Vague Visages’ anti-comedy essay contains spoilers for The Comedy (2012), Entertainment (2015), The Mountain (2018) and Mister America (2019). Check out more VV essays, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings, at the home page.

*

In the early 2000s, comedy had its own No Wave moment. Tone began to supersede content in the alternative genre landscape, crystalized in the tendency that became known as anti-comedy. The sub-genre was a form of Brechtian attack, as it seized the medium and harnessed it against itself to create junctures which left the typical alt-comedy consumer, accustomed as they’d become to the studied irony of the 90s, in a state of dizzying yet invigorating alienation. Andy Kaufman’s children had been set loose in the citadel, free to ransack at will with their grandiose scatology and willful jumbling of the comedic syntax. 

The estrangement techniques utilized by anti-comedy duo Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim in shows like Tom Goes to the Mayor (2004-2006) and Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! (2007-2010) take the grimy, haphazard aesthetic of DIY culture/public access TV and laser-focused it to elicit a particular kind of disquiet, stretching the grotesque specks until they consume the entire canvas. What results is a low-resolution nightmare. Comedic symbols are subverted until the foundations of humor are called into question.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘Upgraded’

Gregg Turkington’s Neil Hamburger persona is a dyspeptic and hack stand-up comedian who has gone beyond bitterness into abstract misanthropy. For the character, the stage and spotlight have become a battleground where his soul is on the line in the gags he blasts out like accusations. Hamburger’s barbed non sequiturs have the texture of the traditional joke structure, but they are more like howls of existential rage, a frantic clawing against the sheer face of cosmic indifference. The cadences of comedy are mauled and mutilated into disconcerting shapes, beaten into submission by the brute force of the character’s unremitting animus.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘Silver Linings Playbook’

The acknowledged postures of 90s comedy, where cool detachment became de rigueur, had been hijacked to altogether more nihilistic ends by Heidecker, Wareheim and Turkington, who went on to create their own universe with shows like Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule (2010-2017), On Cinema (2012-), Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories (2013-2017) and Decker (2014-2017). They created a signature style with its own repertory of oddballs, like Christian puppeteer David Liebe Hart and self-styled celebrity impersonator James Quall. It was as close as TV came to emulating the cinema of Harmony Korine, generating an equally queasy feeling that not everyone involved grasped the intent of the piece.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘The Curse’

Heidecker and Wareheim’s excursion onto the big screen, Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (2012), attempted to scale up the duo’s disorienting gusto, but something was lost in the transfer, and the end result is a pale copy of what had been captured in Adult Swim’s hallucinatory shortform salvos. It was filmmaker Rick Alverson who was able to harness this seditious brio and showcase anti-comedy’s luminaries to best effect. The director’s movies bring anti-comedy’s spirit of unease into a cinematic context, refining and reinterpreting what has been kept alive on TV by the likes of Nathan Fielder and Eric Andre.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Television: ‘The Curse’

Alverson’s films examine endpoints, the terminus of untenable situations into which his characters have thrust themselves. He poses the question, “How did these people end up here?” In The Comedy (2012), Heidecker plays Swanson, a 35-year-old son of wealth who wanders through Williamsburg with his equally entitled friends in search of something to lift the blanket of lassitude that is smothering them. The Comedy takes aim at the Brooklyn hipster paradigm, but the screenplay from Alverson, Robert Donne and Colm O’Leary could equally be read as a disquisition on the ramifications of anti-comedy, and feels prescient in its sketching of the ironic precipice on which its characters are dangled so precariously.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Know the Cast & Characters: ‘Self Reliance’

Sweat-drenched and disheveled, Swanson and his compatriots find themselves engaged in noxious play, looking for a hedonic fix in a wilderness of easy money and endless variety; they suck voraciously at the teat of a diminishing post-war plenty, extracting what they can from the cultural cachet of the community they have usurped.  Swanson pays lip service to the Protestant work ethic, but — as with everything in his life — it is a passing fancy. He engages in proletarian cosplay, performing manual labor in willful spasms, yet he remains unattached to any notion of necessity, falling back into the plump cushion of generational wealth. Swanson and Bobby (Turkington) are mascots of the ascendant rentier class, amassing assets rather than forging connections; the gentrifiers assume that simply by planting their flag they will somehow be imbued with an elusive authenticity, that the gesture itself will suffice.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Television: ‘Class of ’09’

