Tim Heidecker Has No Time for Dave Chappelle, a ‘Leader in the Anti-Trans Movement’

If you only know Tim Heidecker as one half of “Tim and Eric” with his longtime comedy partner Eric Wareheim, you are missing a lot. The comedian, musician and Office Hours host just set out on a big summer tour in which his meta “no more bullshit” stand-up character shares the bill with the “real” Tim playing music from his new album High School.

In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Heidecker holds nothing back going after Joe Rogan (“so boring”), Dave Chappelle (“a leader in the anti-trans movement”) and Jim Breuer (“a tremendous inspiration”). We also look back at the early days of “Tim and Eric,” from Bob Odenkirk’s role in bringing the duo’s comedy to Adult Swim to that time Gary Busey almost assaulted them during a taping. And Heidecker explains why having the freedom to explore his own solo projects has been the “key to not having a bad break-up” with Wareheim.

Heidecker started performing deliberately terrible stand-up comedy about 15 years ago at a weekly open mic night hosted by a friend. “I had dabbled in stand-up comedy earlier in my life and it was heavily influenced by Andy Kaufman,” he recalls, describing the tape of those early performances he has buried away somewhere as “the Rosetta Stone of embarrassment.”

After watching comedians get up and “bomb so badly” week after week, he decided to try bombing on purpose as a sort of “prank.” But it wasn’t until he started watching Donald Trump’s campaign rallies in 2015 and 2016 that he thought he might be able to turn the material into an hour-long special, which he ultimately released for free on YouTube just before the 2020 election. “Watching Trump, I started being influenced by that kind of braggadocio, that kind of swagger that’s totally undeserved,” he explains. “There’s nothing behind it. It’s just attitude.”

Before this summer, Heidecker had never done a proper tour of either his intentionally bad stand-up material or his surprisingly sincere music. “I don’t know how anything works for general audiences but my crowd shows up and they’re up for it all,” he says, enthusiastically, ahead of his first run of shows this past weekend at the Elysian Theater in Los Angeles. “Anecdotally there were people that were like, ‘Yeah, I wasn’t really too familiar with your music, but it was surprisingly good!’ So that’s always a nice thing to hear.”

Along with Office Hours, his Adult Swim show On Cinema, and the Showtime series Moonbase 8, Heidecker’s latest project is one of many in recent years without his longtime comedy partner Eric Wareheim, who has been focusing on making wine and writing cookbooks. Describing the “Tim and Eric” paradigm as “sort of limited,” Heidecker says, “There are ideas I would have that don’t really work in the ‘Tim and Eric’ world and they started finding other routes outside of ‘Tim and Eric.’ So it just kind of happened naturally.”

Right before the pandemic, they put out a sitcom parody and toured together, but have since drifted apart creatively. “For the first several years, Eric and me, all our creative energy was going into our work together,” Heidecker says. “And it made us produce a lot of stuff, but we both kind of got lost in the personas of ‘Tim and Eric’ and I felt a little like, ‘Who am I and what do I want to do?’” They figured out “pretty quickly,” he adds, that finding their own separate projects “was the key to not having a bad break-up.”

The Emmys Have a Dave Chappelle Problem

“Right now I think we’re just doing what we both want to do, but with the idea that we’ve got to do something else together,” he adds. “We love making stuff together and when we do make stuff together it usually comes out pretty good.”

Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation. You can listen to the whole thing—including stories about the early days of Tim and Eric, getting mostly cut out of ‘Bridesmaids’ and a lot more—by subscribing to The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Tuesday.

It seems like the [“no more bullshit”] bit has evolved into you sort of representing everything that you don’t like about comedy or that you don't like about certain comedians. Are there people that you take inspiration from in that way?

I mean, I don’t want to name names, that’s kind of mean. But I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s and that was sort of the first big explosion of the brick wall comics and there was a certain corniness to it. And as soon as you discovered anything that was a little left of that or a little weirder than that, it made that feel very lame. I will name a few names. I mean, Jim Breuer has been a tremendous inspiration. Just a few months ago, I did a show at Largo here in L.A. and I was testing out some new stuff but then I saw that Jim Breuer had posted his setlist for that night, and I was like, well, I’m just going to try to do his setlist.

I saw you shared his anti-vaccine bit that just went viral on Twitter. And I was watching that thinking, it’s hard to top that in terms of bad comedy, right?

Yeah, I mean, it’ll influence me in ways that I can’t predict. It’ll just start showing up in certain sound effects I’m doing. But I’ve noticed so many of these comedians use Instagram now, these very heavily edited clips with captions in big letters. It really looks professional and it looks like it should be good content and then it very rarely is. It’s always a little disappointing. So yeah, there’s just obviously a scourge of it right now and I don’t really understand the appeal of it. I mean, a lot of it is confirmation bias and people like, “That’s how I feel, that’s how I think!” And, not to sound like Trump, but that’s on both sides too. There’s a ton of speechy-style comedy that’s not quite making me laugh.

It does seem like you do enjoy occasionally going after people in the audience for not laughing.

That’s always the classic amateur nightclub move is to be like, “Oh, you don’t think I’m funny? Well, then you must be an idiot.” That’s a clear telltale sign of somebody that shouldn’t be in this business.

So you put the special out in 2020 on YouTube and I know you pitched it to some places that didn't want it, right? Netflix, Comedy Central and other places.

Yeah, the story of my life.

What kind of feedback did you get when you were putting it out there and having it rejected?

Well, you don’t always get the straight scoop. But the one message that was passed along to me, I think via Comedy Central, was a classic. It was, “He just seems like he’s making fun of comedy.”

Which is not OK?

