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8. Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job!: Metacomedy

74 8 Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job! Metacomedy Jeffrey Sconce Abstract: Sketch comedy is a staple of American television, with styles ranging from mainstream to alternative and even experimental forms that target a young, predominantly male audience. Jeffrey Sconce explores the highly experimental approach of Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job!, connecting it to the history of metacomedy as playing with comedic form with reflexivity and ambiguity. In the fall of 1975, the premiere episode of Saturday Night Live (NBC, 1975–present ) featured a somewhat puzzling performance in the show’s final half-hour, an “act” befitting the program’s ambition to showcase comedy generally considered “not ready for prime time.”1 As immortalized in the unlikely biopic Man on the Moon (1999), comedian Andy Kaufman stood alongside a portable record player on an otherwise empty stage, remaining more or less inert for some fifteen seconds after his off-camera introduction by house announcer Don Pardo. Kaufman then dropped the needle on a record—a scratchy 45rpm of the theme song from Mighty Mouse. The first laugh is one of recognition—the audience pleasantly surprised by this unexpected sonic memory of what had been a staple of U.S. television since the mid-1950s. Twenty-seven seconds into the bit, the song arrives at its chorus and most memorable hook, a moment when Mighty Mouse himself joins the singers to announce: “Here I come to save the day!” Here Kaufman suddenly erupted into a grandiloquent performance of lip-syncing, miming the rodent superhero word for word while extending his arm heroically aloft. Kaufman then resumed his awkward silence. Twenty seconds later, the song appears to return to Mighty Mouse’s musical cue. A nervous Kaufman prepares to repeat his miming act. But it’s a false alarm—the song goes into another verse without the singing mouse—and Kaufman looks slightly embarrassed at having missed his mark. A full thirty seconds pass until once again Kaufman and Mighty Mouse exclaim, “Here I come to save the day!” Realizing now this is the entire “act,” Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job! 75 the audience response is even more enthusiastic at this second repetition. Having mimed the line twice (and with one flub), Kaufman takes advantage of an instrumental break to drink a well-earned glass of water. The chorus returns once again, and in the “rule of threes,” Kaufman silently belts out the signature line a final time. With that, in just under two minutes, the “routine,” the “bit,” the “act,” is over. Having been won over by this audacious performance of essentially nothing , the audience erupts in thunderous applause. A resolutely underwhelming performance delivered “poorly” (again, Kaufman screws it up at one point), Kaufman’s low-key pantomime evoked a series of enigmatic questions, both for its audience in 1975 and for subsequent commentators on comedy and culture. Was this performance “for real” or was it a hoax of some kind? Was this meant to be “funny” or “not funny,” or was it funny precisely because it wasn’t actually all that funny? Discussions of Kaufman are as liable to reference conceptual art as television comedy, elevating Kaufman as the most esoteric performer among a group of comedians emerging in the early 1970s who increasingly subjected comedy to the logic of avant-garde performance. Filmmaker/actor Albert Brooks, for example, began his career appearing on talk shows as a terrible ventriloquist (and then later as a “talking” mime). Steve Martin ’s early stand-up integrated shtick learned while working at Disneyland (prop comedy, animal balloons, juggling) with a persona alternating between low idiocy and high Dada. Michael O’Donoghue, the original head writer for Saturday Night Live, occasionally closed the show by doing impressions of various celebrities subjected to six-inch steel spikes driven into their eyeballs. Writing in Time in 1981, critic Richard Corliss dubbed this sensibility the “Post-Funny” School of Comedy.2 Philip Auslander has described such routines as “anti-comedy,” a practice focused on the vulnerabilities and potential “failures” of public performance.3 Given that audiences often found (and still find) these performances to be extremely funny, perhaps the most useful term would be “metacomedy”: stand-up, sketch, and even narrative comedy that is explicitly about the art of comedy itself, a foregrounding of its expectations, conventions, and execution. Elements of metacomedy have continued to thrive among various “alternative,” “underground,” and “edge” comedians over the past thirty years. Though...