Tim Heidecker, known as the Tim in “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” and for “On Cinema at the Cinema,” a 16-year conceptual soap opera barely in the guise of a movie review show, is now also the creative director of the Onion’s guerrilla takeover of Alex Jones’ InfoWars.
With a Texas appeals court having paused the satirical news organization’s acquisition of InfoWars’ intellectual and physical property in the wake of Jones declaring bankruptcy after a more than $1 billion judgment against him for characterizing the Sandy Hook massacre as a hoax, they went ahead anyway with their online parody. Made with the triple goal of embarrassing Jones, creating a revenue stream for the Sandy Hook families out of their profits — merch has reportedly flown out the door — and, not least, making comedy, the Onion’s InfoWars premiered on YouTube on July 2 and will continue to debut new episodes weekly, every Thursday at 5 p.m. Pacific.
Heidecker hosts as what may be described as Tim Heidecker as Alex Jones, but not Alex Jones, whom the show has declared dead, popping him “like a balloon” in his car. There is video. I spoke with Heidecker between the premieres of the first and second episodes; these are edited excerpts from the conversation.
You approached the Onion when you first heard that they were trying to acquire InfoWars. What drove you to make that call?
On “Office Hours,” my podcast call-in show, Alex always comes up, and there was this interest in my mind, if they got InfoWars, maybe we could get the hard drives, we could get the raw footage, and maybe go down to the studio and take over. I don’t know — it just seemed like there aren’t too many people outside of me and my gang that would be useful if that actually came through. I didn’t hear back at all, and I sort of let it go. But then they cold-called me — I don’t even know if they got my message — and were, like, “This is back on the table. What would you do if you had InfoWars? What would be your vision for it?” And then we just started talking and here we are.
Besides an opportunity for comedy, was there any sense of “this guy needs to get got?”
Yeah, for sure. First and foremost is [Onion CEO] Ben Collins, who’s really the architect of all this; this is his mission. He saw an opportunity to do something good, and nobody else was doing it. And he said, “If you’re ever in that position, you have to do it. You have to try to see it through.” This guy has evaded justice for three or four years now, when it comes to paying what he owes the families, and this is a way to put some tinder on that, to get a revenue stream going, be on the side of of the families, just to get them paid what they’re owed.
InfoWars founder Alex Jones outside Waterbury Superior Court during his 2022 trial in Waterbury, Conn. Several families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre sued him, leading to a more than $1 billion judgment against Jones.
(Joe Buglewicz / Getty Images)
The Onion goes pretty hard. They recently posted a video about Bill Gates investing in a “child sex trafficking startup” because it was ecologically sustainable. Do you feel a kinship with that?
Oh, yeah. You know my work well enough to know we go to dark, dark places. It’s all in the service of comedy, to try to shock you, surprise you, make you think about yourself or your relationships with other people. It’s all with the understanding that our audience knows that this is not reality, that we are making things up. We are so blessed to be able to do that, just the [same] way Stephen King writes a horror book and terrible things happen in it. I think death is a very funny tool in comedy; I’m not afraid to go there, ever. We have Alex Jones exploding in his car.
Was that satisfying, blowing him up?
Yeah, I mean, it’s so silly. I kept trying to tell the VFX guy to bring the blood levels down, but he wasn’t interested in doing that. I just said, “OK, that’s what it is.”
What’s the writing process? Are you getting together with Onion guys?
There’s one Onion guy, Jamie Brew, whom I met through this project, who came from the [parody clickbait website] ClickHole world, which the Onion used to run. He’s this young New York comedy guy and I love him. He’s so smart. We have him, and my producer Matt Carlin from “Office Hours” is producing it, and then Vic [Berger] and Doug [Lussenhop, Heidecker’s “Office Hours” co-hosts], and Jena Friedman, who comes from “The Daily Show.” I’m such a lazy writer. We met, like, twice and sat around a table for the day and pitched ideas. And then Jamie and I have been fleshing it out with Matt. It’s sort of the first time I’ve had a head writer in my life; usually I’m the one doing that work. But we sit around and talk and make notes, and Jamie goes off and does the nitty gritty of mapping it out. Then I go back and play with it some more. It’s been a great little collaboration.
As I watched you being Alex Jones, I thought, “This really has to hurt your throat.”
