So, for the past three weeks, I’ve chosen heartwarming, fun Christmas fare. Offbeat perhaps, but traditional. Now. It’s time for the dam to break open and have a few holiday shenanigans.
The rest of my most favorite underrated Christmas specials come from the world of South Park—see my Top 10 and the madcap brilliance of “Woodland Critter Christmas”—so I couldn’t go there. I toyed with choosing the Muppets’ The Christmas Toy (the obvious inspiration for Toy Story), but I thought I’d do what I wanted. It’s my blog, after all.
For those of you unfamiliar with Cartoon Network’s nightly adult programming block Adult Swim, stay up sometime and enjoy the madness. In addition to syndicated reruns and original content, there is a fabric woven into the channel that makes it seem as if it’s on mind-bending substances. And even if you’re not, some of the material is refreshing, even groundbreaking.
Don’t get me wrong—most of their offerings have been mixed bags. But sometimes you get something legitimately funny (Mike Tyson’s Mysteries), something legitimately unsettling (Moral Orel), and sometimes you get content that is unsettling in an intriguing way but not good. But the real meat is the stuff that is meant to be bad to the point it’s hysterical. The comedic team Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim are the Shakespeares of this type of Adult Swim humor.
While there was content from them before (Tom Goes to the Mayor) and multiple spin-offs since, their masterpiece is the series Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, a series they’ve described as the nightmare version of television. All Adult Swim content is geared toward unfortunates who might be up at 4am and tune into something truly bizarre, like their (mostly) brilliant fake infomercials, such as Too Many Cooks and Unedited Footage of a Bear.
Great Job! was pure madness—chock full of extras culled from Craigslist, bizarre graphics, hysterical music, cringe comedy, and gross-out stuff as well. The culmination of the series was the fifth season (Season Cinco, named after the megacorporation that is mentioned several times throughout the series) and the last episode of that season (the finale) came in the form of a holiday special: Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Chrimbus Special.
Like some later episodes of Monty Python, it is one of the weirdest half hours of television ever. Ostensibly, the special is a prolonged advertisement for a DVD of the special, the special of which is all about selling the DVD. This means, I suppose, you never actually see the special in an odd way.
The special begins with a man dying in the hospital (played by one of the many outsider performers found on the internet) who tells a child about the Chrimbus Special DVD. From there, guest actors (like the lovingly bad “impressionist” James Quall and “puppeteer” David Liebe Hart) appear in various segments, wrapping up long-running segments from the series proper, including appearances from Dr. Steve Brule (John C. Reilly) and Tairy Greene (Zach Galifianakis).
The special is performed for a live studio audience who act in much the same mannerisms as the host. It’s one of the things that make Tim & Eric’s work for television lovable. They parody the audiences of infomercials and their fakery with audiences full of folks who accept the goings on as part of the universe. In their world, Quall is a superstar and Chrimbus is real.
Of course, Chrimbus is a riff on Christmas, a holiday mostly geared toward commercialism and getting presents rather than giving them. Tim and Eric, in false teeth, bouffant hair styles, and clothes shot out of a neon spray gun try to figure out what to get each other for Chrimbus and are assisted by a Star Wars-looking imp named Dee Vee, the DVD Monster who provides the last-minute salvation of the special by using his magical powers to manifest free copies of the Chrimbus DVD and give them to all the members of the audience, the process so arduous he almost dies in the process. We come back to the hospital room where the true commercialistic meaning of Chrimbus reveals itself as the girl, having found out the dying man is Dee Vee, demands he use the last of his living strength to magically provide her a copy of the special. The special that is about selling the DVD. Of the special.
Why do I like something that takes incredible pains to be bad? It’s hard to tell. But Christmas is also a time of outsiders drinking too much (probably to make staying with their families tolerable), living a little off-balance, and tearing ourselves to pieces trying to make everything “perfect.” Tim and Eric add to this holiday madness by sending up the aspects of the holiday that bother us all: greed, the expense, the anxiety.
And yet: it also ain’t that deep. Tim & Eric bring an off-kilter flair to the holidays. ‘Nuff said.
The entire special can be seen on Max, though the DVD is only available through Dee Vee’s magical powers. But he’s dead. So, you can’t see the DVD. Of the special. That is about selling the DVD of the special.
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