(electronic music)
- (Greg) Hey Wisecrack, Greg here. Ever since The Tonight Show aired in 1954, the American
late night talk show has been as ingrained in American culture as baseball, apple pie,
and using super soakers to drink tequila on hot summer days. And no one has done more
to demean this hallowed format more than comedian Eric Andre, who has used the genre to leave
a trail of horrified celebrities, befuddled pedestrians, and decimated wooden desks in
his destructive wake.
But is there more to the bizarre antics and his penchant for being gross as hell? Is this
really just a way to smuggle a deeper message to his viewers?
Let’s find out in this Wisecrack Edition on the Comedy of Eric Andre.
- (Greg) Here’s a quick rundown for the uninitiated. Andre is a standup comedian -
- (Eric) During racial sensitivity training he started saying the "n word"! Like crazy!
They're like, "Dude! This is supposed to have the opposite effect papa!"
- (Greg) actor -
- (Jay) How did you learn to do that? - (Eric) What? The same way everybody learns:
The day I hit puberty a wizard appeared and taught me.
- (Greg) And dystopian talk show host who, since 2012, has hosted The Eric Andre Show
on Adult Swim, with his sidekick, the hilarious Hannibal Burress.
It features a mix of in-studio bits:
(gunshots)
- (Greg) interviews -
- (Eric) You ever heard of a robot before? - (Woman) I don't even know what that means.
- (Greg) hidden camera pranks -
- (Eric) I'm Mr. Burrito, the human pizza? We spoke earlier. I'm from the pizza society
and I'm here to talk to you about pizza safety.
- (Greg) and the occasional musical guest.
(cheering)
- (Greg) It’s often very weird, usually hella funny, and if you watch an episode with
your step-mom Gail, she’ll be very confused and extremely concerned.
But Gail can be assured that Andre’s doing more than just goofing around. In fact, he’s
working in the vein of a tradition, first used to describe gross-looking Roman ruins,
and later applied to everything from weird gargoyles to carnival freak shows: the Grotesque!
While the grotesque was onced used as a way to strike the fear of God into the illiterate
masses with THIS nightmare fuel, it really became what we know it as today at the turn
of the 20th century, when Italian playwrights created what critics called “Theatre of
the Grotesque.” The Grotesque is more than just being gross. It’s about transgression:
by pushing boundaries and celebrating the abnormal, it helps us better understand our
allegedly normal world
Andre is far from the first person to use the weird and uncomfortable for cinematic
effect. Filmmaker John Waters put his name on the map for, among other things, making
a movie where the main character eats dog shit. Yuck. Then there’s David Lynch who
was more partial to severed ears. But in Andre’s case: the normal world he’s transgressing
is the celebrity world, and what better microcosm of that than the talk show? In doing so, he
wants us to question how “normal” the entertainment world is after all.
You only need to look as far as the opening credits to know that the Eric Andre Show is
going to be a million middle fingers to Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon and all their guests.
Where a traditional show has a house band playing crowd-pleasing jazz -
(upbeat jazz)
- (Greg) Andre’s house band opts for the genre’s discordant and chaotic cousin.
(uncomfortable music)
- (Greg) Where a traditional opening credits sequence might have some b-roll of the host
or a city skyline, Andre uses this time to psychotically destroy his set and occasionally
get his sex cult raided by the FEDs.
- (Eric) Heyy the ATF's here.
- (Greg) While this might seem bizarre and arbitrary, it destroys the illusion of normalcy
that surrounds the late night format, giving the audience a taste of what’s to come.
The same can be said of Andre’s interviews with celebrity guests, during which he’ll
do anything from set a rat loose
- Ah! My God! Oh my god! - (Eric) What? What's going on?
- (Greg) Yo pretend to actually pee his pants. By making these interviews as weird and unpredictable
as humanly possible, Andre is transgressing the normal formula for how a host is meant
to interview guests. A formula defined by pre-screened softball questions, clear set-ups
for plugging their newest product or film, and so on.
- (Kimmel) Are you proud of it? Are you aware of how good it is?
- (Greg) And in doing so, Andre exposes just how meaningless, scripted, and sometimes straight-up
stupid these interviews and other talk show tropes really are. Is shooting up your onstage
band really any more fake than rehearsed pleasantries? Alright, maybe it is a little more fake, but
still.
And while it might at times seem like he’s just being a dick, according to Andre, “It’s
not just about making somebody uncomfortable, or harassing somebody or giving somebody a
hard time. I set out to be the most incompetent talk show host of all time. .... It’s more
about blowing the guest’s mind, having them feel sort of an out-of-body experience.”
He’s the Morpheus of pop culture, if you will.
But Andre isn’t just transgressing the polite hand-shaking of meeting Jennifer Lawrence
on the Tonight Show. By pushing boundaries in his real-world stunts, we can start to
ask similar questions about the lines he’s crossing there.
Take the time that Eric ran through a civil war reenactment as a shackled runaway slave.
And because Andre has a tendency to push the line until he can’t push any further, there
is a slave catcher chasing them with a whip.
- (Slave catcher) Come back here Toby!
- (Greg) While Andre’s stunt is certainly “weird,” it forces us to ask more basic
questions: like isn’t it more weird that people do historical reenactments without
addressing certain conveniently omitted details?
Andre even said in an interview that the idea came to him after seeing an ad for Colonial
Williamsburg:
- (Eric) Where are all my black brothers and sisters getting their reenactment on? And
then I was like oh yeah black people weren’t having a good time in the REAL colonial Williamsburg.
