Tim Heidecker’s Interview With Fred Armisen Was One Giant Sneak-Diss on Bill Maher
This week, Bill Maher made waves by declaring that working writers aren’t owed a living wage and for his clash of the room temperature IQ’s with Joe Rogan over the topic of Biden vs. Trump. Last month, surrealist sketch comedy icon and professional podcaster Tim Heidecker took advantage of his time with Saturday Night Live alumnus Fred Armisen to focus on another pressing political issue – how Bill Maher is a giant butthole.
Heidecker’s freeform YouTube show “Office Hours” doesn’t dull its sharp elbows. Heidecker and his guests will freely take shots at comedy icons, one instance being the time when Bobcat Goldthwait went on the show to resurrect his beef with Jerry Seinfeld. Though not best known as a parodist, through “Office Hours,” Heidecker has been able to explore the sharper edge of his bizarro humor, and he recently used it to tear apart the dullness of Maher’s crabby, condescending persona on his own podcast, “Club Random.”
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Over the course of the forty-minute interview with the perpetually patient Armisen, Heidecker ranted about how “cancel culture” prevented Netflix from shooting Wednesday in black-and-white before praising Portlandia as an ideological blitzkrieg against the “woke mind-virus” while puffing clove cigarettes and slamming tequila with all the relaxed confidence of a certain centrist who gets high off of his own self-satisfaction.
“No one saw it and it hit like a(n) atom bomb,” Heidecker said of the “Club Random” parody in a follow-up video posted to the “Office Hours” YouTube page this past weekend. Heidecker explained that, when the first video dropped on August 10th, he was on the road doing Q&A shows, and he immediately began fielding questions about how the perfectly imitated production design and impeccably Maher-esque ramblings were planned. “We didn’t write that, we just sat there and did it,” Heidecker stated.
Heidecker’s co-host Doug Lussenhop then revealed that, after the episode dropped, an insider from the Maherverse (whose name was obviously omitted) DM’d him on Instagram to explain that, not only had Maher and his podcast producers seen the parody, but that they were furious at the representation put forth by the “Office Hours” team. “For a comedian Bill Maher can’t take a joke,” the source told Lussenhop.
“Whatever you’re angry about, the source of that anger is coming from the show you’re producing,” Heidecker plainly addressed Maher’s team. “All we’re doing is reflecting back. What am I supposed to do? I would love for him to call in and express his anger to me!”
Hopefully, we’ll be blessed with an appearance from Maher on a future episode of “Office Hours” where he’ll try to pretend that Heidecker’s parody wasn’t a perfect portrait of his own jerk-off show. Maybe Maher can even respond with his own parody of Heidecker on “Club Random.” New rule – even if you can't take a joke, you still have to underpay your writers to dish one right back.
