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Check It Out!: John C. Reilly on working with Dr. Steve Brule


“If you’re raking the leaves and it gets all over your driveway, just hose it off, dummy.”

Actor John C. Reilly, along with Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, is the executive producer of Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule, probably the single funniest show on the tee-vee at the moment. I asked the Oscar-nominated thespian a few questions about the show and its star. Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule is now midway through Season Three on Adult Swim, airing Thursdays at 12:30am ET/PT. You can also watch at the Adult Swim website.

After we watched the promo DVD for the new season, my wife remarked that there is an entire generation who might happen upon an “old” movie like Boogie Nights on cable and think “Holy shit, that’s Dr. Steve Brule!” If they saw Chicago their minds would just explode. I’m guessing that there’s a pretty strict age divide between folks who say “I like your work, Mr. Reilly” vs. the ones who shout out “For your health!”?

John C. Reilly: My career has been one exclamation of “holy shit!” after another. If there is one thing I am consistently known for it is being inconsistent. I am a lucky man who has been allowed to try different things by those who watch my work. Whenever people compliment Dr. Steve Brule I always tell them I will pass along the kind words to him and Denny. I have their pager numbers. Finally, age is an illusion that older people become fixated by. Congratulations on having an understanding and insightful wife.

For the record, I’m one of those people who’d shout “For your health” and in fact, I have said it to you. Not to give your fine film and stage work short-shrift, but the way you inhabit Dr. Steve’s skin is deeply impressive to me as a big comedy nerd, I must say. He’s the greatest “schnook” character since Chris Elliot in Get a Life or Fred Willard as Jerry Hubbard on Fernwood 2night. You have obliviousness down to an art form and that’s a rare talent, indeed. Was there ever a character like Dr. Brule who you observed up-close in your life, like a bumbling high school chemistry teacher or someone like that?

JCR: I will pass along your kind words to Dr. Steve. I know, however, that he does not think of himself as a “schnook.” Most people who refer to him as that are most likely “hunks.” I have never met anyone quite like Dr. Steve Brule and I doubt I ever will. Like all humans, he is unique.

To what extent is the show improvisational? And who is clued in to what’s happening and who is not?

JCR: The show is loosely scripted by Steve according to the topic discussed. Each episode is shot strictly in order by Steve and his technical adviser Denny. All interviews are with actual people with actual fields of expertise. The interviewees are not prepared or pre-interviewed by the Doctor. When you see Dr. Steven Brule meet someone on the show that is the exact moment that they meet. Obviously the Doctor’s family and friends know of him and his work already.

How involved are you in the editing process?

JCR: As an executive producers of the show Tim, Eric and I go over the episodes once Denny has finished duping the master VHS copies. We then arrange to have them sent to a video tape duplication facility in order to make copies for the station and viewers. Thank you for helping make people aware of this important show and its information.

For your health!

Here’s a clip from Season Three of Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule, where Dr. Steve visits The Playpen (“Home of the $2 Lap Dance!) with his guest Ron Don Volante, gangster rapper and owner of the club. Then he interviews a wizard before making a trip to Heaven where he meets “Gord.”
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.26.2014
01:31 pm
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Tim Heidecker channels his inner rock star in Dangerous Minds Q&A
12.09.2013
03:28 pm
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As longtime DM readers are by now probably pretty well-aware, I’m a huge Tim and Eric fan. I’ve seen ‘em live, I bought all the DVDs (even the early material sold on their website) and apparently I’m one of the few people who thought Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie was piss-yourself funny (Everyone knows that you can’t trust the tastes of the general public, even if Netflix stars do tend to mostly be correct, but I digress…)

When the publicist for Some Things Never Stay The Same, the sophomore effort from Tim Heidecker and Davin Wood, contacted me about the album, I said “Yes, please” and then I thought “Hey, wait a minute, Tim Heidecker has a serious band??” Like most of you, for me, the idea of a comic doing music brings to mind not necessarily the great “Weird Al” Yankovic, or even Steve Martin, but Eddie Murphy’s hack 80s shit like “My Girl Wants to Party All the Time.”

My fears were completely unfounded. Some Things Never Stay The Same is a really, really good album. It completely won me over. The songs are as catchy as anything heard on 70s AM radio. Hear them one time and you’ll be humming them to yourself soon afterwards. With the assistance of guests like Aimee Mann, Eric Johnson (The Shins, Fruit Bats) and others, Heidecker & Wood have, um, “seriously” managed to put together one of the most fun albums of 2013. I said “fun” not “funny.” There’s a difference, but I’ll let Tim explain exactly what they’re up to.