I’ve done it for years, but always in these short bursts for a minute or two on “Office Hours” or Instagram. And last week we did like a full day of shooting — not a full-full day, but like 10 to 3 o’clock, and by the end of it, I was, like, “This is killing me.” I knew that was gonna be an issue. Not just the voice, but I don’t want to be stuck doing an impression of this guy for very long. It’s gonna get old. So I know that we have to wrap this up with Jones.
Do you have a post-Jones vision of the show?
Well, we have a post-Jones vision of the network, more than of the show. Maybe the past two or three months, we’ve been laying the groundwork of this new network, the Real InfoWars, and moving away from the overt parody phase, [where you’ll] go to InfoWars and just see stuff that’s in the spirit of the Onion or the spirit of satirical comedy, but is a wide world of young up-and-coming creators. So, really, it’s an Adult Swim model, trying to build a new streaming network that features people our team thinks are really funny and giving them some money and a little bit of the patina of the Onion and our brand. We hope by the fall to be putting stuff out. My joke to Ben and everybody was that I want to change the meaning of the word InfoWars, so in three years you’re thinking about comedy, you’re not thinking about terrorizing the families of murdered children.
Tim Heidecker as Alex Jones for InfoWars/The Onion
(The Onion)
“On Cinema” has a deep level of real-time audience engagement and participation. How much of that are you bringing into this new project?
I’ve always thought it’s very important, back to the “Tim & Eric” days — it built from a core audience that we were pretty active within and responsive to. It goes back even further in Philly, Eric [Wareheim] and I being in the music scene and the art scene, where it was very DIY. You made your own merch, you made your own records, you didn’t wait for the industry to come and give you the big check. With “On Cinema,” it’s great because it’s much in character. The audience is so funny, and they play along. This has the potential to do that because we’re giving them lots of tools to — like, in the first episode, we have this InfoWars Elf that got canceled. I thought that was funny, but I didn’t know if that would be something anyone cared about. And within 30 minutes, you had memes and people talking about the Elf and pretending they cared about the Elf.
What’s the reaction been?
I’m trying my best to not obsess over that stuff as much anymore. From what my lieutenants tell me, it’s being well-received, the numbers are good. The press has been good. Let us cook for a while and see what it is in a year, see if it was all worth it. It’s hard to know right now. I mean, it is, in the sense that we’re doing something original and fun, trying to build this revenue stream to the Sandy Hook families, and trying to embarrass Alex Jones and annoy him — just create noise in his world that is, hopefully, disruptive — because we just want him to face consequences for all the terrible things he’s done.
The day [Sandy Hook] it happened, it was right around the holidays, and my family was visiting. We had been trying to have a baby for a while, and my wife found out she was pregnant that day. And maybe three hours later, we get the Sandy Hook news. There’s that selfish feeling of “I can’t even have this one day without the world seeming like total nightmare,” and of course you think about your own kids and the fact that we’ve had to live in this world where we think about that potentially happening. Not that [Jones is] responsible for the shootings, but when you see what he did to those families, immediately after that … Knowing as a father that could have been me, could have been friends of mine, I felt very connected to those people. And he really dragged them over the coals for a long time. And that shouldn’t be forgotten.
Tim Heidecker, known as the Tim in “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” and for “On Cinema at the Cinema,” a 16-year conceptual soap opera barely in the guise of a movie review show, is now also the creative director of the Onion’s guerrilla takeover of Alex Jones’ InfoWars.
With a Texas appeals court having paused the satirical news organization’s acquisition of InfoWars’ intellectual and physical property in the wake of Jones declaring bankruptcy after a more than $1 billion judgment against him for characterizing the Sandy Hook massacre as a hoax, they went ahead anyway with their online parody. Made with the triple goal of embarrassing Jones, creating a revenue stream for the Sandy Hook families out of their profits — merch has reportedly flown out the door — and, not least, making comedy, the Onion’s InfoWars premiered on YouTube on July 2 and will continue to debut new episodes weekly, every Thursday at 5 p.m. Pacific.
Heidecker hosts as what may be described as Tim Heidecker as Alex Jones, but not Alex Jones, whom the show has declared dead, popping him “like a balloon” in his car. There is video. I spoke with Heidecker between the premieres of the first and second episodes; these are edited excerpts from the conversation.
