TV Review – Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Chrimbus Special

Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Chrimbus Special (2010)
Written by Tim Heidecker, Jonathan Krisel, Doug Lussenhop, Jon Mugar, and Eric Wareheim
Directed by Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim, and Benjamin Berman

I can’t say I “got” Tim & Eric the first time I saw them. That was in the context of their first show for Adult Swim, Tom Goes to the Mayor. It would be discovering their follow-up, Awesome Show Great Job, that cemented them as some of my favorite modern comedians. I would eventually revisit Tom Goes to Mayor and appreciate it immensely. I still see how their tone & style of comedy might not be for everyone, but it certainly keeps me laughing. I decided to revisit this exceptional episode of their series where they invented their own grotesque take on Christmas.

Tim & Eric, with horrible make-up & wild hairstyles, host a special for the holiday of Chrimbus. This holiday is centered around getting gifts, emphasized by the song “What Am I Gonna Get?” The pending arrival of Winter Man, a fully nude & frightening-looking figure, is happily anticipated. To ensure Winter Man shows up with presents, each person is expected to eat their fair share of human hair during the year. Along the way, we receive visits from familiar faces in Tim & Eric’s series. It’s all really a commercial for the DVD of the special you are currently watching. Oh yes, and it’s bookended as the reminiscences of a man who lies in the hospital dying with the magical power to manifest DVDs of the special.

I was lucky enough to see the touring version of this special before it aired on television. My younger brother and I went to Nashville one November evening and saw the men themselves on stage performing all the songs and sharing many of the video segments that serve as “commercial breaks.” There was an added bonus that John C. Reilly was a surprise guest, appearing on stage as his iconic character, Dr. Steve Brule. It was a great time and fun to be in a room full of people who got the joke and were enjoying the hell out of themselves.

What you have to understand about Tim & Eric is that their comedy is a mix of pure silliness & very pointed satire about American consumer culture. The most obvious example of the latter is the endless & ridiculous products spotlighted by their fictional conglomerate, Cinco. We get another one of those here, The Food Tube. Like all Cinco products, it involves a convoluted body-horror transformation of the consumer. In this instance, you blend all your food into a paste, which goes down your gullet via the tube. Installing the tube involves removing all your teeth after applying the patented numbing gel. These devices are meant to highlight the litany of unnecessary & ultimately unhelpful gadgets pumped out to sell to American consumers every year. While Tim & Eric don’t push a heavy-handed commentary, it’s clear to any of us aware of how toxic consumerism is to people what the joke is. 

Tim & Eric themselves mock their celebrity personas, getting angry with backup dancers and off-screen stagehands when elements of the production aren’t going as smoothly as they should. This is never overdone, just enough to make fun of the overly cheerful types who are ultimately horrible people that American media loves to promote. The audience is another bizarre element, made up entirely of rough-looking dudes. They react unnaturally to events on stage, applaud en masse, and then stop on a dime. Not laughing at some bits, losing their shit over others. I can relate to this feeling of unease, I think because of my autism. I often understand why something is meant to be funny but not why someone is laughing at it. Like intellectually, I guess that pratfall was humorous, but I don’t understand why someone else’s pain is hilarious.

The part of this special that has never entirely worked for me is the inclusion of the Carol & Mr. Henderson story. For the unfamiliar, these recurring characters from the show are an overweight & insecure office employee (Carol, played by Wareheim) and her sadistic & sexually deviant boss (Mr. Henderson, played by Heidecker). The stories between them are always set up where Carol is the target of her boss’s mockery, and the rest of the office joins in. The secret is that Carol gets off on the cruelty, eventually leading to them becoming a couple during the previous season of Awesome Show. The joke here is that Carol has become bored with Mr. Henderson now that they are a normal couple…well, as normal a couple as you can find in the world of Tim & Eric. I just have never found these quite as funny as the guys who make the show do.

If you like Tim & Eric, you will love this special. If you don’t, I wouldn’t expect this to convert you. I enjoy it because it makes commentary without being obvious about the grotesque nature of the Christmas holiday in America. For example, I think back to the Kathie Lee Gifford Christmas specials and how gaudy and inauthentic they felt. The celebrity holiday variety show was a dying form in my childhood, but looking back on them, it is hard not to see them as unhinged, gross displays of excess. The Chrimbus Special is definitely something that sticks with you. I still start mumbling the lyrics of “What Am I Gonna Get” around this time every year. Does it make it into the new Christmas canon? Only if you are a weirdo like me.