Richard Metzger: In the press materials, it says that you and Davin Wood wanted to record an homage to 70s singer/songwriters like Warren Zevon and Harry Nilsson. “Cocaine,” the lead-off track refers to just the sort of creative fuel rock stars liked to ingest back then. Did you guys snort up a massive amount of blow before you wrote that song? I ask because I can’t imagine that you were inspired to write that by eating a lot of pancakes, because otherwise you’d have just written a paean to flapjacks. Am I off base here?

Tim Heidecker: You are off base. Really off base. It’s disappointing that this is your first question. a dreaded JOKE question. I really admire this blog and visit it daily, so it was really dispiriting to to find the first question so corny and LOUSY! My gosh what a way to get things started….. Boy.

Anyway, I’ve never done cocaine in my life - for real. Never had the interest and frankly the anti-cocaine propaganda surrounding me in the ‘80s really frightened me into staying away from it. the song idea popped into my head as songs normally do—out of thin air—the words and melody fitting together nicely… me playing around with the chords from “Werewolves of London” playing them backwards… Then I thought it’d be funny to write a really positive song about cocaine—no down side—almost from the perspective of someone in their honeymoon period with the drug before the dark side of it shows up.  Even the bridge, which is usually a good place to go “but there’s another side to this story,” keeps things positive.

RM: Hey, calm down, that was a totally legit question. I think you’re just being overly sensitive about being a comic making “serious” music, Tim. Just go with it. You’re among friends here. I’d imagine that a lot of our readers probably, you know, love cocaine.

But speaking of serious music, how did you rope in Aimee Mann for the project? I respect her so much as a musician that I actually buy her CDs, I don’t even download ‘em. Really.

Tim Heidecker: Fine! I’m COOL! Let’s try and steer this thing back on track… Aimee and I go way back. Not really. Is six years way back? I became friends with her through my wife, which was nice. She didn’t start out as a “SHOW BIZ FRIEND”—just a nice person that my wife would go feed squirrels with. She didn’t know my work, and frankly I think a lot of it grosses her out!  I don’t blame her! But we’re good buds and we’re always looking for stuff to do together. I had the idea for her to sing on a few songs and called her up—she was over in my garage that afternoon and there you go.

RM: I remember when she was on Awesome Show! Is Aimee Mann herself a “serious” musician who wants to be funny?

Tim Heidecker: I find a lot of musicians gravitate towards comedy and vice versa—I think it has more to do with the stuff in our brains that made us get into “show business” than how we neatly fit into our categories we’ve lined up into. I’ve been thinking about this a lot actually as I understand it can be confusing or “bad business” to jump in and out of comedy/music/drama/ballet or whatever it may be, but I bet a lot of people didn’t start out knowing exactly where they’d fit and just went with the first thing that really clicked and paid the bills. Hence, Russell Crowe’s band and all the rest.

RM: Davin Wood and you did most of the music for Awesome Show! together, right?

Tim Heidecker: Yes sir that’s right. Eric of course also throws in his ideas and little jingle ideas as well—I made a lot of the music for “Casey and His Brother” and David Liebe Hart’s songs—a lot of the low fi/super crappy stuff as I taught myself home recording… One I’m proud of is a little song called “Live with my Dad”—the MIDI horns are just… yuck.

All the GOOD sounding stuff came from either us singing Davin a little melody or sending him a little demo and giving him a genre to work in or giving him the idea and letting him build the song—revisions and notes, etc… It’s weird—he lives in Echo Park but we’re on different schedules so almost all our work on the show was done over email and phone calls.

RM: It’s quite a leap from the Casiotone, vocoder and keytar sound of the Tim and Eric soundtrack to the “analog” Laurel Canyon sound on the album. You do a great Bob Dylan, a pretty good Warren Zevon, there’s that ditty boosting Scientology in the style of The Kinks that you did and there’s the music from the show which is all over the place… You’re like the Rich Little of alt comedy and it seems like you could probably mimic practically any musical style you wanted to, so at what point did you and Davin think, “Hey, let’s do this...” and commit to the Canyon sound?

Tim Heidecker: No one wants to be the Rich Little of ANYTHING, but thank you nonetheless.  I think we want the songs to work together as albums and it’s stronger to keep the style somewhat consistent.  That said, I think we kind of branched out into a few different styles on this record: “Sunday Man” and “On Your Own” are kind of Pink Floyd-style space rockers.
 

 
RM: I really like “Getaway Man.” The lyrics to that one are straight up Randy Newman, who I love. It’s wonderfully silly, but well-played, and so affectionate, I must say. You do Randy Newman as well as he does. What inspired that story? A bank robbery? A clingy girlfriend? Both?