You approached the Onion when you first heard that they were trying to acquire InfoWars. What drove you to make that call?
On “Office Hours,” my podcast call-in show, Alex always comes up, and there was this interest in my mind, if they got InfoWars, maybe we could get the hard drives, we could get the raw footage, and maybe go down to the studio and take over. I don’t know — it just seemed like there aren’t too many people outside of me and my gang that would be useful if that actually came through. I didn’t hear back at all, and I sort of let it go. But then they cold-called me — I don’t even know if they got my message — and were, like, “This is back on the table. What would you do if you had InfoWars? What would be your vision for it?” And then we just started talking and here we are.
Besides an opportunity for comedy, was there any sense of “this guy needs to get got?”
Yeah, for sure. First and foremost is [Onion CEO] Ben Collins, who’s really the architect of all this; this is his mission. He saw an opportunity to do something good, and nobody else was doing it. And he said, “If you’re ever in that position, you have to do it. You have to try to see it through.” This guy has evaded justice for three or four years now, when it comes to paying what he owes the families, and this is a way to put some tinder on that, to get a revenue stream going, be on the side of of the families, just to get them paid what they’re owed.
InfoWars founder Alex Jones outside Waterbury Superior Court during his 2022 trial in Waterbury, Conn. Several families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre sued him, leading to a more than $1 billion judgment against Jones.
(Joe Buglewicz / Getty Images)
The Onion goes pretty hard. They recently posted a video about Bill Gates investing in a “child sex trafficking startup” because it was ecologically sustainable. Do you feel a kinship with that?
Oh, yeah. You know my work well enough to know we go to dark, dark places. It’s all in the service of comedy, to try to shock you, surprise you, make you think about yourself or your relationships with other people. It’s all with the understanding that our audience knows that this is not reality, that we are making things up. We are so blessed to be able to do that, just the [same] way Stephen King writes a horror book and terrible things happen in it. I think death is a very funny tool in comedy; I’m not afraid to go there, ever. We have Alex Jones exploding in his car.
Was that satisfying, blowing him up?
Yeah, I mean, it’s so silly. I kept trying to tell the VFX guy to bring the blood levels down, but he wasn’t interested in doing that. I just said, “OK, that’s what it is.”
What’s the writing process? Are you getting together with Onion guys?
There’s one Onion guy, Jamie Brew, whom I met through this project, who came from the [parody clickbait website] ClickHole world, which the Onion used to run. He’s this young New York comedy guy and I love him. He’s so smart. We have him, and my producer Matt Carlin from “Office Hours” is producing it, and then Vic [Berger] and Doug [Lussenhop, Heidecker’s “Office Hours” co-hosts], and Jena Friedman, who comes from “The Daily Show.” I’m such a lazy writer. We met, like, twice and sat around a table for the day and pitched ideas. And then Jamie and I have been fleshing it out with Matt. It’s sort of the first time I’ve had a head writer in my life; usually I’m the one doing that work. But we sit around and talk and make notes, and Jamie goes off and does the nitty gritty of mapping it out. Then I go back and play with it some more. It’s been a great little collaboration.
As I watched you being Alex Jones, I thought, “This really has to hurt your throat.”
I’ve done it for years, but always in these short bursts for a minute or two on “Office Hours” or Instagram. And last week we did like a full day of shooting — not a full-full day, but like 10 to 3 o’clock, and by the end of it, I was, like, “This is killing me.” I knew that was gonna be an issue. Not just the voice, but I don’t want to be stuck doing an impression of this guy for very long. It’s gonna get old. So I know that we have to wrap this up with Jones.
Do you have a post-Jones vision of the show?
Well, we have a post-Jones vision of the network, more than of the show. Maybe the past two or three months, we’ve been laying the groundwork of this new network, the Real InfoWars, and moving away from the overt parody phase, [where you’ll] go to InfoWars and just see stuff that’s in the spirit of the Onion or the spirit of satirical comedy, but is a wide world of young up-and-coming creators. So, really, it’s an Adult Swim model, trying to build a new streaming network that features people our team thinks are really funny and giving them some money and a little bit of the patina of the Onion and our brand. We hope by the fall to be putting stuff out. My joke to Ben and everybody was that I want to change the meaning of the word InfoWars, so in three years you’re thinking about comedy, you’re not thinking about terrorizing the families of murdered children.
