courtesy photo
by Chance Solem-Pfeifer
Ordinarily, a stand-up comedian joking about esoteric local figures and flavors could be a sign of naivety.
But comedian Timmy Williams thinks it could also be seen as an encouraging indicator for fledgling comics in the Midwest. Locals poking fun at their city’s bands, for instance, points toward a trend of ground-up scene-building in Omaha, where the South Dakota-based Williams will perform this Wednesday at Slowdown.
“I’ve seen new comics from Omaha or Sioux Falls doing jokes about the music scenes there because that's kind of where the comedians are coming out of,” Williams observes. “So I see a lot of guys doing jokes about harcore bands I’ve never heard of. But the audiences are like, ‘Oh you got it! That’s just like Lamb of Sacrifice, man!’ As you perform more and more, you can spread your wings comedically and find more general things to talk about. ”
Williams, though, is by no means a green first-timer. He’s a founding member of the sketch comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know, best known for its five-year cable run on a sketch show of the same name. But in the last year, Williams has become a regular guest and tourmate of Omaha’s OK Party Comedy. Having lived in larger markets, such as New York City and Portland, Williams says he is appreciative of OK Party’s get-up-and-go, their inclusivity and their place in a broader vision of making the Midwest its own destination for stand-up.
“In other towns when people start a comedy scene, it can end up being very insular and pretentious,” Williams says. “The OK Party guys are always very enthusiastic about performing wherever, whenever whether they’re getting paid or not. They’re always very excited about getting anybody to do comedy with them even if it’s just some fat idiot who used to be on a cable sketch comedy show.”
After recently moving from Portland back to his hometown of Watertown, S.D., for family reasons, Williams says he’s had to make the best of being a stand-up comedian in a town of 21,000 without readily available comedy venues. The result has been a swath of new jokes about enjoying life in the Midwest (along with some shots at the coasts, mostly Los Angeles). Beyond regional favoritism, Williams’ critiques come from personal experience and close observation of geographic social customs.
“People think we’re just these knuckle-dragging misanthropes (in the Midwest),” he says. “We do have some of that redneck stereotype on the fourwheeler who looks weird at black people is afraid of gay people. But the Midwest I feel in a lot of ways is a lot more tolerant than the coasts are about differentiating and having different ideas.”
Williams hasn’t yet tested this new material in the coastal cities he mocks, but living in South Dakota challenges his joke writing in new environmental ways. He says this current tour through Omaha is crucial for working with sections of longer bits. At the same time, when Williams is not performing weekly, jokes have time to thaw and stew and won’t have their growth stunted by falling flat from one cold night in a club.
“Sometimes you have to rely on yourself and I just tell myself, ‘Make sure when you do that to make it funny,’” Williams says. “Whatever that might mean.”
While Williams doesn’t remove his shirt or wear dresses and wigs these days, as he often did on television for The Whitest Kids U’ Know, his stand-up contains one thematic remnant. Dig into the WKUK library of sketches on YouTube and you’ll find five years of absurd skits that tackle a version of Abe Lincoln’s assassination in which he first heckled John Wilkes Booth and a take on corporate war waged by high-rise snipers. In some of the same style as the show, Williams’ jokes still travel great distances and take detours and U-turns that sometimes hide where the joke began. Practically, though, the reasoning for the mid-bit reversals addresses a problem narrative artists have always confronted.
“Ending anything is hard,” Williams says. “That probably is something that I have pulled from doing Whitest Kids. You set up a premise and then flip it over. So sometimes a complete 180 is a good way to end something.”
As he increasingly pursues stand-up, Williams laughs that he’s happy to have worthy people like OK Party put the face of a former TV actor on their poster to “swindle” people into coming to the show. He looks back on his time with the troupe of Trevor Moore, Zach Cregger, Sam Brown and Darren Trumeter as crucial to shaping his world view and comic self-awareness. He was a player in a kind of first (and very successful) rock band before striking out on his own.
“We actually compare doing Whitest Kids live to being more of a band than a comedy troupe,” he says. “Because we didn’t have costumes, and we would drink too much and would write up a set list and just do it. Only instead of music, it was fart jokes.”
“If you look at us, all five are doing are things too because when you’re in a group you can’t fully put yourself out there. I have all these other pieces of me, most of which are mad and yelling.”
For the hardcore fans, Williams assures a Whitest Kids U’ Know movie script is still in the works. A year ago, a major movie studio bought their script for an end-of-the-world comedy. After (at the studio’s behest) they shifted the script toward a “Da Vinci Code-style” mystery story, the idea was scrapped with This Is The End and The World’s End coming down the blockbuster pipe this summer.
Williams says a movie is still being written in Los Angeles by Moore, Cregger and Brown, though it may not feature the massive special effects demands of the original that included clones of the five actors and massive explosions. Still, the WKUK team remains attracted to vast and wild plotlines.
“Back when Trevor (Moore) and I lived together, we would have very late, very drunken conversations,” Williams says. “We’d talk about how if you had endless money, it would be pretty awesome to make the Book of Revelations into a movie. There’s monsters and zombies and somebody needs to make that, man.”
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s staff writer. He, like Timmy, would like to live on a mountain of chairs. Reach Chance at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.