Fun Fest Interview: Tim & Eric

Do you consider the live show a separate entity from the TV show, or will there be characters carried over?

Eric: The live show plays off the TV show.

Your style of comedy has a very "east coast" sensibility to it, and you folks actually grew up in Pennsylvania. Why move to LA and not New York?

Eric: We moved out here five years ago to work on our first cartoon called "Tom Goes to the Mayor" for Adult Swim. Weird things happen, it's Los Angeles. We were willing to make the move at that point as well.

Tim: Can't beat the weather.

You have a ridiculous amount of cameos from fairly famous people on your show. Do you bump into these people randomly or do people approach you to be on the show?

Eric: Depends really, we don't bump into anyone. People will request to be on the show if they are fans. Most of the time though we'll have something written and our producer will contact somebody's agent and really lobby for them to at the show.

Re: the Vodka Movie series [created on commission from Absolut]: how did the Absolut suits react to what you ended up giving them? What do you think they thought they were going to get?

Eric: It's definitely not what they were expecting but they knew they had some sort of magic. They went out on a limb in employing us. They knew it was funny and then we put the first one out there and it suddenly got taken off the internet because it broke all these advertising rules like violence and that kind of stuff ... dealing with alcohol. But they knew it was going to be a viral hit so they wanted two more of them. We liked doing it because we had full creative control and we were making a comedy bit out of it that we probably would have made even if Absolut hadn't paid us anything for it.

How do you like working with Adult Swim? Are they eventually going to split from Cartoon Network and just do their own thing, Pixar/Disney style?

Tim: There has been a lot of talk over the years about them getting their own channel but that's very complicated and expensive. Generally our relationship with them is really good -- they like the show and they support us. Overall, it has been really great and healthy.

For Eric: you directed a video for MGMT. Where did you find those kids? They're kind of terrifying.

Eric: They're from the OC, Orange County area, kids trying to make it to Hollywood. That's where we get a lot of kids for the 'Awesome' show. They're all hip-hop trained white dancers -- that is what I was looking for.

For Eric: Also, Wikipedia says you were briefly involved with the post-hardcore band Ink And Dagger. Please explain. [we were all over the Newspaper Tragedy 7" in college.]

Eric: I did a first U.S. tour with them when they were first starting out and I'm friends with all those guys. The tour was so angry and violent and fucked up -- as soon as I came home I quit the band but I remained good friends with those guys.

We really need to know what the story is behind the Shrek spots. Were they commissioned by the filmmakers in an effort to dabble in subliminal marketing, or did you just do it because it was hilarious?

Tim: No, we had nothing to do with anybody involved in making Shrek. It was just us, on our own. We had a week of downtime when the movie was coming out and we just started making them. We were just going to make one. But then when we started doing it we just couldn't stop. We got addicted to it -- it was so much fun to do. It was the perfect storm of kind of crappy, shitty, overblown movies and the way it was over-marketed was just extraordinary. We couldn't have done it with anything else, maybe the new Indiana Jones movies.

Have you had any experience playing to Austin audiences? Any stories to tell from your previous visits?

Tim: We've played there twice now. Last time we were there, I had incredibly painful neck pain and one of your fine citizens was gracious enough to give some vicodin after the show. I trusted him because he had freshly broken collar bone so I knew it wasn't some kind of dangerous situation. Just a good ol' boy with a broken collar bone and pills.

Austin's always here to help! Thanks for speaking with us.

Tim And Eric official website
On Adultswim.com