That just blew my mind, like, why is that off limits? Who cares?

In addition to making fun of comedy there is definitely a strain of making fun of this anti-woke comedy trend that we’re seeing in a lot of places, whether it’s the 12-hour Joe Rogan Experience parody that you did or other things. But that one in particular got a lot of attention for you. How did you decide to do that?

On Office Hours, the podcast I do with Vic Berger and DJ Douggpound, we get a little obsessed with these characters, Rogan and Jordan Peterson and Tim Pool and all these people out there. They have huge audiences and it just blows our minds that anyone gives a shit what they have to say. It’s amazing that they have this audience. And there’s just a million things to make fun of about it and the thing that always struck me about Rogan’s podcast, of which I’ve listened to some—enough to get it, I think, get the general point of view and everything—is just how boring it is. It’s so boring and dry and I don’t come to any real higher understanding of anything. Especially when they’re talking about comedy and having other comedians on, I just find it such a drag. And so lame that so many men have just decided this is their Oprah. Or this is their Letterman. “Oh yeah, I listen to Joe Rogan.” Why? What are you doing with your hours? I could understand if you’re falling asleep to it, that could be the only thing. So I said, I think I know how to do this in a way that’s not a straight impression, but it should get my central thesis across that it's boring. And I love Jeremy [Levick] and Rajat [Suresh]. I’ve been enjoying their work on Twitter. They are like up-and-coming geniuses.

Those are the two guys that did it and they were great as well, playing off of what you were doing.

It was essentially improvised with a little sheet of paper that had keywords and names and stuff that we wanted to eventually get to, but yeah, it was just really fun. And we just kind of dropped it and made it a loop, so it felt like it was 12 hours. Because that was always my thing with him was like, you could dip into Rogan and not know where you are and not know if there’s any beginning, middle or end.

Did you ever hear from him or anyone close to him after you did that?

No, I knew people who are sort of regulars on his show were enjoying it. Like Bert Kreischer and Tom Segura, who are friends with him, they were loving it. So listen, you know, for years and years, I’ve been combative or in online spats with certain people in this business and I would probably have a good chat with Joe Rogan if I actually saw him. I don’t hate anybody and I don’t wish anybody ill will or anything. But I enjoy poking the stick at certain things.

You’re kind of unique in that way. Because in the comedy world, everyone’s sort of protective of each other. Another thing you tweeted recently was a comment in reference to John Mulaney bringing up Chappelle, having him as a surprise guest on his tour where he told a lot of his anti-trans jokes. And you were basically the only comedian that I saw speak out against that.

I mean, listen, I have friends who are trans—and that sounds like the worst way to start that conversation, right? But I really do, and I have fans who are trans and I’ve spoken to them about this and I’ve heard directly from them, and there is tremendous anxiety and uncomfortableness and sadness and hurt that it’s treated so flippantly and often dangerously by these people with giant audiences. And I don’t believe that John Mulaney has any kind of issues with the trans community personally. But at the same time, I don’t understand why you need Chappelle to come out onto the stage with an audience that have already paid to see you.

It’s not what they signed up for.

Yeah, exactly. So I did it, of course, as an honest statement that you should feel safe coming to my shows, that I’m not going to spring a leader in the anti-trans movement—it seems to be an issue he cares deeply about.

He can’t stop talking about it.

Yeah, I did it out of honesty and a little bit of snarky, like, “Fuck off.” And also as a message to other artists and comedians and musicians to be like, you know, feel free to speak out about this. You will find a lot of encouragement and gratitude from a very cool audience. I’m speaking completely self-servingly here, but if you want to build a cool, young, creative, smart audience, these are not the people you should be excluding from your audience. And that’s not why I’m doing it, but these are positive side effects of just being inclusive and understanding of marginalized communities that you don’t even have to have full understanding of, you just have to be tolerant and respectful of. And I’ll just say one more thing. When I hear the anti-trans comedy, it just sounds like that cheap ‘80s gay stuff. Like Andrew Dice Clay, who I know is doing a character, but the people that Andrew Dice Clay was probably making fun of but he got kind of swept into the dark side of.

Or Eddie Murphy too.

Yeah, I mean it’s easy, cheap fodder that should be beneath most of these people that are operating at that level. And I’m not telling anybody they can’t do whatever they want, but I’m just saying what's going to happen at my shows.

I do wonder if you feel some responsibility to counter that stuff for your own younger male fans who grew up watching Tim and Eric and could go down that road themselves.

Oh, absolutely, 100 percent. I’m sure a lot of them have. I know that when we started 10, 15 years ago, we attracted a mostly non-conformist, anti-establishment, younger group of men. And it has shifted a lot and there’s plenty of women too, but I know that there was something appealing about the nihilism of our work that was definitely anti-authoritarian or anti-establishment. And you can take that to the left or to the right and I think a lot of guys did, in the Trump era, 2015, 2016 and onward, went that way. And couldn’t believe that I would not be into that too. A lot of them were like, “I thought you get that nothing matters and this guy is a complete destroyer of worlds and he’s going to tear down the establishment, why aren’t you into that too?” And I’m like, well, I get that, but I’m also a liberal artist theater dude who grew up believing in certain axioms that are still true to me. And I think this is a con job that this guy is performing and you’re getting swept up into something that you don’t understand. And just the other day with the shooter on the roof, I see these guys and I’m just like that could easily be a fan, it could easily be a former fan or the same kids that are writing that I’m a “cuck.” I’ve received plenty of death threats and plenty of terrible trolling for being outspoken on certain issues. And so I look at all these 18-year-old, 20-year-old men and know that I have very close connections to them in either positive or negative ways.

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