Well, I am here to tell you that I understand. It's okay. You're safe here. And your child is statistically* not likely to be a serial killer. I'm going to do my best to explain to you in a reasoned, theoretically-grounded way why your child likes Tim and Eric, why it's not corrupting them psychologically or morally, and why you might even like it too.

At the heart of T&E's comedy style is a governing concept: the ontological distances between

The representational spectrum, or deformed triangle, or whatever it may be (the subject of a much longer essay) that connects these three things and the novelty of connecting points on it that are usually disparate--this is The Joke. Certainly there are times at which they veer away from this governing structure, but, for Awesome Show especially, this is where the humor originates.

Here's an example of how they construct a comedic concept using the spectrum. We'll use "Dunngeon," a sketch in which the venerable Richard Dunn (R.I.P.) plays the host of what's presumably a public-access show about rock music. His guest is David Navarro, real-life guitarist and bona-fide famous person.

The first layer of this is the ridiculousness of Richard Dunn, who clearly is not part of the music scene indicated by the set, costuming, and guest. The idea and the image of an old man hosting such a show (and having absolutely no idea what he's talking about) is funny in itself.

The second layer is the idea of a local show with absolutely no budget and completely unprofessional production values somehow getting Dave Navarro to come on.

The third layer is the fact that this show exists within Awesome Show, which, despite what is likely a very small budget, is a professionally-produced and and carefully constructed TV show on a national cable channel. The awkwardness of Dunngeon is 100% deliberate, going against the viewer's expectations of what a professional TV show should entail.

The fourth layer is the knowledge that Richard Dunn himself is, essentially, a non-professional actor. From having watched other episodes in which he appears, a dedicated viewer realizes that this is actually how Richard-Dunn-the-Person is. This is in direct conflict with much of what we see actors do on TV, which often has little connection to their real-world existence.

So here we have all three points of the spectrum/triangle, and awareness of them, converging. Humor is often described as being fundamentally about the subversion of expectations, or the sudden appearance of a surprisingly novel concept in a context that you think you know. That subversion of expectations happens on each level. When combined, it packs a firm comedic punch.

"That's all well and good," you may be saying, "But I'm still not laughing."

THAT'S WHY THERE ARE MORE SECTIONS IN THIS ESSAY!

Well, you're not wrong. But you're also not right. Or rather, you're not quite seeing the whole picture.

Yes, there are Tim and Eric sketches that are pretty gross. Several things with "diarrhea" in the title spring to mind. But there is no instance in which the entire joke is "Ha ha, diarrhea is gross!" More often the humor concerns itself with the how ridiculous the products on infomercials usually are, and how standardized, contrived, and silly the infomercials' production techniques. The object of ridicule is the medium, not the message. (And via the transitive property and Marshall McLuhan the message = the medium = the joke! Please ignore me.)

More often than it's immature, though, T&E's humor is highly sophisticated, surreal, absurd, and mesmerizing. It's so intellectual that it spends a lot of time (see: "Robin," "Comedy," "Jim & Derrick," any intro with Tim and Eric standing next to each other in front of a drop-cloth) satirizing the performance of comedy itself.

The ultimate moral compass behind T&E is often hard to discern, and some might claim that it doesn't exist. I would disagree. I think that underlying every weird-looking semi-professional actor that makes an appearance on Awesome Show, there is a palpable affection for real people, and all the awkwardness, unattractiveness, and uncoolness that comes with them. Dads revel being dorky and mundane. Old women have vibrant affairs. Everyone wears pleated khakis. There's no sense of "we're cool, but look at all these losers"; loserdom is celebrated. At its heart, Awesome Show is a love letter to humanity in its most banal forms. And no matter which way I look at that, it doesn't seem like negativity to me.

A cursory examination of the arc of any Awesome Show episode would reveal that it doesn't particularly resemble what one might term a "normal" television show. It doesn't even look all that much like a normal sketch comedy show. But you would be wrong, because it does.

A typical television show is built of a series of storylines (let's call them A, B, C, and D) that are generally woven together in this manner: ABCABDACDBACBA. Did you catch that? No? Well, basically the main storyline is A, so it gets the most screen time, and the lesser storylines are given diminishing screen time depending on their importance. So there's five instances of A, four of B, three of C, and two of D. You end up with a vaguely palindromic final product.

