From the moment he showed up at Tim Heidecker’s house, the Chihuahua in the dragon costume seemed a little freaked out.
Mr. Heidecker — an actor, comedian and singer-songwriter — lives on a low-key, tree-shaded street in Glendale, Calif. On a recent morning, he was in his converted garage, getting ready for another episode of his talk show, “Office Hours Live With Tim Heidecker.”
As crew members hurried around the room, Mr. Heidecker, 48, installed himself at an old white piano and started banging out the opening chords of the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” A few feet away, the “Office Hours” co-hosts Vic Berger and Doug Lussenhop started blasting random pop-culture sound bites over the speakers, including Jim Carrey yelling “Alllll right-y then!” on repeat.
The noise was too much for Mr. Piffles 2.0, who is billed as “the world’s only magic-performing Chihuahua.” Dressed head to tail in a green get-up, he trembled in the arms of his handler, the Las Vegas entertainer known as Piff the Magic Dragon.
Mr. Heidecker headed to a standing desk in the middle of the garage. It was time to start planning the episode.
“We’re getting close here, guys,” he said. “Do we need Piff at the top of the show? Are we going to talk first?”
Mr. Heidecker first broke out in the 2000s, thanks to the avant-gonzo comedy he created with his longtime partner, Eric Wareheim — most notably the sketch comedy television series “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” He started “Office Hours” in 2016. Over the years, it has evolved into a weekly livestream and podcast.
It’s the kind of show where the actor John C. Reilly might show up as Santa Claus or the “Saturday Night Live” cast member James Austin Johnson might call in as Bob Dylan. Much of “Office Hours” consists of Mr. Heidecker joking around with Mr. Berger and Mr. Lussenhop. They weigh in on the news and take calls from viewers. The proceedings are underscored (and often upended) by a seemingly limitless supply of audio samples inserted by Mr. Berger and Mr. Lussenhop, who is known as “D.J. Douggpound.”
It’s a comfortably chaotic production that showcases Mr. Heidecker’s suburban-dad sincerity and occasional irritability. (He has been known to drop a call the moment he gets bored.) On a recent episode, he guided a listener through an imaginary acid trip; on another, he talked in detail about undergoing a heart procedure. That moment of earnestness was punctuated by ridiculous sound clips.
In many ways, “Office Hours” is a throwback to the zoo-crew morning radio shows of the 1980s and 1990s. Growing up in Allentown, Pa., during that era, Mr. Heidecker listened to Bearman and Keith on 95.1 ZZO, an FM station based in Bethlehem, Pa. From there, he moved on to “The Howard Stern Show.”
“My favorite thing about ‘Stern’ were the moments where you felt like they weren’t on the air — that they were just talking to each other,” Mr. Heidecker said. “The humor they generated was impossible to write, or to anticipate.”
Just after 10 a.m., “Office Hours” was underway. As Piff the Magic Dragon performed a card trick, Mr. Heidecker had the still-shaking Chihuahua in his arms.
“Maybe he’s troubled by you,” Piff suggested. “Hold him like a baby.”
“This dog was shivering when he came in,” Mr. Heidecker said, mock-defensively.
One of the magician’s sleight-of-hand feats left Mr. Heidecker so stunned that he yelled “No!” and walked off camera. Later, he joked about having a crisis from seeing so many baffling tricks up close: “I’m sick of this — sick of not understanding what the hell’s going on in my life.”
By then, a pair of dark circles had formed on his shirt. He raised an arm and asked Piff for one more bit of magic: “Is there anything you can do about my pit stains?”
An hour and a half later, “Office Hours” wrapped, and the garage emptied out. There were still a few hours before Mr. Heidecker’s children, ages 11 and 8, got out of school.
He hopped into his black Tesla and drove to one of his go-to lunch spots, Skaf’s Lebanese Cuisine. Along the way, he spotted a traffic cop sitting rigidly on a motorcycle behind a mailbox.
