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A funny thing happened a few weeks ago. I was watching an NBA playoff game. Every few minutes I consulted Twitter, as one is wont to do during a live sporting event in 2014, and I saw a tweet from comedian Tim Heidecker1 that struck me as both ironic and significant:
These Griffin Force commercials are a great example of everyone involved not giving a shit. @ t i m h e i d e c ke r The commercial in question was from a series for the Kia Optima. “Griffin Force” features Los Angeles Clippers star Blake Griffin and 30 Rock star Jack MacBrayer as pseudo superheroes who don’t exactly fight crime – they hang out in a midcentury batcave-esque lair, cruise around town, and occasionally extoll the benefits of the Optima. The tone of “Griffin Force” is hard to pin down. The jokes aren’t really jokes but rather slow, deadpan visual gags. The set pieces are made to look cheap and flimsy. The acting is archly bad. Many of the spots end in several seconds of awkward silence, and per Heidecker’s insinuation, they are unfunny – almost purposefully so. But the irony of his comment on the “not giving a shit” tone of these ads is that Heidecker himself helped usher in this style of Web-native humor. Over the past 15 or so years, Heidecker and his partner Eric Wareheim – known as “Tim and Eric” – have built a small comedic empire out of their brand of surreal,
deadpan anti-humor. The duo met in college and began collaborating on short videos and animations for their website, TimandEric.com.2 Videos like “LA Guyz” and “Cat Film Festival” epitomize their work, which David Itzkoff of The New York Times once described as “like outtakes from a public-access channel that’s broadcast only in hell (…) full of shoddily produced, sloppily edited [elements, which are] usually a result of accidents, budgetary restrictions and bad choices.”3 These elements are also hallmarks of anti-humor in general, which skewers the whole concept of comedy by failing to deliver a traditional punch line, instead reveling in the anti-climactic lack thereof. The joke is often buried in the setup itself – a setup that is usually tinged with amateurism, darkness, surrealism, and heavy doses of irony. Other famous comedians associated with anti-humor include Andy Kaufman, Norm Macdonald, and Neil Hamburger.4 Armed with this fresh, offbeat voice, Tim and Eric quickly impressed one of their idols, Mr. Show’s Bob Odenkirk, who offered to collaborate with the duo on their first TV show, Cartoon Network’s Tom Goes to the Mayor. The rest is Hollywood history: their first show begat several others, including the popular Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! which ran for five seasons and even became a feature film. Throughout their successes on the big and small screen, Tim and Eric continued to make content for the Web. They even dabbled in “advertising,” first in 2007 with a bizarre and hilarious series of seemingly commissioned promo
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