Abbott and Costello were huge for me as a very young person.
We, the comics that we like, we're all, like, post-humor.
When anything doesn't hit with a huge laugh, as comics, it feels like, Oh no, oh no, we're sinking.
The thing that struck me is so many people that said, "Hey, I've been watching you since I was 12, and I'm 25 now." It was a weird shift, because you start off fighting for an audience based on doing something so strange that only you find funny, and it's weird when other people find it funny. Those people aren't always ready to laugh yet, and there's a sort of standoffish quality to it.
Funny people don't really laugh very much.
We are making fun of stuff. It is subversive, I think, and in many ways political. It's a reaction against the society we live in, very much so. When we make a commercial for a product that doesn't do anything.
I feel like when you do Twitter, sometimes you just have an idea and you fire it off and don't really think too hard about the consequences of that. I think my reputation there is as a comedian and not someone to be taken seriously. But I like the idea of getting out false information and just muddying up the story and making it as confusing and, you know, schizophrenic as possible.
Dads are awkward because they're older guys who aren't cool anymore and are figuring out who they are, and they often make bad choices in fashion and music.
When people come in to act on the show, we say, "Just be extremely dry and not funny. Let the idea be the joke." That holds true through a lot of our stuff.
When you get older your dad becomes this other man rather than a scary man, and you have a friendship.
My dad is a very quick-witted, sarcastic, dry, humorous guy, whereas my mom's very silly, and that side of the family is very musical.
Most books that come out with a comedy label seem to be, Eric [Wareheim] and I could have written, "This is our story, and this is who we are," and sort of this navel-gazing, narcissistic approach to comedy we're seeing these days.
I'm very wary of doing political stuff for a lot of reasons. One of the big ones is that the shelf-life for them is not very long, and the joke becomes old news very quickly.
On movies, you have a lot of stylists that get things too pretty. Everything gets steamed and ironed. It's just not the way we really behave.
I always liked records that didn't explain themselves too well - ones that you had to listen a few times.
I think the great sketch shows, like 'Python' and 'Mr. Show,' they didn't stick around for very long. There's something kind of cool about that.
In the world of 'Tim and Eric,' everything is big and ridiculous and absurd.
Well, I love Bob Dylan, let's make that clear. He's one of my musical heroes.
I have been skeptical and not trusting of traditional models of the entertainment industry. I never got a manager.
There's a generation of people I think without a strong connection to family, to religion, to civic duty. They have a real disassociation from the problems of the world.
I used to work in an office in New York for this terrible company, and we used to have staff meetings, and I would just count how many times the boss would use the phrase "in terms of." And he would say it like 30 or 40 times. And sometimes he would just say it. He'd be like, "Uhh, in terms of, how are we doing with that?" I realized nobody knows what they're talking about. Everyone's bullshitting. Maybe not everybody, but certainly a lot of people.
That kind of language is what makes us laugh. Like, "Well, just eFax that to me, and I'll take a look at it."
When you travel, specifically for our show, you get inspired by rest stops, Cracker Barrel. Middle-America people are perfect.
I was in a band in high school and college and I always had a love for music, but I didn't go to a conservatory or anything like that. I was fairly self-taught.
I think comedy has to come from a real place. It has to come from an honest place.