Swanson and Bobby’s predicament is not dissimilar from that of the anti-comedians. In setting out to transgress, they break down the doors of a stable consensus. This is illustrated when Swanson discusses the idea of socialism with a fellow partygoer (Alexia Rasmussen), whose sincerity is systematically disassembled by Heidecker’s character — he proposes the “third way” of feudalism, that a large percentage of the population “don’t have conscious thought” and the economic elite have power because “they deserve it” and have been “picked by God,” that “[Adolf] Hitler had… ideas,” but he makes clear that he’s “not a Nazi, or anything.” Is this just reflexive contrarianism, or is he being serious?  It is a constant game of chicken with social taboo.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘Munich – The Edge of War’

Swanson and his counterparts are engaged in an arms race of linguistic one-upmanship. Heidecker’s character brings up the Oklahoma City bombing, and tells his friends that he read somewhere “that building had it coming,” pausing for the recognition of his naughtiness. Swanson and Bobby engage in a lengthy debate on the cleanliness of “hobo dicks,” neither flinching or abandoning the conceit, piling vulgarity upon vulgarity. This is not a conversation, it is a performance; like anti-comedy, it excludes the audience entirely. Swanson’s money grants him a child’s license to soil himself in public and pass it off as charm.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Know the Cast & Characters: ‘Good Grief’

But Swanson’s pranks impact people’s lives, and the targets are often the most socially precarious, as when he and Van Arman (Wareheim) barrage a bemused taxi driver (Yianni Kool) with shrill and nonsensical insults because he is unable to “put on some hip-hop” for them. Again, making noise is the thing; it is devoid of a context beyond the pure pleasure of the vibration, insensitive to externalities. Swanson’s social circle seem to be afflicted with a form of Tourette’s that is set off by the threat of boredom. He pays a taxi driver (Rock Kohli) $400 to drive his cab for 20 minutes, as he thinks it would be “kinda fun” to have “the whole experience” of sampling this man’s life. The taxi driver reminds him that “this is not a playground; this is how I make a living; this is my life,” but Swanson gets what he wants in the end, running away when the experience has outlived its novelty value.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘Role Play’

Swanson bombards the nurse (Seth Koen) who is taking care of his ailing father (Kender Jones) with a torrent of provocatively explicit questions, then asks “anything there?” when the nurse stares blankly at him. Heidecker’s character creates situations without any attempt at a statement beyond fulfilling some private agenda; it is oppositional defiance without a comprehensible adversary. Alverson uses William Basinski’s ethereal ambient piece “Disintegration Loop 1.1” to accompany shots of Swanson and friends playing softball and riding bikes, which plays like an absurdist take on Brecht’s Kuhle Wampe (1932). Basinski’s piece was a response to the events of 9/11, a paean to a lost city, and its use in The Comedy frames Swanson et al as the heirs to the city that emerged out of the smoke — representatives of a corroding imperial center. 

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Know the Cast & Characters: ‘Asteroid City’

Post 9/11, contention became the prevalent current in American life; anti-comedy was able to reduce comedy to a jumble of component parts that floated between the major antipathies of the time; it was a conscious withdrawal from having to land on either side of the dialectic. In Swanson’s world, discourse ceases to be important, but semiotic disruption assumes the utmost significance — the gang sit around drinking and throwing out banalities to each other, like “you are so special to us” and “I need you.” They belong to a generation that has been saturated in wellness bromides and corporate doublespeak, they have imbibed liberal pieties and adapted them into their own jaded lexicon. But nature abhors an ontological vacuum, and it is not hard to see Swanson and his cohorts being seduced by the neo-reactionary wave.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘Saltburn’

In an illuminating scene, Swanson, Van Arman and Ben (LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy) visit a church, seemingly apropos of nothing. There is the opportunity to lampoon symbols of faith and cut through the solemn silence, but when irony meets awe, there develops a tension which can only be obliterated with an escalation of the game; they skitter across pews and clamber over seats, as much in embarrassment at the paucity of their own weltanschauung as defiance of the institution. In the absence of God, the self assumes primacy; it must devise ways of convincing itself that it can stare down eternity with a smirk.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Know the Cast & Characters: ‘Barbie’

