Tim Heidecker on Taking Over Infowars: "The Joke Should Be Mean"

When The Onion announced that it would take over Infowars in 2024, I had a hard time imagining a single funnier and more perfect thing than the ghoulish legacy of Alex Jones being stomped all over by the satirical news outlet.

A few years and several legal back-and-forths later, The Onion still doesn’t quite own Infowars. But it is proceeding apace and recently announced that none other than comedian Tim Heidecker would serve as creative director (and chief Alex Jones impersonator) when Infowars’ brand is finally handed over. And just like that, something even funnier and more perfect came to be: In Heidecker’s first video as Jones, an 18-minute “Emergency Broadcast,” he offers up a spectacular impersonation of the conspiracy theorist, announces an alliance between God and Satan, and ends by imploring viewers that “Infowars is a movement, and you’re on it. You’re on our ship. Come on board.” (While drinking a wine glass full of adult blood, obviously.)

At WIRED, we’re longtime fans of both The Onion and Tim Heidecker—a match made in heaven, if you ask me—so I had to take the opportunity to sit down with Tim and find out more about what kind of movement, exactly, he was busy plotting for the Infowars of the future. We talked all things Infowars, including the latest on The Onion’s legal efforts to acquire the brand and its archives, plus the shift of Heidecker’s own comedy into newsier terrain, his thoughts on the death of late-night, and why he never tries too hard to get attention online.

Read our conversation below, watch it on YouTube, or listen at the podcast provider of your choice.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

KATIE DRUMMOND: Welcome, Tim.

TIM HEIDECKER: Thanks for not calling me Eric.

Oh my god, I can't even imagine. Has that happened before?

Yeah, and even with close friends.

I have to start by asking, what goes into the uncanny parody of Alex Jones? How did you try to capture his id, if you will?

I guess I just can do it. I don't know. I don't think about it. I've been doing it for 10 years or more. When he was at the first Republican convention in Cleveland, a guy I do a lot of work with, Vic Berger, we went to the convention, and at the time, there was this chat—what was it called? Snapchat—which I guess still exists.

Yeah, I missed that boat. I don't understand it.

For a minute there, it did really good face-swapping—or, it probably still does. But you can do that real-time face-swapping. So I was doing it with Alex Jones, and he was there. So I just started doing it, and I could do it. I don't know how I could do it. I guess the key to it is to not stop talking, and to keep going, and filibuster as much as you can with not really any information.

In the 10 years that you have been parodying him, have you learned anything about the guy? Do you have a better understanding of his whole deal?

No. I think he's a great entertainer, a great talent. There's great broadcasting talent there. He’s taken it into a very dark place, where essentially it's a pills delivery system. That's the business.

Right, they sell supplements.

They sell supplements. I think that's the bread and butter. That's what they're there to do, and to keep people afraid.

If there's anything that might prevent you from becoming part of the many casualties of the globalists, it is to be stocked up with iodine and various silver components and things. So it's a big circus, you know, a big P. T. Barnum-y kind of a blustery thing.

You've been pioneering a certain brand of satire for a very long time. Starting with Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! It's been described as absurdist, surreal, maybe cringe. I was very young, I won't tell you how young, when the show debuted, but knowing what I know about it, I wouldn't describe it as overtly political.

No.

That, though, has changed for you. How would you describe your personal brand of comedy as having evolved in the last 20 or 25 years?

I instinctively said no when you said it wasn't political. I think in a sense it was; it had a point of view that had a set of values attached to it that looked at consumer culture mostly, capitalism, and found some sort of nihilistic, very cynical look at the modern world, which I think is a political point of view.

We didn't get into current events and didn't necessarily mess with the news, but I've always been that way. Most of the people I work with have very progressive politics. A bunch of artists and weirdos and musicians and comedians.

Obviously comedy's gone in a very strange direction recently. But I guess I would say the first five or six years of Tim and Eric was very much about Tim and Eric, not Tim Heidecker or Eric Wareheim. It was about a comedy duo that really didn't involve our own personal lives in any way, very much in character.

After that, it got a little tiring for me, or it got a little restrictive. So I think honestly back to the good old days of Twitter, I think Twitter—if the youngins can comprehend this—used to be kind of a fun place.

