Tim Heidecker Is Not Trying to Make You Laugh With Folk Album ‘Slipping Away’: ‘My Artistic Life Has Been About Obscuring Identity and Irony’

Over the last couple decades, Tim Heidecker has built a vast universe of comedy through TV shows, movies, web series and podcasts.

In the bulk of it — hundreds of episodes of “Tim & Eric,” “On Cinema” and “Office Hours,” not to mention his 2019 political mockumentary “Mister America” and the purposefully hacky stand-up special “An Evening With Tim Heidecker” — he’s played himself. (Well… sort of.)

“My artistic life has been about obscuring identity and irony, and making it so that you don’t know who you’re getting when you’re dealing with me,” Heidecker tells Variety.

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With his new folk-rock album “Slipping Away” — a 100%-earnest collection of songs about aging, anxiety and the apocalypse — the comedian is not trying to make you laugh.

As for people’s understanding of who Tim Heidecker is, and when to take him seriously, he says, “I understand that I’ve made it even more difficult.”

The prolific funnyman, actor, producer and singer-songwriter sat down with Variety to discuss songwriting, why he doesn’t use a stage name and why some of his characters are reminiscent of JD Vance.

You sing in “Well’s Run Dry” that “words don’t come like they did when I was young.” It reminded me of this Bob Dylan interview in which he talks about his early music. He says something like —

It’s like, “I don’t know where that came from. I used to be able to do it. I can’t do it anymore. I can do other things, but I can’t do that.”

OK, so you know it word for word. Do you actually feel that way, across all of your creative endeavors? That the thing is just harder to conjure now?

I have moments where I feel that way. I’m not totally sold on the idea of limited creativity or limited ideas, but when I’m writing a song, I’m sometimes tapping into the way I’m feeling at the moment. It’s not always things that I’m consumed with or obsessed with. I am feeling maybe a little depleted at times, but I probably felt that way when I was 16 years old, too, at points. You’re like, “I don’t have any ideas.” And then the next day you have an idea.

The album as a whole is pretty bleak. Was it important to you to end on a song that offers a bit of hope?

Yeah, I had that as an afterthought. I felt like I had put so much time and energy into this piece of work that I’m really proud of, and I loved the way the last song felt, but I didn’t know if I needed to go out on such a bummer. I had the realization that in all of my work, I can choose what I want to say. I can choose to put a little optimism at the end of this, even when reflecting on some anxiety-driven, apocalyptic feeling. It’s surprising, and if I can find ways to surprise, I’ll go toward that.

Where do the ideas for songs come from? And is it a similar ideation process to your comedy?

Usually, a song comes out of nowhere. It shows me the direction I’m going to go. It sounds a little mystical or whatever, but it’s true. The first song I wrote for this record was “Hey, Would You Call My Mom for Me?,” which came out of a pretty literal experience in Vancouver, where there is a lot of homelessness and drug addiction. I had that experience where a kid asked me to call his mom. That got me thinking about the pandemic and about the state of the world, which led me to write that song, which led me to write a few of the other songs. 

That’s a heavy experience. What was that like?

It was in this area called Gastown. They call it Zombie Town, too. It’s overrun with drug addicts and homeless people, and the cops look the other way. I happened to work my way through that area in the early morning, and it was shocking and sad. I didn’t know what to do about it, so I gave the kid some money. I don’t know what the right thing to do there is. I’ve seen it in San Francisco too and other places around the country. The kids are young — teenagers or 20-year-olds who are living on the street. It feels particularly sad to me, probably because I’ve got kids, and some of them seem like they might have been in good shape a few years ago and have fallen into this.

As someone who has built this vast comedic world, much of which is an uncanny sort of satire, have you found it difficult to convey the sincerity of projects like this?

It’s something I’ve been doing for a while now, and it’s diminishing — the number of people who are confused by it. Through “Office Hours” and through interviews like this and talking in the press about it, I think it’s fairly convincing. There’s always going to be skepticism, for actors or for anybody that didn’t come up as a musician. There’s always a little hesitation or skepticism about whether they’re legit. My artistic life has been about obscuring identity and irony, and making it so that you don’t know who you’re getting when you’re dealing with me. So, I understand that I’ve made it even more difficult. 