At the time of its release, Alverson regarded Entertainment (2015) as the only film of his that “achieved any accomplishment.” In it, Neil Hamburger — “America’s $1 Funnyman” — embarks on a cross-country tour, playing a series of incongruous venues and encountering a public less than receptive to his acerbic schtick. In its stylistic approach, Entertainment lays bare the relationship between anti-comedy and psychological horror. Lorenzo Hagerman’s unsettling lighting and Robert Donne’s eerie score are more Dario Argento than Judd Apatow; it offers no warmth and a mood of presentiment prevails in its atonal bursts and lurid colors. 

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘May December’

There is no attempt in Entertainment to signal its humor or ease the audience into its milieu; viewers are left in the same state of alienation as Turkington himself — who seems trapped in a purgatorial cliché of the road comic lifestyle, retreating to anonymous hotel rooms and trying to re-establish contact with his estranged daughter via increasingly desperate voicemails. Alverson aims to provoke the same response from the viewer as the sparse crowds that attend Hamburger’s gigs. Their conception of entertainment does not align with what the character is offering — writers Alverson, Heidecker and Turkington take pains to probe the underlying values of entertainment orthodoxy. Hamburger repeats the mantra of putting smiles on faces and bringing a flicker of joy to benighted lives, but it is always open to question how much Turkington really believes it, or whether it is just another conceptual ruse.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘The Curse’

In Alverson’s hands, anti-comedy becomes a new kind of gothic — it is the world viewed through a warped, sinister lens; a fresh excavation of the unspeakable through outsized comedic strategies. A Hamburger punchline is like opening a door onto something terrifying. It is almost as if Turkington is possessed when he dons the Hamburger garb; a malign spirit takes control of him. Entertainment unfolds like a kind of ghost story, and Turkington’s deadpan despondency only lifts in those moments when he meets a worthy antagonist, someone willing to act as his canvas, onto which he can splatter his most splenetic outpourings. In the time between gigs, Turkington lumbers through a blank expanse with an almost zombified gait.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘Totally Killer’

As with the characters in The Comedy, Turkington does not communicate with those around him; every ounce of external energy is preserved for the performance, in which he sets out to explode the notion of the stage as a sacred space in which a form of communion takes place. Hamburger seeks to illustrate that the stage reinforces the usual power dynamic, that the normal boundaries are left intact, that you always surrender your agency when you submit to the will of the performer — anti-comedy is a debasement of the stage. It is unclear if Turkington even observes the people around him; they do not figure in his work, which is concerned with attacking the spectral visions of celebrity from the most unexpected angles. 

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘Long Shot’

The cold air of reality wafts in with the introduction of Turkington’s cousin John (John C. Reilly), a wealthy land baron who brings an uninitiated set of eyes to Turkington’s craft. When he witnesses a typically heated exchange with a heckler, John questions whether Hamburger’s injunction to “laugh your fool head off and shut your fool mouth” is the ideal customer service approach. Floating out of context, Turkington’s choices are irrational. John stands in for the careerist comedian; he speaks about the need for Turkington to hit “all four quadrants,” maximize his “growth potential” and formulate a “business plan” to elevate himself into the ranks of superstar comics who have successfully leveraged their relatability.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘Old Dads’

Turkington is at odds with the world on and off stage; Hamburger has built a pyramid of hostility and bricks the stand-up comedian in with him. Trapped in the liminal region where levity and despair collide, Turkington wears a suffocating suit of armor and bombs on stage with increasing relish, picking up a bowling trophy and using it to mimic machine-gunning an unresponsive audience, elongating the gesture until it becomes willful self-sabotage. He passes through locations which symbolize the relentless cycles of industry — its gluts and surpluses, its convulsions of use value represented in the oil field, the dead boom town, the airplane graveyard, the prison. He stops to take a photo on his phone of a picturesque car wreck; he climbs aboard a dead plane’s rusting hulk and stands in the vacated fuselage.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Know the Cast & Characters: ‘The Black Phone’

