Caroline Bader
“The show you’re gonna see next week is kind of a train wreck. A beautiful train wreck,” Eric Wareheim tells Isthmus. The comedian is half of the surrealist-absurdist humor duo Tim and Eric, whose Mandatory Attendance Tour™ stops by the Orpheum on Feb. 23.
While most famous for Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! on Adult Swim, which ran from 2007-10, don’t expect a rehash of old bits. “We came up with a bunch of new characters. There’s some stuff you might remember, but we found new ways to be insane,” Wareheim says. “It feels very fresh for us. Even if you’ve seen all the shows, this is gonna be very, very new.”
How new? Well, they change it up every night. “Every night, I throw in new lines for Tim just to fuck with him, trying to make him laugh,” says Wareheim. “We have a part in the show where I interview him, and every night I give him new questions. We try and stay calm, but we have not gotten through a show without totally breaking down yet, but that's part of the fun.”
There are some classically styled Tim and Eric video interludes, featuring their oddball surrealist editing and intentionally awkward, cringe-inducing delivery. The audience is also likely to see their cast of bizarre extras spouting nonsensical dialogue, which fans of Awesome Show! will appreciate. Newbies may want to skip over to YouTube for a highlight reel introducing them to the duo’s style. Here’s a great one of their fake commercials, and here’s Paul Rudd dancing. Oh, here’s another about child clown rentals that shows the darker side of their humor.
Wareheim says the video sketches are all new, made specifically for this tour, “I feel like now when we go to the video, you get to see a bit you’ve never seen. That’s kind of part of the experience, and we’re very proud of that stuff,” he says. “We wanted to make this a next-level concert.”
While chatting with fans at a pre-show Q&A, and eating “five pounds of crawfish and shrimp” before performing in New Orleans have been some recent highlights for Wareheim, he says the best part of the show is his camaraderie with his pal and connecting with the audience. “The experience of being on stage with Tim and just flooring the audience with a joke or a bit, that’s still the greatest feeling,” Wareheim says. “When a large group of people is laughing together, we’ll start laughing. It’s really positive.”