Tim Heidecker as Alex Jones for InfoWars/The Onion
(The Onion)
“On Cinema” has a deep level of real-time audience engagement and participation. How much of that are you bringing into this new project?
I’ve always thought it’s very important, back to the “Tim & Eric” days — it built from a core audience that we were pretty active within and responsive to. It goes back even further in Philly, Eric [Wareheim] and I being in the music scene and the art scene, where it was very DIY. You made your own merch, you made your own records, you didn’t wait for the industry to come and give you the big check. With “On Cinema,” it’s great because it’s much in character. The audience is so funny, and they play along. This has the potential to do that because we’re giving them lots of tools to — like, in the first episode, we have this InfoWars Elf that got canceled. I thought that was funny, but I didn’t know if that would be something anyone cared about. And within 30 minutes, you had memes and people talking about the Elf and pretending they cared about the Elf.
What’s the reaction been?
I’m trying my best to not obsess over that stuff as much anymore. From what my lieutenants tell me, it’s being well-received, the numbers are good. The press has been good. Let us cook for a while and see what it is in a year, see if it was all worth it. It’s hard to know right now. I mean, it is, in the sense that we’re doing something original and fun, trying to build this revenue stream to the Sandy Hook families, and trying to embarrass Alex Jones and annoy him — just create noise in his world that is, hopefully, disruptive — because we just want him to face consequences for all the terrible things he’s done.
The day [Sandy Hook] it happened, it was right around the holidays, and my family was visiting. We had been trying to have a baby for a while, and my wife found out she was pregnant that day. And maybe three hours later, we get the Sandy Hook news. There’s that selfish feeling of “I can’t even have this one day without the world seeming like total nightmare,” and of course you think about your own kids and the fact that we’ve had to live in this world where we think about that potentially happening. Not that [Jones is] responsible for the shootings, but when you see what he did to those families, immediately after that … Knowing as a father that could have been me, could have been friends of mine, I felt very connected to those people. And he really dragged them over the coals for a long time. And that shouldn’t be forgotten.
Tim Heidecker, known as the Tim in “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” and for “On Cinema at the Cinema,” a 16-year conceptual soap opera barely in the guise of a movie review show, is now also the creative director of the Onion’s guerrilla takeover of Alex Jones’ InfoWars.
With a Texas appeals court having paused the satirical news organization’s acquisition of InfoWars’ intellectual and physical property in the wake of Jones declaring bankruptcy after a more than $1 billion judgment against him for characterizing the Sandy Hook massacre as a hoax, they went ahead anyway with their online parody. Made with the triple goal of embarrassing Jones, creating a revenue stream for the Sandy Hook families out of their profits — merch has reportedly flown out the door — and, not least, making comedy, the Onion’s InfoWars premiered on YouTube on July 2 and will continue to debut new episodes weekly, every Thursday at 5 p.m. Pacific.
Heidecker hosts as what may be described as Tim Heidecker as Alex Jones, but not Alex Jones, whom the show has declared dead, popping him “like a balloon” in his car. There is video. I spoke with Heidecker between the premieres of the first and second episodes; these are edited excerpts from the conversation.
You approached the Onion when you first heard that they were trying to acquire InfoWars. What drove you to make that call?
On “Office Hours,” my podcast call-in show, Alex always comes up, and there was this interest in my mind, if they got InfoWars, maybe we could get the hard drives, we could get the raw footage, and maybe go down to the studio and take over. I don’t know — it just seemed like there aren’t too many people outside of me and my gang that would be useful if that actually came through. I didn’t hear back at all, and I sort of let it go. But then they cold-called me — I don’t even know if they got my message — and were, like, “This is back on the table. What would you do if you had InfoWars? What would be your vision for it?” And then we just started talking and here we are.
Besides an opportunity for comedy, was there any sense of “this guy needs to get got?”
Yeah, for sure. First and foremost is [Onion CEO] Ben Collins, who’s really the architect of all this; this is his mission. He saw an opportunity to do something good, and nobody else was doing it. And he said, “If you’re ever in that position, you have to do it. You have to try to see it through.” This guy has evaded justice for three or four years now, when it comes to paying what he owes the families, and this is a way to put some tinder on that, to get a revenue stream going, be on the side of of the families, just to get them paid what they’re owed.