The anti-comedy approach is about mimicking extremity, manufacturing heightened emotion in pursuit of a specific effect, all the while withholding the intrinsic self. In between there is numbness and lethargy, registering nothing beyond minor alterations of backdrop. Even in a moment of involuntary engagement, Turkington is torn between the security of his ennui and wading into the bloody waters of another person’s distress. But Alverson does not stoop to offer the audience catharsis. When Turkington encounters a young woman (Ashley Atwood) giving birth on the floor of a public bathroom, viewers do not witness his grudging intervention, but rather simply see him impassively cradling the fetus, and no further mention is made of the incident.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Television: ‘The Woman in the Wall’

Hamburger is a decayed archetype, a set of misfiring traits. His ire is aimed at the shibboleths of legacy entertainment, his misdemeanor is that of being divisive in an age that craves mass acceptance. Hamburger is at odds with a time in which entertainment has infected everything, where the desire to be entertained is insatiable and indulged at every turn, where the models set out by mass entertainment fill in for a malfunctioning and unsatisfying reality, where the clown has inexplicably gained credibility within the court. From this perspective, Turkington’s almost catatonic withdrawal takes on the patina of defiance; it is his way of stepping off the treadmill, keeping the threat of entertainment at bay by strenuously abbreviating himself.  

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘Family Switch’

But Turkington is eventually overpowered by Hamburger, and by the time the tour culminates at a private function in the Hollywood Hills, the possession is complete. Faced with the braying representations of entertainment success (Heidecker and Dean Stockwell), the act is battered into its fundamentals. Hamburger chokes on the rarefied air, and his scorn dissipates into wailing and bawling. Dying onstage bleeds into real life — an assertion of life is now a gasping for survival. The expectation that the clown has any answers, that the laughter should be more than animal impulse, becomes too onerous to bear and Turkington capitulates.  

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘No Hard Feelings’

Anti-comedy sustained itself in the mid-2000s on an understanding of its essential emptiness and the erasure of subtext; a joyous retreat into Dadaism in the face of insoluble antagonisms and schisms. It was an antidote to the sound and fury of the War on Terror, but material conditions militated against its jubilant abnegation, as its contradictions began to be felt too acutely — the relative stability within which it operated was eroded. The question began to be asked whether provocation for its own sake was the preserve of privilege, an indulgence of a less apprehensive time. Anti-comedy appears to have been overtaken by the vehement sincerity on both sides of the burgeoning culture war; the stakes have been raised to the point where the respective camps invoke their anointed clown — be it Hannah Gadsby or Matt Rife — to fight their battles. When the lines are drawn, playfulness becomes a luxury that nobody can afford.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘No Hard Feelings’

Alverson’s immersion in the anti-comedy world left its mark on his next feature, The Mountain (2018), a chilly, enigmatic drama with echoes of The Master (2012) and Aki Kaurismäki in its somber precision. It is not hard to find parallels between Hamburger/Turkington and travelling physician Wallace Fiennes (Jeff Goldblum) — they are both characters bent on charting their own destructive course, leaving human wreckage in their wake. Fiennes takes the orphaned son of a former patient, Andy (Tye Sheridan), under his wing to work as his photographer, capturing patients at a psychiatric hospitals to perform lobotomies.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘Wingwomen’

The static camera, elliptical structure and bathetic edge of The Mountain carry some of the perversity that anti-comedy brings to pacing; stretching and straining scenes, then driving them into an absurdist ditch. Style and content are in conversation with each other, and this conversation is often fractious; the gentility of Hagerman’s photography ennobles the wildness of the mind, and the shoddy practices sanctioned in their containment. Interaction is as fraught for Andy as Alverson’s other subjects; there is a distance that cannot be bridged in his everyday encounters. Like Swanson and Turkington, Andy betrays an unease in the face of life’s trials, and leans in to the aberration he finds around him. Like Turkington, Andy is ambivalent about his craft, yet he keeps shooting, rendering the desperation and despair picturesque.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘The Other Black Girl’

Language keeps failing Alverson’s protagonists, their punchlines fail to land. Alverson probes the line between a laugh and a scream, positing that the audience’s response is largely dictated by how one chooses to frame the predicament. Andy’s willingness to see the subjects of his photographs as something more than geological features lures him into a dysphoric state which alters how he is categorized by the world. In telling this story, Alverson underscores how our actions are contingent upon a well of general consent — that anyone can lapse into what is deemed an aberrant condition without due vigilance, that to conform appropriately one must be flexible, as the lines are forever shifting. Out of inflexibility grows art and creativity; the ways in which Alverson’s characters refuse to budge endows a creative edge yet inflicts a personal deficit.  

