The Eric Andre Show: Finding the Alchemist
Man-Boy Genius
I remember about 7 years ago, I was scrolling through Tumblr and I kept seeing low-quality gifs featuring a disheveled late-night host either interviewing a bear or quite literally, fire. I found out that this was from an Adult Swim show called “The Eric Andre Show” and I downloaded the first season. It was about four minutes into the first episode where a George Clooney impersonator began to chug coffee out of a large styrofoam cup where I turned off the episode. I looked up the meaning behind the show’s intention completely fell in love with it’s chaotic madness.
If you watch enough episodes, it becomes apparent that Eric (and the viewer) are caught in a hellish loop. The brilliance is how he manages to deconstruct the “late-night” narrative. Eric Andre serves as host with Hannibal Buress as his co-host. The show mimics every aspect of a late-night show: an opening monologue, a man on the street, interviewing guests, and hosting live acts. Season one is incredible since since they had little to no budget, his “guests” consisted of a various impersonators, a grizzly bear, and fire. He was able to get Sinbad and Dolph Lundgren though.
Season one’s quality is very low grade compared to the rest of the seasons. This is to give the impression of old public access channels once found on television. Filming the season with early 80’s cameras heightened Eric’s absurdity. The runtime of the show topped at 15 minutes which was more than enough time for Eric to make his guests and viewers, uncomfortable. This discomfort is what Eric thrives off of. Some have called Eric’s humor absurdist and nihilistic which can be tied directly to something Eric doesn't actively talk about; his race.
Eric was born to an African-Hatain father and a Jewish mother in 1983 in Boca Rotan, Florida. Growing up, Eric was the “wild child” of his school and would get in trouble for various mischievous acts. This would translate perfectly as he joined a band playing upright bass and later, decided to take a stab at stand-up comedy. This creative freedom allowed Eric to express himself to the nth degree. In college, Eric along with his friend, Hannibal Burress, created a low-budget pilot that was filmed in the basement of a Brooklyn Bodega. The show was pitched to Adult Swim and was granted the green light.
“The Eric Andre Show” is the late-night show from Hell. On the surface, the show is a hyper-gnawing experience that only seems to entertain the inebriated. Eric’s energy is violently manic while his co-host, Hannibal Buress, is as cool as a cucumber. Eric often berates or harass his guests to the point of threats of physical violence or walking off the show. On the interior, the show is a brilliant, absurdist subversion of America’s late-night programming.
“Anti” Late-Night
As he was making his rounds in the stand-up circuit in his college years, Eric noticed that his black peers always mentioned race in their jokes. Never wanting to regurgitate what’s already been done, Eric has learned how to acknowledge racial disparity by normalizing its absurdity.
Some of the jokes are physical, some visual. Physically, Eric is an absolute maniac. The show opens with an announcer off screen proclaim, “Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s The Eric Andre Show!” and what follows is utter chaos.
Eric runs into frame, screaming, and proceeds to destroy his own set; by any means necessary. He’s literally deconstructing “Late-Night”. After several fast edits of Eric crashing through his desk, tackling his band’s drummer, hacking off his penis, and having a threesome with the Claus’; he regrettably returns to his chair on set, completely out of breath, while his previously destroyed set begins to magically repair itself. He’s forced back into the status quo of normalcy; of keeping up appearances. While Eric is still catching his breath, his co-host (and logos) Hannibal Buress walks in. A running gag in the earlier seasons of the show was that Eric never prepared an opening monologue.
This leads to him “improvising” the latest in entertainment news. What Eric is also doing is parodying specific Late-Night tropes that plague mainstream media. A lot of these monologues feature Hannibal berating Eric and accusing him of losing the audience. Hannibal’s inclusion is to subvert the co-host position. The co-host is conduit between the audience and the host; Hannibal seems to be completely bored with the insanity of the show.
Audio is just as important to the subversive Hell as the visuals. The Eric Andre Show’s audio bed is full of broken boxsprings. The clearest examples of this are found in the opening monologues and the interviews. There’s prerecorded applause and audience whooping punctuated by a very aggressive, “Yeah!”. We, the viewer, never see the studio audience but the show is edited in a way where the celebrity guests look off-screen towards where the audience would be. These traits are magnified in the “Have you heard about this” opening monologue in season 2 that can only be described as having an existential crisis after realizing you’ve been dosed with about two-eighths of shrooms.