InfoWars founder Alex Jones outside Waterbury Superior Court during his 2022 trial in Waterbury, Conn. Several families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre sued him, leading to a more than $1 billion judgment against Jones.
(Joe Buglewicz / Getty Images)
The Onion goes pretty hard. They recently posted a video about Bill Gates investing in a “child sex trafficking startup” because it was ecologically sustainable. Do you feel a kinship with that?
Oh, yeah. You know my work well enough to know we go to dark, dark places. It’s all in the service of comedy, to try to shock you, surprise you, make you think about yourself or your relationships with other people. It’s all with the understanding that our audience knows that this is not reality, that we are making things up. We are so blessed to be able to do that, just the [same] way Stephen King writes a horror book and terrible things happen in it. I think death is a very funny tool in comedy; I’m not afraid to go there, ever. We have Alex Jones exploding in his car.
Was that satisfying, blowing him up?
Yeah, I mean, it’s so silly. I kept trying to tell the VFX guy to bring the blood levels down, but he wasn’t interested in doing that. I just said, “OK, that’s what it is.”
What’s the writing process? Are you getting together with Onion guys?
There’s one Onion guy, Jamie Brew, whom I met through this project, who came from the [parody clickbait website] ClickHole world, which the Onion used to run. He’s this young New York comedy guy and I love him. He’s so smart. We have him, and my producer Matt Carlin from “Office Hours” is producing it, and then Vic [Berger] and Doug [Lussenhop, Heidecker’s “Office Hours” co-hosts], and Jena Friedman, who comes from “The Daily Show.” I’m such a lazy writer. We met, like, twice and sat around a table for the day and pitched ideas. And then Jamie and I have been fleshing it out with Matt. It’s sort of the first time I’ve had a head writer in my life; usually I’m the one doing that work. But we sit around and talk and make notes, and Jamie goes off and does the nitty gritty of mapping it out. Then I go back and play with it some more. It’s been a great little collaboration.
As I watched you being Alex Jones, I thought, “This really has to hurt your throat.”
I’ve done it for years, but always in these short bursts for a minute or two on “Office Hours” or Instagram. And last week we did like a full day of shooting — not a full-full day, but like 10 to 3 o’clock, and by the end of it, I was, like, “This is killing me.” I knew that was gonna be an issue. Not just the voice, but I don’t want to be stuck doing an impression of this guy for very long. It’s gonna get old. So I know that we have to wrap this up with Jones.
Do you have a post-Jones vision of the show?
Well, we have a post-Jones vision of the network, more than of the show. Maybe the past two or three months, we’ve been laying the groundwork of this new network, the Real InfoWars, and moving away from the overt parody phase, [where you’ll] go to InfoWars and just see stuff that’s in the spirit of the Onion or the spirit of satirical comedy, but is a wide world of young up-and-coming creators. So, really, it’s an Adult Swim model, trying to build a new streaming network that features people our team thinks are really funny and giving them some money and a little bit of the patina of the Onion and our brand. We hope by the fall to be putting stuff out. My joke to Ben and everybody was that I want to change the meaning of the word InfoWars, so in three years you’re thinking about comedy, you’re not thinking about terrorizing the families of murdered children.
Tim Heidecker as Alex Jones for InfoWars/The Onion
(The Onion)
“On Cinema” has a deep level of real-time audience engagement and participation. How much of that are you bringing into this new project?
I’ve always thought it’s very important, back to the “Tim & Eric” days — it built from a core audience that we were pretty active within and responsive to. It goes back even further in Philly, Eric [Wareheim] and I being in the music scene and the art scene, where it was very DIY. You made your own merch, you made your own records, you didn’t wait for the industry to come and give you the big check. With “On Cinema,” it’s great because it’s much in character. The audience is so funny, and they play along. This has the potential to do that because we’re giving them lots of tools to — like, in the first episode, we have this InfoWars Elf that got canceled. I thought that was funny, but I didn’t know if that would be something anyone cared about. And within 30 minutes, you had memes and people talking about the Elf and pretending they cared about the Elf.
What’s the reaction been?