Oh, it was the most fun place.

It was great.

Well maybe not the most, but it was fun.

It was a really funny and fun place. I also found it was a way that I could talk about what was going on in the world very quickly. I can react to things. Then there was just stuff happening in politics that felt very Tim and Eric-y, or it felt very much like my kind of humor.

Herman Cain ran for president. He was the CEO of Godfather’s Pizza. This was 2012. It was when Mitt Romney was running against Obama. He put out this campaign commercial that was kind of almost like a-social media-style, very low-budget kind of thing. At the end of the commercial, his campaign manager is standing, looking cool, and he has a cigarette.

No! In 2012?

Yeah. Not Herman Cain, but his campaign manager was doing the commercial.

Why was his campaign … ?

It was just this creepy dude. He was being a cool guy. That was the funniest thing I had ever seen.

That's really weird.

It was like we had kinda gone through Sarah Palin a little bit, and even Donald Trump at the time had done his first foray, saying insane things about Obama.

There was just a lot there that felt mockable, and I'd eventually made a whole record about Herman Cain, a whole record from the perspective of, like, a lunatic who is a big supporter of his. I put it out, called it Cainthology. So that was probably my first overt political comedy thing.

But fast-forward to now, I would say that real life has eclipsed comedy in the Trump era. Like, we are talking a day before Donald Trump hosts a UFC fight outside the White House in an arena that he had built.

That he might not take down.

Right. Who can say, really? I mean, that would be extremely funny if it weren’t actually happening.

I think it can be both things, by the way.

But how do you think about that? How does the surreality of everyday life and Donald Trump and politics, how does that affect the work that you do?

I think it can be depressing and anxiety-inducing, and then also very funny at the same time. I love dark comedy. I love the darkest of comedy, and I think the best comedy reveals a pain that we all experience and fears that we all experience. So at the moment when people say, “How can you satirize this stuff anymore? It's too crazy”...

To me, it's not like “How could you possibly do that?” It's like “how do you do it?” Because it's so bleak, and it's so outrageous.

I think even if you did something where we would on Office Hours say, “Just talk about the UFC thing, and talk about how crazy it is, and don't try to top it. Just to be open about how it makes us feel and how funny it is and how absurd it is.” There's an audience of people out there who are feeling that same thing and want to know that they're not alone and they're not crazy.

I think at the moment, it feels like my best answer for that is that just acknowledging the insanity right now is enough to make people feel like there's a community of sanity out there.

I think that's what satire does. It acknowledges a problem or it acknowledges something that's crazy or wrong. It says, “I see this,” and some people, somebody just out there trying to teach kids at school or some nurse out there or somebody else is just like, “Oh, thank god, I thought it was just me.”

Alex Jones had a truly crazy response to the news of you becoming the creative director [of Infowars]. He posted, on X, a 30-minute video about you and your previous work. He also posted, quote, “The man hired by The Onion to take over Infowars produced pro-pedophile/child torture and murder shows for Adult Swim in conjunction with Will Ferrell, who took part in Satanic rituals with spirit cooking high priestess Marina Abramovic.” What did you think when you saw those responses?

Christmas morning.

Was it really Christmas morning?

Oh, metaphorically speaking.

I’m Canadian, very gullible. Now you know.

Good to know.

It was a total joy, because I've been swimming in these QAnon, 4chan, right-wing waters for a long time. I think when it was quite new and scary in 2016, 2015, when you had Pepe the Frog and memes of people being put in gas chambers and stuff, I'd never experienced anything like that before. That was like, oh my god.

Did you ever worry about your safety?

Oh, sure. At that time, there were a few incidents that were like, "Ooh, maybe we should get something," you know? Different. I'm not living behind a wall or anything, but you take some precautions.

We have reporters who cover the waters that you swim in. And it can be very scary. I looked at the responses to Alex Jones' post on X about you, and it was all people just being like, “Fuck you, Alex Jones.”

Well, the funniest thing was I think even a lot of his supporters were like, “Alex, this was a comedy show. Like, this is kind of embarrassing for you.”