- (Greg) Is Andre the weird one, or the people who dress up as soldiers defending slavery?
By disorienting our perception for a second, we’re able to see the situation for what
it really is.
- (Eric) Get off of me! Oh no...
- (Greg) Look I don’t know about you but I like dress up as a member of a Chilean death
squad on the weekends. You know, for the history.
If most art is an active expression of norms, like Norman Rockwell paintings celebrating
the joy of getting together and murdering a nice juicy turkey, the grotesque, is about
questioning those norms at every step.
Andre is trying to achieve something similar when he runs into a Tea Party meeting to kindly
let the attendees know
- (Eric) Excuse me, you guys forgot your hoods!
- (Greg) It might be absurd to jump on stage at an Alex Jones event and then self-identify
as a nihilist
- (Eric) I'm not a Democrat either, I'm a nihilist.
- (Greg) But we can also ask, isn't Jones' brand of snake-oil fueled conspiracy politics
deeply nihilistic in the first place?
We might compare Andre’s out-of-studio antics to those of, say, David Letterman. Letterman
broke up the monotony of studio time with almost purposely non-confrontational humor,
like strapping a camera to a roller-skating monkey or literally dropping random things
off buildings. Utterly devoid of any iota of social commentary, these stunts are put
into stark relief by the wild, incendiary political acts Andre incorporates into his
show.
By turning a banal reenactment or political rally into a situation that feels abnormal
and unstable, we’re forced to see the normal in a whole new light.
- (Eric) Here's my hotel key, I want you to have sex with my wife.
- (Greg) It’s like how if you drop acid before you watch the 1998 remake of The Parent
Trap, you realize that it’s actually a film about how all Americans have a split consciousness.
On one side, we’re rugged American individualists and on the other, British snobs, and those
halves are always trying to reunite so that our parents will love and accept us.
- (Hallie) We actually did it!
- (Greg) But you didn’t think we were going to skip the real nasty shit did you? I mean
shit quite literally.
- (Michelle) This is a bag of my feces! That's right!
- (Eric) Aw Michelle come on! - (Michelle) This is enough for you!
(Crowd screams)
- (Greg) Eric Andre has a deep love for all substances capable of being expelled from
the human body. Take the iconic example of Andre’s interview with Lauren Conrad, star
of MTV’s The Hills. Her publicist clearly hadn’t done their homework, as from the
moment she walks on set she’s visibly uncomfortable. But always wanting to be a good host, Andre
goes to extra lengths to make sure she’s relaxed - by vomiting on his desk and then
eating it in front of her. In case you missed that, he first pukes all over his desk, and
then he tries to subtly eat the puke. Conrad responds by getting the hell out of there.
So is there any way to explain this that doesn’t end with “and that’s why Eric Andre is
a disgusting human who never should have been given a show, and instead of watching it,
we should all just watch re-runs of Ellen -- a host we can admire for her kind treatment
of others.”
Here is what Andre later recounted in an interview about Conrad, “I’m not trying to be a
dick. She’s cool. I have no beef with her. It’s just, you know, I’m a psychopath
when I’m doing interviews. I hope she doesn’t take it personally but she didn’t like it
too much.”
Here’s the deal: we walk around in our day-to-day lives wearing clothes, eating well-prepared
meals, and wearing masks over our disease holes, trying to forget that underneath all
of our civilized practices we are animals that fart and burp and shit and piss and projectile
vomit at Brittany Johnson’s 9th-grade party. Even worse, Andre invokes this humbling, embarrassing
feeling in front of quote unquote “celebrities.” Their entire careers typically depend on our
belief that they are larger than life, ie that they almost certainly transcend the disgusting
reality of their farts loudly reverberating in the toilet bowl in the shared office bathroom.
Sorry Jared. My bad, alright?
What’s more he does so on the squeaky-clean, suit-clad terf of a talk show - where hosts
focus on family-friendly zingers and topical but not-edgy commentary. It’s also worth
mentioning that late-night host, Jack Paar, got in trouble for making a joke about the
“water closet” in 1960. By contrast, Andre spent an entire year not grooming himself
before the filming of his fourth season, not even letting the costume department *ever*
wash his suit. Like James Corden singing Carpool Karaoke, Andre is reveling in his own filth.
But all of that said, is Eric Andre gross? Hell yes. A hundred times yes. He’s so gross
and it’s shocking that he’s been able to land so many seemingly normal romantic
partners like Rosario freakin’ Dawson, who is now dating senator Cory Booker.
Andre is gross, but he is using this grossness to create his own theater of the grotesque
in which he is pushing boundaries and testing limits to make us think about how weird and
often disgusting our supposedly normal world is.
And just like a batch of your cousin Scott’s “special brownies”, the Eric Andre Show
is able to blow our minds and make us see things in a whole new light. So next time
someone calls you “weird” for eating an ice cream sandwich in the shower or “gross”
for throwing up all over wall street or “a criminal” for having a contest to see how
many babies you can hold, you can respond by simply explaining that like Eric Andre,
you are an artist using the grotesque to push the boundaries of experience.
But what do you think Wisecrack? Is he just a nasty ass comedian, or is there a method
to his madness? Big thanks to our patrons for supporting our channel and the podcasts.
Hit that subscribe button and as always, thanks for watching. Peace.