I’m trying my best to not obsess over that stuff as much anymore. From what my lieutenants tell me, it’s being well-received, the numbers are good. The press has been good. Let us cook for a while and see what it is in a year, see if it was all worth it. It’s hard to know right now. I mean, it is, in the sense that we’re doing something original and fun, trying to build this revenue stream to the Sandy Hook families, and trying to embarrass Alex Jones and annoy him — just create noise in his world that is, hopefully, disruptive — because we just want him to face consequences for all the terrible things he’s done.
The day [Sandy Hook] it happened, it was right around the holidays, and my family was visiting. We had been trying to have a baby for a while, and my wife found out she was pregnant that day. And maybe three hours later, we get the Sandy Hook news. There’s that selfish feeling of “I can’t even have this one day without the world seeming like total nightmare,” and of course you think about your own kids and the fact that we’ve had to live in this world where we think about that potentially happening. Not that [Jones is] responsible for the shootings, but when you see what he did to those families, immediately after that … Knowing as a father that could have been me, could have been friends of mine, I felt very connected to those people. And he really dragged them over the coals for a long time. And that shouldn’t be forgotten.
Tim Heidecker, known as the Tim in “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” and for “On Cinema at the Cinema,” a 16-year conceptual soap opera barely in the guise of a movie review show, is now also the creative director of the Onion’s guerrilla takeover of Alex Jones’ InfoWars.
With a Texas appeals court having paused the satirical news organization’s acquisition of InfoWars’ intellectual and physical property in the wake of Jones declaring bankruptcy after a more than $1 billion judgment against him for characterizing the Sandy Hook massacre as a hoax, they went ahead anyway with their online parody. Made with the triple goal of embarrassing Jones, creating a revenue stream for the Sandy Hook families out of their profits — merch has reportedly flown out the door — and, not least, making comedy, the Onion’s InfoWars premiered on YouTube on July 2 and will continue to debut new episodes weekly, every Thursday at 5 p.m. Pacific.
Heidecker hosts as what may be described as Tim Heidecker as Alex Jones, but not Alex Jones, whom the show has declared dead, popping him “like a balloon” in his car. There is video. I spoke with Heidecker between the premieres of the first and second episodes; these are edited excerpts from the conversation.
You approached the Onion when you first heard that they were trying to acquire InfoWars. What drove you to make that call?
On “Office Hours,” my podcast call-in show, Alex always comes up, and there was this interest in my mind, if they got InfoWars, maybe we could get the hard drives, we could get the raw footage, and maybe go down to the studio and take over. I don’t know — it just seemed like there aren’t too many people outside of me and my gang that would be useful if that actually came through. I didn’t hear back at all, and I sort of let it go. But then they cold-called me — I don’t even know if they got my message — and were, like, “This is back on the table. What would you do if you had InfoWars? What would be your vision for it?” And then we just started talking and here we are.
Besides an opportunity for comedy, was there any sense of “this guy needs to get got?”
Yeah, for sure. First and foremost is [Onion CEO] Ben Collins, who’s really the architect of all this; this is his mission. He saw an opportunity to do something good, and nobody else was doing it. And he said, “If you’re ever in that position, you have to do it. You have to try to see it through.” This guy has evaded justice for three or four years now, when it comes to paying what he owes the families, and this is a way to put some tinder on that, to get a revenue stream going, be on the side of of the families, just to get them paid what they’re owed.
InfoWars founder Alex Jones outside Waterbury Superior Court during his 2022 trial in Waterbury, Conn. Several families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre sued him, leading to a more than $1 billion judgment against Jones.
(Joe Buglewicz / Getty Images)
The Onion goes pretty hard. They recently posted a video about Bill Gates investing in a “child sex trafficking startup” because it was ecologically sustainable. Do you feel a kinship with that?
Oh, yeah. You know my work well enough to know we go to dark, dark places. It’s all in the service of comedy, to try to shock you, surprise you, make you think about yourself or your relationships with other people. It’s all with the understanding that our audience knows that this is not reality, that we are making things up. We are so blessed to be able to do that, just the [same] way Stephen King writes a horror book and terrible things happen in it. I think death is a very funny tool in comedy; I’m not afraid to go there, ever. We have Alex Jones exploding in his car.
Was that satisfying, blowing him up?
