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Jun 06, 2011 Les Savy Fav By Matt Fink

Under the Radar’s Music vs. Comedy Issue, which is on stands now, features an article entitled “A Mutual Admiration Society: Where Comedy and Music Meet.” For that article we interviewed Les Savy Fav’s Tim Harrington, among others, and included a few quotes from him. Below is the full transcript of our interview with Harrington.

Despite the fact that musicians and comedians appear to share a healthy respect for each other’s crafts, it’s still rare that an established artist in one art form makes a serious attempt to cross over into the other. Rarer still is the artist who can do both well, an exclusive group which includes Tim Harrington and very few others. As the lead vocalist and kinetic focal point of art-rockers Les Savy Fav, Harrington and his bandmates have earned a place in the indie rock panoply with a series of increasingly ambitious releases, but in 2008 he took a considerably larger risk. He started Beardo, a sketch comedy show for Pitchfork.tv where he writes, arranges, and performs in skits that range from the absurd (a vampire whose sexual conquests are foiled by flaccid incisors) and the satirical (an indie all-star charity song to benefit the rich) to the darkly cynical (a man ghostwriting a suicide note for a friend who uses it to score points against his ex-girlfriend). In so doing, Harrington has proven that with comedy, a little bit of audacity goes a long way.

Matt Fink: So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Beardo. What was your original idea for it?

Tim Harrington: It is what it is. I wanted to shoot a bunch of funny sketches or skits, and I was talking with Ryan Schreiber at Pitchfork who was starting Pitchfork.tv at the time. And we were drunkenly talking about it, and he said, “You should just do a show where you do whatever you want.” Obviously, that sounded awesome to me. “Do anything you want” always sounds like a good idea to me. So we started writing and shooting stuff, and it has been really popular and has gone really well. I’m starting going back into it seriously now, writing a bunch of new stuff.

I think one of the reasons [for doing Beardo] was that I have always really liked and admired comedy and comedians. It has always meant a lot when a comedian likes our band. Early on, we found out that David Cross liked our band, and it was during his Mr. Show run and we were all so excited. I think the crossover is called “stoner people.” [Laughs] They’re generally into comedy. So I’ve always really liked that stuff and have wanted to work on that. And, also, I get funny when we are on stage performing as a band, so I was looking for an outlet so that I didn’t end up doing some sort of standup routine between bands. My banter between songs was getting longer and longer, so I needed to find another outlet.

Has the process of making Beardo been pretty much what you expected when you came up with the idea?

Somewhat. Yes and no. The difference between Beardo and the process of doing my band is that I’m doing so much more of the writing and the inventing all by myself, whereas our band is really—particularly among bands—on the most collaborative end of the spectrum. We really write the music together. So when you’re by yourself, it’s sometimes really hard to not have someone to bounce ideas off of. A lot of the comedians that I really like—Bob [Odenkirk] and David [Cross], and now Tim [Heidecker] and Eric [Wareheim]—often it is more than one person. It’s two people or it’s an ensemble, because you want to improvise. It’s true for music, as well. I work with a bunch of people through Beardo, but I’ve never had a proper relationship with another writer. It’s hard because the comedians that I know are too funny to want to work for me, and the musicians I know are not funny enough. I need a modestly funny comedian or musician to work with me [laughs]. I wanted to do it without concerns of just putting something out there that was really raw and direct from my interests. I’m sort of learning as I go with that stuff.

Is there anything similar between the craft of writing a sketch and the craft of writing a song?

I’m so bad at the craft of writing a sketch, but for a performance, the impulse is similar. The other guys [in Les Savy Fav] are much more appropriately musical in terms of knowing how to play instruments and having musical talent. I like to write and I like to perform, so usually when I’m writing a sketch it’s about the way the timing is going to work and the way that you’ll be able to improvise on it. I think it’s the difference between playing music by ear and playing by sheet music. I feel that when people are excellent at the craft of comedy, it can be like sheet music. It will turn out well no matter what. Sometimes there are things that I think seem really funny, and I start writing and it’s still funny, but it gets in front of the camera, and you see it’s not as funny as you thought it was. As a beginner with Beardo, it’s the difference between really knowing what’s going to work and having sketches that are too sketchy, and I say, “Well, I’ll just figure it out.” With the band, I’d say we’re really good at writing songs, and I already know exactly how it’s going to play. When we’re performing, I’m making it better, not filling in deficiencies. We know it’s good, and we know what we’re doing, and the performance is about making it better, as opposed to being like, “I’m just going to improvise and wing it.” The Beardo stuff, some of it has been more like documentary, but it’s really interesting to me to write a skit that’s proper. I have no shame. I’m goofing off, but sometimes it seems like a cheat. Anybody can have no shame.

Have you ever had any concern that you’d not be taken seriously as a comedian since you’re primarily a musician?

Well, no. I’m not really taken seriously as a musician, either, so I’m used to it [laughs]. That question has always been stuck to our band, like, “Are you afraid of not being taken seriously as a musician because of the way you perform.” Again, I operate with no pride, so that kind of thing tends to not occur to me. It maybe ought to, but I resist it. My comedian friends are all pretty cool and supportive, and none of them snarkily ask if they could sing when I ask them to participate in a sketch. They never say, “How about I come and sing one of your songs?” I think that would probably be a reasonable thing to say. I like to show my work to whoever I can, so if I can show it to a lot of people at once, I’m happy with that. But I’m usually showing things that are half-baked. If the rest of the band wasn’t protecting it, I would be posting every practice and every song like, “Hey, everybody! What do you think?”

So what is your writing process like for your skits?

