Welcome to Real Infowars

If you’re alive in the dystopia and pay even passing attention to comedy, you may have seen that The Onion has been trying to acquire the InfoWars assets from Alex Jones. It’s been a complicated legal saga, with Jones using every possible avenue to stop it. The point of the whole gambit, though, is serious: to start getting money back to the families of the Sandy Hook victims.

In the meantime, The Onion has gone ahead and started making content as the new—excuse me, real—InfoWars. It’s pretty great so far.

To steer the project, they recruited cringe-sketch-horror-absurdist-comedy hero Tim Heidecker. Apparently they did so before realizing he also happens to have a creepily perfect Alex Jones impression. That’s a nice bonus, but it’s not really the point.

As The Onion CEO Ben Collins has said, the idea is to build something that goes well beyond parodying Alex Jones as a broadcaster of reprehensibly false conspiracies. The weekly transmissions, which I’ve been catching on YouTube, are already headed in that direction.

The channel’s Emergency with Tim Heidecker spotlights the Jones impersonation, but it’s not the only recurring bit. Real Infowars also hosts a separate segment featuring a character called Jim Haggerty, a right-wing huckster with his own guests, fake sponsors, recurring storylines, and steadily expanding comic universe. It’s easy to roll your eyes and say, “Didn’t Colbert already do this twenty years ago?” And sure. But this is a different breed of grifter altogether—one sustained by supplement scams, “male enhancement” products (let’s call it gender-affirming care), Christian nationalist bunker mentality, drip-feed paranoia, and every flavor of grievance entrepreneurship. The fake ads are consistently brilliant and have their own absurd narrative development.

Heidecker was made for this gig. I’ve been a fan since Tom Goes to the Mayor, followed by Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! I’m more of the Mr. Show generation, so it’s also cool that Bob Odenkirk helped shepherd Heidecker and Eric Wareheim into the wider comedy world. Since then, Heidecker has carved out his own very strange corner of it.

On Cinema at the Cinema, with Gregg Turkington, is completely nuts. At this rate it’ll match The Simpsons in number of seasons. We saw the live show a few months ago, and it was quite something. Then there’s Office Hours, which is looser and more conversational, maybe a little too juvenile for some tastes, but driven by exactly the same instinct to see how far a bit can be pushed before reality snaps.

That’s why this new InfoWars works so well. It’s two great tastes that taste great together. You get The Onion’s editorial quality and brand wrapper, but it’s also unmistakably Heidecker. They’re constantly fucking with the form while displaying an almost unnerving understanding of this toxic, auto-cannibalistic, nihilistic little corner of American culture.

So yes, it belongs to the lineage of The Colbert Report. But it also goes way further out, as both The Onion and Heidecker come from a much more absurdist tradition. The result is perfectly calibrated to be both unsettling and hilarious.

You’ll recognize a few comic voices, even when they’re buried under characters. Others seem like they wandered in straight from the Tim and Eric outsider universe. Collins and Heidecker have both said the goal was not just to make fun of Alex Jones, but to build a place where new comic voices can develop, and you get a sense of that even at the outset.

Do your part for a better America and tune in.