Yeah, I mean, it’s so silly. I kept trying to tell the VFX guy to bring the blood levels down, but he wasn’t interested in doing that. I just said, “OK, that’s what it is.”
What’s the writing process? Are you getting together with Onion guys?
There’s one Onion guy, Jamie Brew, whom I met through this project, who came from the [parody clickbait website] ClickHole world, which the Onion used to run. He’s this young New York comedy guy and I love him. He’s so smart. We have him, and my producer Matt Carlin from “Office Hours” is producing it, and then Vic [Berger] and Doug [Lussenhop, Heidecker’s “Office Hours” co-hosts], and Jena Friedman, who comes from “The Daily Show.” I’m such a lazy writer. We met, like, twice and sat around a table for the day and pitched ideas. And then Jamie and I have been fleshing it out with Matt. It’s sort of the first time I’ve had a head writer in my life; usually I’m the one doing that work. But we sit around and talk and make notes, and Jamie goes off and does the nitty gritty of mapping it out. Then I go back and play with it some more. It’s been a great little collaboration.
As I watched you being Alex Jones, I thought, “This really has to hurt your throat.”
I’ve done it for years, but always in these short bursts for a minute or two on “Office Hours” or Instagram. And last week we did like a full day of shooting — not a full-full day, but like 10 to 3 o’clock, and by the end of it, I was, like, “This is killing me.” I knew that was gonna be an issue. Not just the voice, but I don’t want to be stuck doing an impression of this guy for very long. It’s gonna get old. So I know that we have to wrap this up with Jones.
Do you have a post-Jones vision of the show?
Well, we have a post-Jones vision of the network, more than of the show. Maybe the past two or three months, we’ve been laying the groundwork of this new network, the Real InfoWars, and moving away from the overt parody phase, [where you’ll] go to InfoWars and just see stuff that’s in the spirit of the Onion or the spirit of satirical comedy, but is a wide world of young up-and-coming creators. So, really, it’s an Adult Swim model, trying to build a new streaming network that features people our team thinks are really funny and giving them some money and a little bit of the patina of the Onion and our brand. We hope by the fall to be putting stuff out. My joke to Ben and everybody was that I want to change the meaning of the word InfoWars, so in three years you’re thinking about comedy, you’re not thinking about terrorizing the families of murdered children.
Tim Heidecker as Alex Jones for InfoWars/The Onion
(The Onion)
“On Cinema” has a deep level of real-time audience engagement and participation. How much of that are you bringing into this new project?
I’ve always thought it’s very important, back to the “Tim & Eric” days — it built from a core audience that we were pretty active within and responsive to. It goes back even further in Philly, Eric [Wareheim] and I being in the music scene and the art scene, where it was very DIY. You made your own merch, you made your own records, you didn’t wait for the industry to come and give you the big check. With “On Cinema,” it’s great because it’s much in character. The audience is so funny, and they play along. This has the potential to do that because we’re giving them lots of tools to — like, in the first episode, we have this InfoWars Elf that got canceled. I thought that was funny, but I didn’t know if that would be something anyone cared about. And within 30 minutes, you had memes and people talking about the Elf and pretending they cared about the Elf.
What’s the reaction been?
I’m trying my best to not obsess over that stuff as much anymore. From what my lieutenants tell me, it’s being well-received, the numbers are good. The press has been good. Let us cook for a while and see what it is in a year, see if it was all worth it. It’s hard to know right now. I mean, it is, in the sense that we’re doing something original and fun, trying to build this revenue stream to the Sandy Hook families, and trying to embarrass Alex Jones and annoy him — just create noise in his world that is, hopefully, disruptive — because we just want him to face consequences for all the terrible things he’s done.
The day [Sandy Hook] it happened, it was right around the holidays, and my family was visiting. We had been trying to have a baby for a while, and my wife found out she was pregnant that day. And maybe three hours later, we get the Sandy Hook news. There’s that selfish feeling of “I can’t even have this one day without the world seeming like total nightmare,” and of course you think about your own kids and the fact that we’ve had to live in this world where we think about that potentially happening. Not that [Jones is] responsible for the shootings, but when you see what he did to those families, immediately after that … Knowing as a father that could have been me, could have been friends of mine, I felt very connected to those people. And he really dragged them over the coals for a long time. And that shouldn’t be forgotten.
