I Am A Cuck: Documentary on Tim Heidecker, Sam Hyde and the 2016 Election

[Zetetic]

As someone who's never been that into Tim Heidecker, I'm finding it very interesting. Thanks for making this, Retinend.

At the 55 minute mark, there's something eerily reminiscent about some of the ancient discussions about how much Nathan Barley was Brooker and Morris reacting poorly to the co-option of their aesthetics and mode of 'satire'. (Not that there's an NB-equivalent here, just the same feeling of people dealing with the relationship - or not - between style and content, but driven here by the interaction with the public.)

[Retinend]

I'm happy that the film is still engaging enough for someone not already in the fandom!

And you make a good point. Dan Ashcroft's line "I'm not your "preacher man" " might well also have been said by Tim to Sam in the finale, but instead of being said outright, it's more of a subtext to that conversation.

At the moment the sirens start blaring, what Sam really wants to say to Tim (regarding the cancellation) is:

"well you SHOULD do something about it because we're the same, you and I".

The problem is that the shows (Awesome Show and MDE:WP) only looked the same - there wasn't any similarity on the inside.

[monkfromhavana]

I enjoyed that, and that's coming from someone who enjoyed Tim & Eric, but has delved further into his work. Never heard of the Sam Hyde guy before and I don't think I'll be in too much of a rush to check out any of the stuff he has made.

It seems a bit like if a Limmy fan, who didn't really get the joke, managed to get a show on the air that was garbage, then got upset because Limmy didn't like it ("or support me, like I supported you". Like you said in your above post, it might look like it, but it isn't it.

A human shit packaged inside a Toffee Crisp wrapper might like like a Toffee Crisp, but it's not. It's a piece of shit.

[Retinend]

In case anyone was wondering (edit: re: the stuff from the last page), it led to me getting a lot of eyeballs on my film title yesterday:


WATCH: https://twitter.com/retinend/status/1326114906844917760
(I plopped out this little video at short notice to defend myself from their pile-on, while plugging the film in tandem)

My method:

https://twitter.com/thegoodlogan/status/1326220247595159556
If he deletes the tweet - this was its content: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cXBZTVQk-qtPccR5V3dF3PZTOLzZswEI/view?usp=sharing (as you can see it is a complete success for my promotional campaign, in addition to being just deserts for evil slander)

[Master Cylinder]

I'm happy that the film is still engaging enough for someone not already in the fandom!

And you make a good point. Dan Ashcroft's line "I'm not your "preacher man" " might well also have been said by Tim to Sam in the finale, but instead of being said outright, it's more of a subtext to that conversation.

Tim did say on a recent Office Hours when arguing with an alt-right troll after the Baked Alaska, after the guy brought up the MDE thing, said Sam was Tim's colleague - Tim retorted "Believe me, he was no colleague of mine"

[colacentral]

I was replying to the On Cinema thread but I thought the bulk of my reply was more relevant here:

Re: the discussion of what makes OC so funny: I have a "deleted scene" from my documentary about OC, Tim & Eric and Office Hours _{- by the way many thanks to QDRPHNC and Noodle Lizard both for their valuable input pre-release -} [nb]thread: "I Am A Cuck"[/nb] in which Tim, in a rare instance, actually talks shop about his comedy and - perhaps surprisingly - he holds Steve Martin up as a hero of his.

LISTEN: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17HWc1YK8dxe3z50VsbKtwzImN8gDvRic/view?usp=sharing (Office Hours 27.05.2016)

In short, Tim is faced with a caller who is trying to stir things up by reporting that Norm MacDonald said that "anti-comedy" was shit and disingenuous. Tim says that he respects MacDonald and that he has never had the desire to be part of an scene called the "anti-comedy movement" or whatever. He prefers to think of himself as doing what Steve Martin did: to get audiences to the place where they feel like they are sharing a funny moment with their best friend, and the ideas are bouncing around, and everyone is laughing at variations on the thing, and eventually one you just says: "what the hell are we even laughing about?"

I think OC is all about the observations of foolishness and silliness that are funny in real life: I was watching that new Comedy Central show "Corporate" and it's all so slick and the jokes are "observational" only in a very stylized way. OC is totally unvarnished by comparison, and the Oscar specials above all else.

That's not what anti-comedy means anyway, as far as I've understood it. Anti-comedy is when the jokes are so obviously purposely bad that they become funny again (in theory). The "Stella Shorts" (Michael Showalter, David Wain, Michael Ian Black) are an example of this, so is their film Wet Hot American Summer (Michael Showalter slipping on a banana peel for example).

You could also put Neil Hamburger in the same category, since the core idea is that he's a bad comedian.

I don't know if anyone else on here has ever spent time on the I-Mockery forum, but I was on there alot in the early 2000s and "anti-comedy" was very much the trend there. I feel like that posting style might have even been a perrie dish for what has since become the modern style of pepe the frog type trolling, everything wrapped up in so many layers of irony that the kids followong along can no longer tell what's real and what's not.

As a side note, I genuinely think that the "brony" phenomenon came out of it. I remember people affecting a love of My Little Pony as a joke, changing their avatars and signatures to My Little Pony references. I knew these posters were joking, but dozens of dumb impressionable kids, who just wanted to be in the club, copied the trend without getting the joke.

Without getting the irony, they convinced themselves that there really must be something of value in it, and willed a genuine like of it into existence. I feel like the relationship between the alt-right and trolling has worked in the same way.

I recently read this article, which argues something similar in relation to "ironic" invokations of nazi imagery in the neo folk subculture: http://www.whomakesthenazis.com/2010/11/what-ends-when-symbols-shatter-my-time.html?m=1

Anyway, my original point was that Tim and Eric and On Cinema aren't anti-comedy. I think Tim's stand up certainly is, and his Office Hours persona will sometimes lapse into being purposely unfunny, but his written work as a whole isn't like that. It's quite an odd type of comedy for Norm MacDonald to rail against too, considering that he so often revels in stale joke construction.

[Retinend]

(removed by request)