Tim Heidecker Quotes

My dad is a very quick-witted, sarcastic, dry, humorous guy, whereas my mom's very silly, and that side of the family is very musical.

Most of my ideas just come out funny.

There's probably some buried conservative inside of me, coming out like a little gremlin in my belly that I've suppressed. This is a sort of character I've done before: He's kind of dumb and he's kind of arrogant, and a little seedy. A little coke-y. He's gotten into the cocaine or he's had too much coffee. It's been pretty fun. Not all the songs are like that but it sort of creeps in there.

I'm a little bit of an amateur political junkie.

It's never fun to read death threats.

I sort of fell out of new music. I'm old, I like what I like, and that's that.

A good example of a lyric that makes me laugh but might not hit anybody right away is, "Sit behind the guitar and play the chords," just because it's such a lame image. It's not rock'n'roll at all to be sitting behind a guitar.

There is nothing funny about a well-adjusted, intelligent person making the right choices.

Nobody hates hipsters more than hipsters.

We use all the takes that no one would ever use and often the moments before we say action, or before we say cut. No one's ever called and complained or anything like that. Everyone's just so grateful to get the work and to be on TV and all that.

There's a lot of dopes in life, and in film school. The interesting people are usually easy to find.

When I was in college in Philly, there was a lot of post-punks hardcore like, rock. Sixties, retro, proto-Strokes kind of bands.

Funny people don't really laugh very much.

Dads are awkward because they're older guys who aren't cool anymore and are figuring out who they are, and they often make bad choices in fashion and music.

I'm always in situations where you can't be funny, and yet I want to do it anyway.

Just because we can shoot something that looks like a movie doesn't mean we should. Sometimes if something looks too good, it's not funny. Some things need to look good, because we think it's funny that you'd spend so much time and be so precious about such a stupid idea.

I think, you know, I'm German, and um, probably not very expressive in my emotions.

Most of the time, we write something and then figure out who would be best to do it.

A lot of movies aren't intended for everybody.

Back in high school, there was something fun and dangerous about inhabiting a different personality.

I feel like when you do Twitter, sometimes you just have an idea and you fire it off and don't really think too hard about the consequences of that. I think my reputation there is as a comedian and not someone to be taken seriously. But I like the idea of getting out false information and just muddying up the story and making it as confusing and, you know, schizophrenic as possible.

I was in a band in high school and college and I always had a love for music, but I didn't go to a conservatory or anything like that. I was fairly self-taught.

I think comedy has to come from a real place. It has to come from an honest place.

There's a generation of people I think without a strong connection to family, to religion, to civic duty. They have a real disassociation from the problems of the world.

At Temple University, and I'm sure this was the way in a lot of film classes, comedy was not an option, and not considered a serious form of expression. You had to make a film about an issue.

The scariest thing about screening a comedy ... if you screen a drama, you know, there's no real way to tell in real time if people are enjoying it or not. But in a comedy, it's like, if people aren't laughing, it's sort of scary.

Costumes are fun. Dress up like a pilot some night and watch as people stare!

On movies, you have a lot of stylists that get things too pretty. Everything gets steamed and ironed. It's just not the way we really behave.

I think the great sketch shows, like 'Python' and 'Mr. Show,' they didn't stick around for very long. There's something kind of cool about that.

There are a lot of young, well-educated, artistic people out there that like to be entertained.

When I was a kid I went to Catholic school, and they used to drag us out to pro-life rallies and stuff full of crazy people.

I think there's a fine, healthy tradition of, you know, the people on the fringes satirizing the process of Hollywood.

In the world of 'Tim and Eric,' everything is big and ridiculous and absurd.

Well, I love Bob Dylan, let's make that clear. He's one of my musical heroes.

Online piracy needs to be dealt with itself, because people are just wholesale stealing people's work and not paying for it. It's very hard to figure out a way to fix it.

I don't have a big hang-up about my body.

Abbott and Costello were huge for me as a very young person.

I have been skeptical and not trusting of traditional models of the entertainment industry. I never got a manager.

I always liked records that didn't explain themselves too well - ones that you had to listen a few times.

We are making fun of stuff. It is subversive, I think, and in many ways political. It's a reaction against the society we live in, very much so. When we make a commercial for a product that doesn't do anything.

When people come in to act on the show, we say, "Just be extremely dry and not funny. Let the idea be the joke." That holds true through a lot of our stuff.

I used to work in an office in New York for this terrible company, and we used to have staff meetings, and I would just count how many times the boss would use the phrase "in terms of." And he would say it like 30 or 40 times. And sometimes he would just say it. He'd be like, "Uhh, in terms of, how are we doing with that?" I realized nobody knows what they're talking about. Everyone's bullshitting. Maybe not everybody, but certainly a lot of people.

That kind of language is what makes us laugh. Like, "Well, just eFax that to me, and I'll take a look at it."

When you travel, specifically for our show, you get inspired by rest stops, Cracker Barrel. Middle-America people are perfect.

We, the comics that we like, we're all, like, post-humor.

When anything doesn't hit with a huge laugh, as comics, it feels like, Oh no, oh no, we're sinking.

I'm very wary of doing political stuff for a lot of reasons. One of the big ones is that the shelf-life for them is not very long, and the joke becomes old news very quickly.

When you get older your dad becomes this other man rather than a scary man, and you have a friendship.

Most books that come out with a comedy label seem to be, Eric [Wareheim] and I could have written, "This is our story, and this is who we are," and sort of this navel-gazing, narcissistic approach to comedy we're seeing these days.

The thing that struck me is so many people that said, "Hey, I've been watching you since I was 12, and I'm 25 now." It was a weird shift, because you start off fighting for an audience based on doing something so strange that only you find funny, and it's weird when other people find it funny. Those people aren't always ready to laugh yet, and there's a sort of standoffish quality to it.