BY JONATHAN VALANIA “Comedians are the new philosophers,” the girl next to me whispered in my ear conspiratorially, like this had just occurred to her for the first time — at 24, she was roughly half the median age of the crowd at the Academy of Music Friday night where Jerry Seinfeld was staging a two-night/four-show big-ticket stand, endeavoring to put the lie to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum that there are no second acts in American lives. I just shrugged and thought: Maybe back in the day. Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks — those guys were philosopher […]
PHAWKER TAWK: Q&A With Tim and Eric
BY SCOTT COLAN With hack ventriloquist Jeff Dunham and his quasi-racist puppets scoring unprecedented ratings on Comedy Central, you could assume that the state of comedy in America is in as bad a shape as the national economy. Fear not, Philadelphia’s own Tim & Eric and their show “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” provides respite from the mouth breathers and the ankle biters. Their dark comedic surrealism puts them among the latest in a lineage that stretches from Monty Python to SCTV to Kids in the Hall to Bob and David. And now the torch has been passed […]
LOCAL FOOLS MAKE GOOD: Tim & Eric’s Trip
NEW YORK TIMES: ON first viewing, the comedy sketches on “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” can seem like outtakes from a public-access channel that’s broadcast only in hell. They are full of shoddily produced, sloppily edited talk shows about acne and commercials for utterly unnecessary gadgets, and populated by people who should never stand within 50 feet of a camera lens. When these elements appear in a typical television program, they’re usually a result of accidents, budgetary restrictions and bad choices. When they appear on “Awesome Show,” they’re intentional. “We have a very strict set of rules of […]