Tim Heidecker: Oh man, I don’t remember. Maybe having just seen Drive? I adore Randy Newman and got a bit obsessed a few years ago. If you’re reading this and saying “Whaaaa?” I suggest you go back and check out Sail Away and Good Old Boys two records that I could listen to every day of the week. Anyways, I think the song gets a little silly in the second verse and was pretty happy with the line “Evening Sun,” which sounds like something but really isn’t! I like when that happens—fun word play that sounds right in the song but upon further investigation is nonsense. The song gets a lot of Springsteen comparisons, too, and thats because we did the trick of playing a high piano note coupled with the glockenspiel. It’s a recipe for insta-Boss.

RM: I like the soulful horns on that one, too. Production value! Sounds expensive.

Tim Heidecker: Yea! We brought in real live human beings to play on this record!  Davin really is the master of dialing in the MIDI to sound really great but we had new some players who were game so we had them over to my garage and built those parts.

RM: Okay, last question: What’s the next musical genre you two will take on with the next Heidecker & Wood project?

Tim Heidecker: Who knows? I have piles of songs in various stages of completion. Some country flavored (but I think Ween already cornered that idea). Probably more of the same. Hopefully we get better. I think a priority would be to do the next record a little more “live in the studio” with some really good players - I was listening to the reissue of Moondance and it was striking to hear that although the songs are all different there’s a consistent arrangement to each of them—it’s really just some guys in a room playing these songs. I think that’d be fun to do.

Some Things Never Stay The Same is out now via Little Record Company. Below, a high-spirited performance of “Cocaine” at Largo in Los Angeles on April 27, 2011.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.09.2013
03:28 pm
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Tim and Eric return to Adult Swim for Halloween special, ‘Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories’
10.28.2013
05:32 pm
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As longtime readers of this blog know, I am a big Tim and Eric fan, I’ve gone to see them live and well, I just think what they do is brilliant and hilarious. Furthermore their comedy is practically inscrutable, as it’s nearly impossible to pin down why the things they do are so fucking funny. I think they’ve found not just a particular niche for themselves, but have actually come up with a very specific and very “new” kind of comedy vocabulary.

Certainly there never seems to be any middle ground where they’re concerned: People either love Tim and Eric or else they really hate them. If, like me, you love them, it was welcome news indeed to hear about their upcoming Adult Swim Halloween special with guest Zach Galifianakis.

Here’s how the press release describes the half-hour Twilight Zone-style “horror” anthology:

Tim, Eric and Zach are elated to learn their grandfather has left them each $1,000 in his will. However, there’s a catch. In order to collect the money, they must live in his haunted mansion for the rest of their lives.

As you can see from the trailer, Tim and Eric also want to warn their fans about syringes going around this Halloween…
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.28.2013
05:32 pm
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David Liebe Hart: Christian Scientist; Puppet Guy on Tim and Eric Awesome Show; Famous Los Angeleano
07.14.2011
01:25 pm
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As Los Angeles-based fans of Tim and Eric know, David Liebe Hart, the slightly off, but obviously harmless Christian Scientist puppeteer and singer/songwriter, has been one of the city’s…er best kept secrets for over two decades. I’ve seen Hart with “Doug the Dog” and his ventriloquist dummy “son” Chip the Black Boy performing outside of the Hollywood Bowl and the La Brea Tar Pits, singing his songs about alien abductions, staying off drugs and how badly he wants a girlfriend since I first moved here. Not only would I often see Hart busking for spare change, I’d also see him on cable access television with his Junior Christian Teaching Bible Lesson program. In fact, James Quall, another Tim and Eric cast member was (is?) a member of the Junior Christian Teaching Bible Lesson posse himself. Praise the lord that Tim and Eric have seen fit to provide gainful employment for these two rather eccentric fellows.

You can find numerous examples of David’s cable access handiwork on YouTube but here is a very revealing segment from The Daily Show where we catch him describing how his wife left him and trying to give out her phone number so people can harass her for committing adultery!! (I once recall seeing him tell a story about getting a venereal disease on a live cable access show and then giving the woman’s name and telephone number out on air. Each time someone would call in, the host would tease Hart that it was this woman on the line and that she was really angry. He seemed genuinely terrified every time the phone would ring).

One day my wife and I were driving down Beverly Blvd and we saw a determined guy with a deteriorating Afro darting across the street. “Hey… look… it’s….” I said, stammering at the famous face in front of my car, but she was quicker. “SALOME!” she shouted and David Liebe Hart grinned from ear to ear that, happy that at long last, he was finally being recognized.

Sadly Chip the Black Boy was “kidnapped” from David and has not been seen again. Don’t expect to see him on any milk cartons.

David Liebe Hart Was Viciously Slandered.