But from the beginning, this has all been a project in self-expression. What’s interesting to me about this side of me is like not feeling the constraints of the comedy persona. It’s really opened me up because if I felt like I had to be this one person, I would be so miserable. Recently, I posted this interview I did and someone commented, “Man, all we want to hear you talk about is ‘On Cinema.’” I love “On Cinema,” but if I felt beholden to the audience to only do one thing, I would go nuts. Plus, there’s a lot of people who didn’t grow up with Tim & Eric and are coming through the music, and are finding my old work through that.

You mentioned the idea of obscuring identity in your work. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone else do that quite like you.

I agree, I don’t know anybody who is doing it quite like this. I don’t like to be the one to say that, because it sounds obnoxious. Andy Kaufman, of course, played with this idea a lot.

Did you ever consider using a stage name for your music?

The idea of doing different names — that always felt corny to Eric [Wareheim] and me. It just felt like it was more interesting to be different versions of yourself, and it was old-fashioned to come up with character names. I mean, we came up with character names for specific sketches and characters and stuff, but Tim Heidecker is going to be the worst comedian you’ve ever seen, and he’s also going to be an actor in a movie that you might like. My aim, at the end of the day, is for people to be like, “This guy is pretty well-rounded. He did all of these interesting things. I didn’t like all of them, but it was all coming from this one brain.”

The singular identity is interesting on Spotify, for example, because you have “Slipping Away,” a collection of serious folk songs, next to “An Evening With Tim Heidecker,” which is an intentionally bad hour of stand-up comedy.

It’s probably damaging to me overall, from a business perspective. Because of the way the algorithms work now, it just gets confusing to people. That’s the way it is, I guess. I don’t have a lot of control over that.

I wondered if with this album you found a different outlet for comedy, in a sort of roundabout way? “Like I Do,” for example, is a funny song, but it’s not funny in a traditionally Tim Heidecker way. There’s a folk music sensibility.

For sure. The stakes are lower, for the humor at least. There are two components to the songwriting. One is a pure, cathartic, emotional expression of myself. The other is kind of like doing a crossword puzzle or a word game. It’s fun to figure out how to connect ideas, or how to have a rhyme within a rhyme, or callbacks. A lot of the time, it should be funny. Again, you’re not going to be laughing out loud during this record. But it’s funnier than, you know, a Bruno Mars record, probably.

Clips from “An Evening With Tim Heidecker” and “Mister America” have been all over social media, side-by-side with clips of JD Vance. What do you think of people drawing that connection?

“Mister America” and certainly a lot of the stand-up special, and some moments of “On Cinema,” have become uncanny these past couple of months with JD Vance. I think there’s something we’ve tapped into about a certain kind of American man that we all find very funny and interesting to satirize. We weren’t making fun of something that didn’t exist — it was there. It was Ted Cruz 10 years ago. This guy has been around for a while. JD Vance, this political season, is the star of that show. He is the embodiment of that kind of man. I’m not great with descriptors on what that is, but you know it when you see it.

Yeah, it’s like a lame guy who is compensating for something, and maybe feels a little uncomfortable in his own skin.

And a lot of it is cosmetic. We’re in this age where any kind of political behavior feels contrived. Some people are better at it than others, and JD Vance seems to be one of the worst at it in terms of feeling like a normal human being. When you look into why that could be, it makes more sense. He is a guy who has deep connections to the Peter Thiels and the billionaire class that has this sick vision for how society should operate. And it plays into this idea that Vance is almost pretending to be a populist when he’s clearly a manufactured agent. This very scary, futuristic, “Fuck Earth, we’re going to be living on Mars if you have enough money” kind of mentality.

What do you think about politics as a source for comedy in general? John Oliver recently pushed back on the idea of Donald Trump being a “gift to comedy,” saying, “it’s not a gift that any of us really wanted.”

I’d separate the things, because in my time off the air, I don’t find him funny at all. I find his ideas and the people that surround him very scary and unsettling and damaging to my family’s future. But there is absolutely no doubt that he, as a character, is still fucking hilarious. It’s unbelievable. On “Office Hours” today, I jokingly said the whole “stand back and stand by” line that he said [to the right-wing extremist group Proud Boys], and Vic [Berger] and I started crying laughing. Because the comedy of that is: he didn’t mean to say that, he was just riffing. He riffed it, and it created a nightmare for him. Words come out of that guy’s mouth, and he doesn’t have any control over it, and it creates all these problems. You don’t get more classic comedy than that, and it’s happening in real life. There’s a million things that are funny about him on a character level, but the real-world implications of it are not as funny. So, for the Stephen Colberts and the John Olivers, I could see how it becomes a drag.

This interview has been edited and condensed.