Now let's take the episode "Missing" from season 1 of Awesome Show as an example. Here's the structure:

A: Casey is missing, wandering the streets

B: "Nights with Tim Heidecker" intro

A: Casey's Brother's performs "Casey Call Pep-Pep"

C: Steve Brule addresses "lookin' cool"

D: B'ougar commercial

B: "Nights with Tim Heidecker"--Eric provides some important info on rascals

A: Casey's adventures on the streets/touching song/an appeal from Uncle Muscles

C: Steve gives Jan a makeover

D: The science behind B'ougar

B: "Nights with Tim Heidecker"--a rascal encounter

A: Casey is abducted by Steve Mahanahan

As you can see, it ends up looking pretty similar to the structure of any other show. Which is all well and good except that it's only ten minutes long. The reason why it feels so distinctly different and jarring is that everything is compressed down into very short bits, ranging from only a couple seconds to a minute or so. In a lot of ways, even beyond the extremely absurdist and sometimes disgusting humor, I think this is what turns people off about the show.

Think about it. If your main exposure to sketch comedy has been SNL, MADtv, or Kids in the Hall, or  Mr. Show or The State, you're accustomed to sketches taking their time. They have a beginning, middle, and end and they usually follow a familiar arc. There's a familiar scenario (a couple eating at a restaurant), something unusual is introduced (the woman is on her period and transforms into a large Italian man when provoked), and then that unusual thing is taken to the extreme (she continues to turn into different men as her mood changes, culminating in destroying the restaurant--you might recognize this example from an episode of The State).

Tim and Eric sketches very often do not follow this arc. Often, they maintain the same level of absurdity/grossness/ominous surrealism throughout. It's like comparing a dimmer switch to a light switch; they both have the same range, but get there different ways. For Awesome Show, there isn't an in-between, neutral state, it's basically just ON, ON, ON. And this is something that can only really work in a very short show, because it would be too stressful in a longer context. I'll admit that my first time watching the series, I found it pretty jarring, too. But with practice and experience, that constant energy can become addictively entertaining and make other TV comedy seem bland and lifeless in comparison.

I'm going to briefly make a claim here that kind of makes me uncomfortable, because I always hate it when other people make generalizations about Gen Y. But here goes, anyway. I think that people under 30 might be uniquely suited to appreciating the T&E aesthetic because of the media landscape in which we were raised. I have heard some research that seems to support the claim that, as digital natives, we have always been exposed to more media at the same time than any previous generation, and as such have less patience for things that bore us and a greater capability for multitasking. Thus, a show like Awesome Show that basically says "Don't like this sketch? Well just wait ten seconds and there'll be something different," plays exactly into what we want our media to do.

I'm trying to think of a good place to start. That preceding paragraph isn't really one, but it'll have to do.

The best thing about Drive is relentless, constantly ratcheting tension. The action scenes are masterfully composed of pauses and flurries of action. Things are carefully left off-screen or deliberately placed on-screen to heighten shock and excitement. Even peaceful, romantic scenes are built from a series of lingering, loaded shots of long silences.

But wait, that makes it sound boring. And it's the furthest thing from a boring movie. Even with all those long, tense blocks of silence, the whole thing moves along at a good, steady clip. It feels as if it's been trimmed of all narrative fat. Only the essentials are shown, just enough for us to understand the relationships, scenarios, and motivations. It's not an acting showcase, although its cast is stellar (I mean, come on--Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman, Christina Hendricks--you can't get a much better ensemble than that). I doubt that a whole lot of Oscar nods for acting are going to come its way, if only because nobody has all that many lines. But the cast are all fantastic nonetheless.

The soundtrack is wonderful. Even listing to it on its own evokes the film's moodiness and tension brilliantly. It's very synth-y and '80s-y, but doesn't grate on me the same way, say, the Blade Runner soundtrack often does. The violence is shocking, surprising, and often graphic, but I found it making me smile more than grimace. I think I was just dazzled by how artfully and matter-of-factly it was integrated into the narrative--no ominous music or melodramatic buildup. At the same time as much of the movie (most notably Gosling's character's relationship with Mulligan's) seemed to exist in a kind of heightened reality, the violence was gritty and visceral.

Anyway, I could keep talking about it for a long time. In short, I thought Drive was wonderful, and I encourage you all to see it too and let me know what you think.

There's a big difference, however, between the majority of rehashed ideas we get, and the few remakes/reboots/adaptations that have been truly impressive. The Thing and Batman Begins have proven without a shadow of a doubt that taking something that wasn't done in a serious or modern manner and reworking it into something else entirely can really work. 