Working in tandem, Eric and Hannibal provide an uneasy experience for anybody that decides to visit their show. The anchor of the show is its celebrity interviews. Eric makes it his mission to make his guests as uncomfortable as possible. Although the show’s runtime is only 15 minutes, the interviews themselves can last as long as three hours. Eric has an arsenal of gags from acting insane, having bugs/animals appear on set, men crashing into and out of Eric’s desk, etc. The chair the guests sit in is also manipulated to stimulate anxiety. For example, Jimmy Kimmel had someone under his chair “tickling his taint”, as Eric explained to Larry King. Eric has made it his show’s ethos that the guests never know what’s going to happen once they get to the show. His producers tell the celebrities’ managers that it’s a “wacky late-night show” and nothing more. The guests arrive and become ravaged with chaos for the pleasure of the viewing audience.
In the five-season run, only two guests have walked off the set. Rapper T.I. walked off in season 4 after being exposed to too much male nudity; but the most known walk-off is from Lauren Conrad of MTV’s “Hills” fame. While being distracted by a question from Hannibal, Eric pulls out a cup of warm oatmeal from his desk and stores some in his mouth. Once Lauren complains to Eric about the heat of the studio, he “vomits” onto his desk. She turns away disgusted but is pushed over the edge when Eric decides to slurp the vomit back up. She immediately walks off. The scene is so obscene that many felt it to be a personal attack to which Eric has denied vehemently.
Black Nihilism
This separation between man and character has become a juggling act for Eric. Eric, the man, is reserved, intelligent and quite mild-mannered. He’s a far cry from the screaming maniac on the street. Eric even approaches interviews with an Andy Kaufman-like energy as he navigates the mundanity of the interview process. Eric rarely reveals the reason or why of his show. A lot of his responses are proto-nihilistic under the guise of “why do anything?” The peak of this was his interview with Larry King where it seems like Eric is attempting to be Larry’s worst guest. Eric is never mean spirited to Larry, he just has the energy of a student trying to make the class laugh. He would later state in an interview with Talib Kweli that talking to Larry was akin to him messing around with his grandmother.
This nihilistic trait of responding to the apathy of the universe (or any system of power for that matter) with a twisted sense of humor or lack of interest is something the black community have come to call “laughing to keep from crying”. It’s this trait that separates white viewers from black ones. It’s this specific lens where skits like the ‘Runaway Civil-Rights Slave’ have their most biting effect.
This nihilism is more of a lifestyle than a philosophy. As written by Cornel West, “(nihilism is) far more, the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness.”
The black experience is an existential one where identity and self perseveration seem like antagonistic forces to one another. “Anti” and “black” work in concert to provide a vision of negativity to the perceiver. “The Eric Andre Show” is known as “anti-late night” or “the black Tom Green show”. These labels, may not be intentional, but are inherently racist and provide an aesthetic of lower quality before you even watch it. Atlanta is another show that deals with black nihilism and even takes a jab at late-night with their “B.A.N.” episode.
The episode is exceedingly tame compared to any of Eric’s episodes but the thing that connects them is a song called, “Oregan Spirit” by Rolf A. Krueger. Four seconds of the song conclude Eric’s segments with the words, “We’ll Be Right Back” to the effect of the old ‘Technical Difficulties’ screen. In Atlanta, it’s used as a transitional piece for a commercial break and even plays a longer part of the track. This song, pursposful or not, serves as a connective tissue between these nihilsitic creations and is an expression of acknowledgment of Eric’s feat to deconstruct late night.
We’ll Be Right Back
“The Eric Andre Show” has been on Adult Swim for 5 seasons, starting in 2012 and it seems like it's finally coming to a close. Season 5 was released in late October 2020. A major announcement before the premiere was that Eric’s longtime co-host Hannibal Buress would not be returning. Hannibal claiming he was getting too old to be watching Eric “shit on his desk in front of guests”. Adult Swim even released a half documentary, half behind the scenes look of Season 5.
It’s never mentioned upfront but there seems to be a sense a finality in the video. Eric has never revealed the process of creating his show. We see the writer’s room, Hannibal briefly talking about him quitting, and even Eric’s parents! More importantly, we see a stunt gone wrong and Eric realizing how much he’s put himself through over the years. Wrestler-turned-actor John Cena threw Eric through a bookshelf that fell down on Eric's head. Eric went to the hospital and got a CAT scan and found out he had a concussion. I believe the man is ready to put the character to rest. “The Eric Andre Show” is an incredible exercise in absurdist subversive humor that manages to tackle every facet of the zeitgeist with every season. The show isn’t for everyone and that’s honestly one of it’s best attributes. It’s contribution to the form is innescapable and is unirocally one of the best Late-Night shows ever created.
Season 5 of The Eric Andre Show is currently airing on Adult Swim.