“That’s a very strange place to hide,” Mr. Heidecker said. “What’s he trying to bust people for — mail fraud?”
At Skaf’s, he ordered his usual: a chicken shawarma wrap and a Coke. It was crowded for the lunchtime rush, but the mood was relaxed.
Mr. Heidecker moved to Glendale in 2014 and quickly embraced its suburban pleasures. He goes for head-clearing jogs and plays on a softball team with other parents.
“It feels like it could be anywhere in the country,” he said. “Everybody’s living normal-ish lives. And there’s nobody famous going to the school. Thinking about it now, I might be the most famous person there. Which is not saying very much.”
Glendale is removed from Hollywood, geographically and spiritually — like Mr. Heidecker himself. When he and Mr. Wareheim began making their absurdist, hyper-metabolized comedy in the early 2000s, it was as though they had sneaked into show business. In later years, Mr. Heidecker appeared in big-studio films, including “Bridesmaids” and “Us,” and helped produce “Nathan for You,” “Moonbase 8” and other cable comedy series.
But the entertainment industry has changed drastically since Mr. Heidecker got his start. And though the once outré “Tim and Eric” style is now regularly aped in commercials and online videos, Mr. Heidecker said he was unsure where he fit in with pop culture nowadays — or if he even fit in at all. He mentioned pitching shows that seemed like “no-brainers,” including a series about a 1990s TV animal trainer starring the comedian Kate Berlant. None were picked up.
“I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to stop trying for a while,’” he said. “I’m not going to lie and say I wouldn’t immediately take someone’s truck of money to make my dream. But that doesn’t seem to be happening right now.”
“You’re competing for eyeballs against, like, people fighting in the parking lot on TikTok,” he continued. “I’m 48 years old. I don’t know anything about what a 19-year-old kid wants to watch on TV. Nor should I.”
That gives him time to focus on homemade projects like “Office Hours,” as well as his film-criticism spoof, “On Cinema at the Cinema.” And it lets him spend part of the year on making music — an unlikely career pivot.
He was 40 when he released the album “In Glendale.” Some of his fans had a hard time understanding how a guy who had once performed the gonzo “Tim and Eric” tune “Petite Feet” was now singing wry ballads about working from home and central air-conditioning.
“I heard a comment: ‘For somebody that makes such weird stuff, I’m disappointed that the music isn’t weirder,’” Mr. Heidecker recalled. “And I’m, like, ‘Well, that’d be a little on the nose.’”
In recent months, he opened for the alternative folk group Waxahatchee and performed at the hip-but-not-too-hip music festivals Hopscotch and Americanafest. His new album, “Slipping Away,” which comes out next week, is a deceptively gentle-sounding rumination on the rough patches of middle age, with its late-night anxieties and minor victories.
The opening track, “Well’s Running Dry,” finds him facing down writer’s block. “Bottom of the 8th” explores the pleasures of taking a kid to a ballgame. Even his tales of rock-world excess tend toward the mellow. On “Trippin’ (Slippin’),” he chronicles a bonding experience between himself and a few bandmates.
“We had a day off at a Best Western that had a pool, and somebody along the road had given us a bag of mushrooms,” Mr. Heidecker recalled. “I hadn’t done them since high school, when I was not equipped mentally to play around with psychedelics.”
He pinched a nub of shawarma.
“But this time, I took just a little bit and I was, like, ‘That’s the right amount,’” he said. “I wasn’t seeing things or anything like that. I was just very content.”
It was after 1 p.m. when Mr. Heidecker wanted to head back home to do some work on a screenplay and figure out how he was going to get his daughter to her choir practice.
He got back in the car and began the drive back to his house, winding through Glendale’s quiet streets. He was on a schedule but not in a hurry.
“It’s nice,” he said. “Pretty low stakes.”
The post A Day in the Life of Tim Heidecker, Glendale Dad appeared first on New York Times.