I keep a big index card box of general ideas, and whenever I want to write something, I go to the box and see which ideas are actually good. I find that once I start picking out of the box, it will take me five minutes to figure out whether I can finish it or if I should chuck it. Like, I was obsessed with this idea of animal hitmen, and I couldn’t figure out a way to make it work. You know when you have a pet, and then you don’t want it anymore? You’d hire an animal hitman to kill it. But I’m not good at making an idea work under any budget. “Animal Hitmen” needed Arnold Schwarzenegger starring in it. I had these identical twin bounty hunter dudes, and it just got complicated. For a while, I was always writing things that could be done live, like with Saturday Night Live, but none of them ever seemed to come out good. I was always putting some weird reference to camera work or some impossible stuff in it.

I haven’t done that much live performance. I hosted the comedy stage at Pitchfork [Music Festival] last summer and had to do four 15-minute bits, and it was really horrifying. I think I never really had a huge interest in being a standup comedian. I don’t really even perform live that much, I think, because I have this live outlet with the band and have spent so much time figuring out how I like to do it. I’ve seen standup comedians and how humiliating it is, but with bands you’re this overwhelming force, where even if the audience isn’t interested, you can turn everything up really loud and assault them. For comedians, it’s exactly the opposite. Even for the funniest comedians, there are always these people chattering in the audience, especially at a live music festival. Hannibal Buress was one of the guys, and he’s so insanely funny in a quiet room. But in a festival where you can hear Liars playing in the background, you just can’t be loud enough. Unless you’re like Sam Kinison, maybe you can.

When do you tend to find that ideas come to you for sketches?

I like to spend time thinking about them. Sometimes something will come up in conversation that I think is good, but I more enjoy sitting down and writing giant long lists. I enjoy improvising. Writing as you go along, during the day, is kind of journalistic, and you have to wait for something funny to happen. I’m much more fond of sitting down and writing these big, long sheets of paper with synopses of ideas on them. But maybe that’s because that’s the way the band works, as well. We tend not to write our music in a really directed way. We don’t take a little hook and make it into a full song; we more play, play, play and gather source material and then weed it down and organize it together. So rather than having four partly done ideas for songs, we’ll have 400 parts, and we’ll have all that source material and start arranging it and see what’s going together.

So what kind of comedy did you grow up watching and gravitating towards?

I always liked screwball goofy stuff when I was a kid. I actually was really into Gallagher [laughs]. As an adult, it’s the worst thing in the world, but it was so fucking hilarious when I was kid. But at the same time, I was also sneaking to see Eddie Murphy videos when I was in junior high. And I still think Eddie Murphy’s standup routine is the gold standard for all time. Then I was into Mr. Show. That was the thing that got me super into comedy. It was something that spoke to the aesthetic that I had that hadn’t always been addressed before. I had seen stuff that was funny, but in junior high I started to get into punk and started to get a different vibe and take on things. Mr. Show resonated with me in a way that a lot of other things didn’t. So as I was discovering that, I was also getting into a lot of BBC comedy stuff. I really loved Alan Partridge, and I was into the all of the British shows from the past, like The Mighty Boosh. The things that I always thought that was funny, my wife always finds really depressing. She doesn’t want to watch any Steve Coogan stuff or Alan Partridge, but they’re so funny. I just really love depressing comedy.

Do you think you have a more British sensibility?

I’m super British, but I don’t know if I have a British sensibility. I do like the pathos, the pathetic elements of stuff. I really like this animated [Beardo] one, where it’s this dude writing a suicide note, and you realize that he’s ghostwriting for his buddy who isn’t a good writer. And he becomes really self-involved while writing the note, and his buddy kills himself while he’s not paying attention. Then he turns the note into a weird self-serving thing to make his girlfriend feel bad for being mean to him. I think that’s super funny, but what’s funny about it is what a complete asshole that person is.

I also really love endurance comedy. Another [Beardo] video I really like is this long video that hardly anyone gets through that’s called “Cat Lecture,” and it’s this PowerPoint presentation of a cat vet giving a lecture all about his experiences to a veterinarian school, and the slides don’t work, so he starts winging it, and it ends up as 12 minutes of inane rambling. I think it’s perfect, but I don’t think anyone else does. It’s an acquired taste. It was kind of the same with music. When I first got into music, my parents weren’t really into it, and I was like, “Oh, yeah. Michael Jackson’s cool. Whatever, music.” But when I got really into it, it was related to comedy. I grew up in New Jersey, and the public radio stations up in Fordham had an evening kid’s radio show where you could call in for help with your homework. And they’d play pop songs but mostly novelty songs, like “Fish Heads” and “Weird Al” Yankovic and other funny stuff. And it was half a turn on the dial away from WFMU, and sometimes because of the weather I would not be able to tune the station in and would end up listening to WFMU and spend a lot of time listening to weird, experimental music, like some 40-minute John Cage thing. I would listen to it completely thrilled, with a huge dipshit grin on my face, waiting for the punch line for the song, like “Wait for it. Wait for it.” So I’d listen to an hour of experimental music, and slowly but surely, I got more into listening to the weird stuff on WFMU, which led me into getting me into punk and rock. So maybe that’s where my taste in music and rock comes from. No comedian could ever fail by just punishing me.

There’s a really good sketch where Tim Heidecker is doing standup, and he comes out, and he’s like, “Hey, everybody. Before I get started, is the promoter here? You know, there’s no water backstage.” And he spends his entire time just making weird, annoying, totally boring professional comedian observations and complaints, and it’s really fantastic. But the audience is laughing, and then they stop laughing, and then they don’t know what to do. I’ve always been of the mind that there’s only two kinds of comedians: angry ones and sad ones. I think I’m a sad one. Gallagher’s an angry one.

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