Let's take a closer look at both examples. The Thing was a flop, commercially, but when you consider that it released within a fortnight of E.T., and on the same day as another sci-fi novel adaptation by the name of Blade Runner, it's not hard to see why most people were choosing other films. But the special effects, fantastic storytelling and different approach to the 1952 literature it's based on, in comparison to the film that was made that same year, is obvious. Even now it's around thirty years old and still a fantastic watch in which the SFX stands up perfectly. 

Batman is a given, and that goes for any film fan or critic. Christopher Nolan took what was great about Batman - the locales, the outfits, the characters - and gave them a sense of realism that had never before existed. Nothing in those films can't be done in real life - it's all technology that exists, or is viable in the future. The Joker goes from comical to terrifying, the Sandman from a man who likes nightmares to the wielder of a bioweapon. Perfect. 

But then we end up with oddities like the upcoming remakes of Oldboy, Blade Runner and Akira. Baffling. What's worse is the American remake of Let the Right One In - a film released, in Swedish (subtitles exist, people), two years before the remake, which doesn't really make Hollywood look very foreign-friendly, I'll say that much. 

So do the film industry a favour, and vote with your wallets! If they don't get the money, they won't make the films - so pay for originals and great reboots, and let's leave the unoriginal blockbusters in the dark. 

It's kind of a weird feeling. As much as I kind of had the run of the house while living with my parents over the past year and a half, the situation was what it was--living with my parents. Before that, two years of roommates and two years of weird pseudo-isolation in single dorm rooms. I've never been in a situation where everything from the front door to the toilet was mine and mine alone. And I have to say, it is really goddamn nice.

It's weird to have a full-size refrigerator to myself. Weird to realize how many gaps there were in my collection of kitchen utensils. Weird to be able to shower with the door open. Weird that I don't have to worry about guys peeing loudly in my bathroom while I'm trying to sleep (this was actually a major issue in Garghouse). Sure, I'm rapidly getting used to it and certainly will soon be taking it for granted, but it's fun to marvel at while the novelty lasts.

Grad school has been flying along so far. It's pretty intense, especially for my big foundation class, SI 501 - Contextual Inquiry and Project Management. It basically subscribes to the "throw your children into the middle of a lake filled with horrible lake monsters in order to teach them to swim" school of thought. My group is going to be working on improving patient processing flow for U-M Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. Cool! Do any of us know a single thing about how to do that? Nope! But I've got to draft 15-20 useful interview questions for them by Tuesday anyway!

Other extremely intimidating things I'm supposedly going to do this semester include very quickly becoming Python-literate, making a database-backed portfolio website using the Google App Engine, developing a working knowledge of cognitive psychology, and having social interactions with a lot of people I've never met. We'll see how those all pan out. One thing I've already become really good at is making events in iCal. Oh, also drying and preserving tomatoes. But that's a different thing.

I'm currently knee-deep in trying to find housing for next year and it's such an amazing pain in the ass. I was lucky enough to have roommates willing to undertake the bulk of the legwork during the two years I had to find off-campus housing as an undergrad, but now it's just me. It's probably healthy and a life experience, but goddamn if Ann Arbor rental companies aren't almost universally horrible.

I'm sort of coming to grips with the fact that I'll have to live relatively far away from central campus to conserve money. Right now I'm not even sure what my budget will look like next year because I haven't gotten a financial aid offer yet. I'm assuming I'll get at least a decent chunk. Hopefully I won't be disappointed.

In other news, that Borders job that was looking so promising for a couple weeks seems to have fallen through. I'm sure you can figure out why. 

In other other news, I finished reading my first Pynchon novel, V., which I started reading back around Thanksgiving. Certainly one of the hardest reads I've come across. So, so dense! I'm pretty proud I made it all the way through, though, regardless of how long it took. Now I'm reading The Handmaid's Tale and it's a total breeze in comparison. I've plowed through about half of it already today.

And I made bread. And it didn't work out as I'd hoped. AS USUAL. I don't know why it gives me such trouble. I think part of it might be that I always have the urge to make it in the middle of winter, and that's definitely the worst time for it in terms of humidity/temperature/latent bacteria in the air. Considering doubling the yeast. Or just making half-loaves.

So go check it out, please! What are you waiting for! Geez!