![]() If some of it carries a latent tinge of fatphobia, Wareheim and Heidecker certainly don’t pull any punches when it comes to their own odd-looking bodies, and the casual anti-fat brutality of “Squat” throws into sharp relief what it’s like for fat Americans to exist in public. Mobster Bobby Bologna (Heidecker) slurping and spitting his fried eggs like a baby eating spaghetti in “Sauce Boy” is an unforgettably repellent sight, as is the slow-motion gorging of Brenner’s guys’ night buddies in “Hole”. If that’s not America, I don’t know what is.īedtime Stories sharpens the duo’s fixation on the alienating nastiness of the human body. Everything is for sale, everyone is expendable, and the slightest slip-up spells disaster. Scams and exploitation are everywhere, from the kindly child slavery of “Butter” to the predatory life coaches in “Baby”, and anxiety about ownership of self-image (“The Endorsement”) and the body (“Toes”, “Tornado”) permeates Bedtime Stories like a bad smell. In a similar vein, its send-up of male anxiety in “Hole” - in which the nebbish Dennis Murphy (Wareheim) is tormented, buried alive, and replaced as a father and husband by his ultra macho neighbor, Brenner (Heidecker) - taps into the toxic, whiny sense of entitlement and grandiose delusions of unfairness underpinning the Men’s Rights movement and much of modern American reactionary thought.īedtime Stories transforms incompetent men into hapless victims, adults into grotesquely overgrown children, and daily concerns like work and body image into a desperate scramble to stay alive. ![]() In part it’s this sensitivity to the strain of living perpetually on the edge that gives the series such a bite. ![]() How many people fight to survive each day while the suits above them decide on a whim whether or not they’ll be able to afford their insurance premiums? Baklava may seem absurd, but in its heightened portrayal of workplace stress it comes closer to touching the very real feeling of life-ending anxiety over money than many straightforwardly serious works of art. The tension is unbearable, and it’s almost impossible not to relate to the feeling of living in crisis in the shadow of a higher-up’s petty obsessions and thoughtlessness. When his boss’s supply is cut off, Barry’s mission is complicated by Crown’s increasingly graphic suicide attempts. ![]() Crown (Heidecker), is indifferent to Barry’s struggles, completely consumed by his fixation on a local restaurant’s homemade baklava. In “Baklava”, piano salesman Barry (Wareheim) struggles to outperform his coworkers, desperate to win a performance bonus to pay his kidnapped daughter’s ransom and protect the city of Dallas from a terrorist threat. ![]() The show is an experience you can’t shake, a one-of-a-kind dive into the putrid, gaseous bowels of a national experiment that went wrong a long, long time ago. Bedtime Stories turns American culture inside out and puts on a puppet show with its skinless, dripping remains, transforming everything from greasy spoon diners to late-night infomercials into visions of revulsion and degradation. It’s often scary in the traditional sense, but that doesn’t explain its uniquely queasy appeal, or its off-kilter insights into everything from suburban fear of emasculation to the solipsistic fervor of fandom. Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories, a series of 11 to 21-minute shorts broadcast on Cartoon Network’s late night block, Adult Swim, takes that sensibility and brings it into focus through the lens of horror. If Tim and Eric’s successors share one thing with their inspiration, it’s a fundamental American-ness, an understanding of the world as stressful, obscene, and inescapably competitive. Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim have been household names among stoners, dirtbags, and outsider comedy aficionados since their breakout success, 2006’s Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Their straight-faced bathroom humor and surreal local access aesthetic are tremendously influential, their imprint visible everywhere from Andy Daly’s pitch-black Review to The Onion ’s prim and fussy Lake Dredge Appraisal. ![]()
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