An uncomfortable David Liebe Hart anecdote

David Liebe Hart and Adam Papagan on MySpace (listen to their paean to “Ellen Degeneres”!)

Chip The Black Boy

He’s More Than Meets the Ear; The Hollywood Bowl’s ‘puppet man’ would like a better gig, but mostly he just wants to belong (Los Angeles Times article by Tricia Nelson)

Originally posted 08/20/09.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.14.2011
01:25 pm
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Tim and Eric in film school: VHS vs film, lobsters & the future
03.01.2011
04:43 pm
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Not that this is meant to be bust-a-gut funny or anything (just to get that out of the way), here’s an early look at Tim and Eric’s budding comedic partnership from back when they were in film school at Temple University. Includes video montages, bird chasing, love and… more.
 

 
Via Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Blog!/Epic Ponyz

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.01.2011
04:43 pm
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Tim and Eric AwesomeCon 2010!
07.12.2010
10:43 pm
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Tim and Eric fans rejoice! It’s that time of year again, it’s time for AwesomeCon 2010!

Join Tim and Eric Saturday July 24th at San Diego’s Embarcadero Marina Park North for AWESOMECON 2010! There will be special guests, games, music by DJ Douggpound, a costume contest, Tim and Eric karaoke, and much much more. And don’t forget to study up on your trivia because one ultimate fan will win a jet ski ride with Tim and Eric!!!!

This event is totally free and no tickets are required!

For maximum enjoyment bring yourself and your friends (preferably in Tim and Eric themed costumes), a blanket , sunscreen, and water. See you thereeeeeeeeeeeeee!

A jet ski ride? Really?

Maybe even the Tan Man himself will be there!

Saturday, July 24, 2010 at 12:00pm Embarcadero Marina Park North, San Diego, CA 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.12.2010
10:43 pm
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Pep Pep passes: Richard Dunn from ‘Tim and Eric Awesome Show,’ RIP
06.04.2010
02:52 pm
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Sad to hear that Richard Dunn, the befuddled senior citizen from the cast of Tim and Eric Awesome Show—great job! passed away at 7:14 a.m. on June 4, 2010.

It’s nearly impossible to pick a favorite Pep Pep moment, but this clip, of Dunn and Jane’s Addiction’s Dave Navarro is mine:
 


Via Xeni Jardin/Eric Wareheim on Twitter.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.04.2010
02:52 pm
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Doin’ the Coachella Strut (C-strut) by Eric Wareheim
04.21.2010
11:25 am
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From Eric Wareheim’s YouTube channel: “People are in such a rush to get to the next performance nowadays. Eric Wareheim and Doug Lussenhop prefer to slow it down and take in the beauty of the grounds and the people around them. Just lil baby steps to the beat.”

Posted by Tara McGinley
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04.21.2010
11:25 am
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Tim and Eric: We’re All Riding In Our Minivan
08.16.2009
12:06 pm
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Here’s some old guy synthpop madness courtesy of Tim and Eric.  Kraftwerk’s got nothin’ on these dudes!


Minivan Highway EL Remix

Tim and Eric

Thanks Gord Fynes!

Posted by Tara McGinley
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08.16.2009
12:06 pm
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Tim and Eric Interview on Vanity Fair.com
07.31.2009
03:49 pm
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Happy to find this long Tim and Eric interview on VanityFair.com. We certainly know which side of the Tim and Eric equation we’re on here at Dangerous Minds. We love them!

You’ve just finished shooting the fifth season of Awesome Show. Is this going to be the big one, when Tim and Eric finally win over the hearts and minds of the mainstream?

Eric Wareheim: Season Cinco represents a very dark side of the Awesome Show series. I think people are going to be very scared and very disturbed by it.

That is the worst pitch for a TV show ever.

Eric Wareheim: Really? You think so?


Q&A: Tim and Eric on Child Abuse, Diarrhea, and Yerba-Mate Tea by Eric Spitznagel

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.31.2009
03:49 pm
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Surprises! (curated by Eric Wareheim & Doug Lussenhop)
07.18.2009
10:09 pm
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From Cinefamily:

Come join Eric Wareheim (of “Tim & Eric”) and Doug Lussenhop (DJ Douggpound) for an evening of surprises: music videos, short films, video experiments and TV sneak peeks. Like a Gump-ian box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get. Except you know you’re gonna get the world premiere of Eric’s new music video for Major Lazer/Diplo for “Pon De Floor”. You also know you’re gonna get free beer and hot dogs afterwards. And you know it’s not gonna suck, like Forrest Gump. It’s gonna be fun, awesome, cool, and neat! See ya there!

Surprises! (curated by Eric Wareheim & Doug Lussenhop)

Thanks Jesse Merlin!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.18.2009
10:09 pm
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