Recap Tim And Eric at the Vic

Saturday night at the Vic, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim successfully turned their insane 11-minute sketch show into an extremely fucked-up two-hour extravaganza for a sold-out house. Their opening bit set the night’s tone: After smoke filled the stage, a nearly eight-minute song unfurled and spanned multiple genres but had the word “diarrhea” as its sole lyric. “We’re fucking with the audience the whole time,” is how Heidecker summed up their approach to live performances in a recent interview with Decider, and this show certainly projected that philosophy. As the choreographed tune transformed from a soulful bluesy number to a call-and-response tribal version, the average audience member might have been thinking, “Is this all they’re going to do?” Thankfully, it wasn’t, although, fans probably would have been satisfied if it was.

Tim And Eric brought along a few Awesome Show, Great Job! regulars to bring variety to the live show. Inept impressionist James Quall (who usually works the phrase “spaghetti and meatballs” into all his impressions) and inept ventriloquist David Liebe Hart (who doesn’t ever bother to stop moving his lips) each had a turn at the stage. Hart stuck to his alien-themed songs from the TV show, while Quall tested out a lengthy political joke about Election Day that had neither a memorable punchline nor a mention of pasta. Sire Spicer (a.k.a. the “sexual romance” singer from season three’s “Chan” episode) also made an appearance during an imploding staged version of his sketch, but all the show’s guests were trumped by “a really nervous” Dr. Steve Brule (Chicago's own John C. Reilly), who unexpectedly took the stage for an extended diagnosis of the audience’s “concert health.” He answered pre-screened questions from the crowd like what to do with a booger (“wipe it on the guy in front of you”) and how to handle a seat-less toilet (“take a good aim and squat”), though Brule’s antics outrageously peaked when he brought an audience member onstage for a live “health examination.” After asking a woman known only as Beverly a series of harmless yes/no questions, he proceeded to, well, grope her chest for a “breasts exam.” It would’ve been truly awkward if she wasn’t so inviting to his clumsy overtures. Or, as Brule summed it up: “You’re all just jealous because this is Beverly’s health, you dingbirds!”

Tim And Eric anchored the show, screening clips from the show’s upcoming fourth season and performing live bits most of the night. The sketches from the show are on par, if not funnier, than the previous seasons: Alan Thicke did a commercial for nap-inducing apples, a.k.a. “Napples;” another commercial advertised marginally diarrhea-resistant plastic undergarments known as D-Pants; and a trio of sketches saw Tim And Eric on a road trip to Fort Lauderdale to party. Onstage, the duo performed a perhaps-meta song as the Beaver Boys wondering aloud about why nobody loves them, though, sadly, Casey And His Brother did not make an appearance here. Still, that’s a minor complaint for a lengthy show overflowing with mind-numbing craziness and a running diarrhea motif. A bathrobed Heidecker summed the night up during the show’s encore, saying quite simply, “You guys have a pretty fucked-up sense of humor.” Hard to argue with that.

Robert Gauthier