It's very funny to Eric and I, and to our friends, because we were obviously the people making that, and we know who we are, and we know where our intentions are.

You look at it now, and you go, “Yeah, I guess, you know, I could see you taking this the wrong way,” but at the time we were just making each other laugh, you know? So I'm not here to defend it. It was very funny to see him get riled up about that stuff, for sure.

But maybe interesting, too, to see how his influence has waned?. I was surprised to see that it didn't generate the kind of response that I thought it would.

I almost wish we had gotten to this sooner. I mean, that whole movement is so fractured. He's at war with Trump every other day.

There's certain things he kind of gets close to being right about. He's on our side right now, apparently, with the war in Iran and thinks that's a bad idea. So, you know, he's shifting and changing, probably for cynical reasons or whatever, trying to grab the flow, wherever the culture is going on that side.

He’s gotta sell some supplements.

It's all about that. I think at the heart of it, though, is still this feeling of very uncomedic ideas like retribution and justice and consequences for your actions. Ideas that I didn't necessarily expect to be in the middle of.

But after learning more about the families and what they've been through and everything, it felt like a pretty noble activity to be a part of.

Well, let me turn to that then, in earnest. How did you get involved in all of this in the first place? Take us back to before you became creative director of the new Infowars. How did that even become a glimmer of a possibility?

I remember that they made an attempt to buy it, I saw that on the news. I kind of cold-called them on it. The Onion. But Ben Collins, who is the CEO …

Love Ben.

Great guy. I didn't know him at the time, but he was very active on Bluesky. So I reached out, I think actually just through my agent, to keep it kind of professional. But I just said, “Hey, I'd love to talk to you about it.”

I wasn't sure what they were planning on doing. I think my idea at the time was really just to get our hands on his master tapes, like on the hard drives, and just do something fun with those.

Does the archive come with the deal?

Uh, yes. I would think so, yeah. Unless they've been ... What did Hillary Clinton do? She bleached all her hard drives or something like that?

I don't remember that.

Really? Well, you're Canadian.

I'm Canadian, but also, I mean, I've been living in the US for 20 years. A lot has happened.

No, she bleached her, she did …

Don't give Alex any ideas.

So that happened, and then nothing happened. I didn't hear anything. I think their deal fell apart.

I didn’t know anything. I just went back to my life and did my normal things. Then they reached out to me, emailed me and asked me if I could get on the phone, and then it started with that. It started with a big question of what would you do if you had control of Infowars? Like, what do you think we should do?

What did you tell them? And how has that evolved since then?

The two things I said were, “Obviously, you're a satirical institution, and you should make fun of Alex Jones. The joke of you buying Infowars should last a period of time. It should be mean, and cutting, and hopefully land some blows and make him look like a fool. But that can't go on for very long. That's gonna get pretty old, because what else is there to say? He's a buffoon.

You know, The Onion is trying to grow, as every company tries to grow, but their comedy is very restrictive. Their tone, their sensibility is a perfect, beautiful thing.

It is. It really is.

It really is. But you can't bring in other voices. It can't make other shows that don't feel like The Onion. So they're kind of limited in that. But if they had another property, if they had another brand, and wanted to grow the overall company, the parent company, Global Tetrahedron, they could use this.

This could be the vessel for that, and they would bring in somebody like me who's not of The Onion, but is Onion-adjacent, with a similar sensibility, to build a comedy streaming platform.

Have you talked to any of the Sandy Hook families?

Yes. Once on a Zoom. It was a very moving and very powerful, but also a very positive experience. They were all in, very excited. One of the families was like, “I can't watch your video.” We had put out one of my videos of me doing Alex Jones. “I can't watch it with my wife, 'cause she gets mad when she hears your voice 'cause she thinks it's him.”

They were laughing about it. They thought it was funny. They're like, “Go harder. Do it, be as mean as you want.” They just want to, I think, see this guy—I don't want to put words in their mouth—but pay for what he did to them.

All accounts that I get from them and their lawyer and all those people are just thrilled about all of this, as much as you can be thrilled about something like this.

I'm curious, for you becoming the creative director of Infowars, there's the obvious comedic a