Jefferton is an embodiment of the hell that unrestrained strip-mall colonization has wrought on small-town America. In fact, I lifted it straight out of the town of Jefferton, the setting of Tim and Eric’s television debut, Tom Goes to the Mayor, which ran from 2004 to 2006 on Adult Swim.

If you’ve lived intimately with the primary articles in the Tim and Eric canon over the past 10 years, this scene may feel like home. The vinyl tablecloths are clean enough, but the bottoms of the tables are crusted over with dried food filth flies land on everything, and there’s probably a fair amount of human hair in there somewhere. To appreciate what Tim and Eric are saying to us, a part of you must be ready to embrace the premise that life is an all-you-can-eat buffet of macaroni casserole, cocktail wieners, and Jell-O salad that was left out overnight. Their work elicits characterizations that range from “surreal” to “juvenile” to “stoner comedy,” and it undeniably has shades of each, but taken as a whole, it presents a unified vision that speaks directly to a certain kind of fear.

Perhaps you’ve seen the sketch where child rent-a-clowns are kept in cages until their limbs become gangrenous and begin to fall off, or the one where a phlegmy boy nervously wails songs on a talent show while in the throes of a protracted allergic reaction. Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim-referred to simply as “Tim and Eric” when in comedic-duo form-are committed to extracting humor from some fairly disturbing situations.

Tom goes to the mayor porcelain birds