a mockumentary attached to On Cinema at the Cinema—long story, don't ask—where Gregg Turkington (the other guy who makes it, along with Heidecker) talks about his fascination with VHS tapes, with this mountain of Content that required entire film crews and months of production and came out to giant fanfares, and then melted away so thoroughly that a lot of these movies never even got digitized. We think of the Internet as this timeless and eternal place, but plenty of films never crossed that threshold, so that now you can only find them at garage sales for 25¢ apiece. The thought that there's a literal media factory in California churning out stuff like this, dictating the lives of thousands of people, with all the insane machinery and equipment that you needed to make a movie, and then it all winds up as a cheap add-on to a garage sale in a media format nobody cares about anymore... on some level, that says a lot about something, and it's cheap and tragic and beautiful and awful and very, very funny.

Heidecker's "digital age" stuff is a lot calmer and slower overall, in part because the narcissism of the digital age is that anybody can make Infinity Content and the result is hours-long YouTube videos and podcasts and what-have-you, but it all feels like the same message. Though "message" is overstating it, really. For me, it's just that this kind of invisible tedious meaninglessness is wearying and depressing, and having someone recreate it in such scathing ways is cathartic and satisfying and, paradoxically, wildly entertaining. I think that we're collectively getting more and more aware of this (or just more tired of it), so Heidecker feels way more "of his time" now than he did in the early 00s, but I don't think his method's really changed.
posted by rorgy at 5:36 AM on December 15, 2021 [4 favorites]