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Television: ‘I’m a Virgo’

One of the most striking themes of The Mountain is the confusion between the real thing and its representation — it uses the distinction between a mountain and the painting of a mountain to warn that a picture is a dishonest thing; it traps what is fluid in a frame. The psychiatric patients are represented in the pictures Andy takes of them, but the moment of composition finds them on the verge of having a crucial facet of themselves expunged. Anti-comedy attempts to make an accommodation with that dishonesty, detailing the sweet erasure of being pure representation — to live in picture time, free of all topographic anomalies as map and territory merge, the soundwave and the idea being transmitted becoming indistinguishable.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Know the Cast & Characters: ‘Dirty Grandpa’

Tim Heidecker’s work took on a more political edge around the time of the 2016 U.S. presidential election — a campaign in which the world met anti-comedy half way. In his work with Vic Berger, and his more recent attacks on bastions of the right-wing infosphere like Joe Rogan and Tim Pool, Heidecker seems to be tiptoeing toward an idiosyncratic strain of satire. Mister America (2019) is a cinematic outgrowth of the On Cinema canon, and an exercise in fan service to an extent, but it speaks to a growing political awareness on Heidecker’s part.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘White Men Can’t Jump’

Mister America is a mockumentary which follows the aftermath of a trial which was streamed in its entirety on Adult Swim’s website. Heidecker was charged with second-degree felony murder when 19 people died from a tainted vape distributed by him at a music festival. Ending in a mistrial, the subject goes on the offensive against the prosecution’s attorney, San Bernardino district attorney Vincent Rosetti (Don Pecchia), by staging an insurgent campaign against the prosecutor. Mister America makes great play on the excesses of revanchist populism, as the hatefulness of the message is garbled by the ineptitude of the delivery system. Heidecker’s bumptious On Cinema persona is insufficiently skilled to properly utilize the dog whistle.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Know the Cast & Characters: ‘A Man Called Otto’

Heidecker stops off at all the obvious reference points — Armando Iannucci, Rick Gervais and Stephen Merchant, Sacha Baron Cohen, Christopher Guest — while equally taking cues from films like The War Room (1993) and Street Fight (2005). Mister America mimics the beats of the campaign documentary, but uses the presumption of authenticity this template sets out as a means of escalating the increasingly bizarre war of wills between Heidecker and On Cinema’s “resident expert,” Gregg Turkington, who inserts himself into the film to air his grievances against Heidecker, and expound on cinematic “gems” like The Shaggy D.A. (1976).

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Television: ‘Somebody Somewhere’

Mister America takes aim at the various stripes of right-wing grift, hawking protein powders while eulogizing a fabled past that can only be retrieved by bolstering the pitchman’s personal brand. It fashions an arc out of fresh air, taking Heidecker and his campaign manager, Toni Newman (Terri Parks), stewing in their hotel room and using various formal tricks to give this paralysis the appearance of progression. At its core, Mister America  is screen action propelling actual inaction, simulating a certain comfort from the knowledge that the failure of such obnoxious tactics is assured here. Therein lies some of the sadness that attends this effort. What is most significant about Mister America is how familiar its mode of play feels, as though the space for estrangement has been snuffed out by an injunction that the players act responsibly.

D.M. Palmer (@MrDMPalmer) is a writer based in Sheffield, UK. He has contributed to sites like HeyUGuys, The Shiznit, Sabotage Times, Roobla, Column F, The State of the Arts and Film Inquiry. He has a propensity to wax lyrical about Film Noir on the slightest provocation, which makes him a hit at parties. The detritus of his creative outpourings can be found at waxbarricades.wordpress.com.

Anti-Comedy Essay: Related — Know the Cast & Characters: ‘Mrs. Davis’