After a bankruptcy auction, a rejected sale and a year of legal wrangling, Tim Heidecker and Ben Collins are days away from a court hearing they hope will let The Onion finally take operational control of Infowars on a licensing basis — paying roughly $80,000 a month to keep the lights on, route money to the Sandy Hook families and lay the groundwork for a longer-term comedy platform built on top of Alex Jones’ wreckage.
Heidecker, the Tim and Eric and On Cinema co-creator who has been needling Jones for the better part of a decade, has been brought in as a creative overseer. Collins, the former NBC News disinformation reporter who now runs The Onion, is the deal’s public face.
They caught up with The Hollywood Reporter to talk about making edgy comedy in the age of Trump and what an Onion-run Infowars actually looks like on day one.
This is one of the wildest media maneuvers in years. What can you tell me about how it came together?
TIM HEIDECKER It’s been a wild ride. I’ve been involved behind the scenes for several months. About a year or more ago, when the initial news broke, I just reached out. I love playing with these people, and I’d been following Alex Jones and the QAnon stuff for so long. I offered my help and heard nothing, because at that point it was kind of a stalemate. But it came back again last fall. There was a new energy behind it, and they reached out to me.
My initial thought was: “Yeah, if you get this thing, it’ll be fun for a little while — but then what? Where do you take it? How do you continue to jab at him, but maybe not in a direct, satirical way?” What the world needs right now is a home for the people who used to make shows on Adult Swim and Comedy Central and are now scattered around social media making great stuff that isn’t curated and certainly not funded. Could the ultimate joke — the ultimate beautiful conclusion to this saga — be that this turns into a place for thriving creativity and humor and goodwill?
So Infowars ultimate becomes the new Adult Swim or Cartoon Network?
HEIDECKER Certainly a place for comedically left-of-center, outsider, individual — I don’t want to say political, but progressive — experimenting.
BEN COLLINS Not pieces of shit.
HEIDECKER Yeah. Not hack-y standup specials, not rambling four-hour conspiratorial podcasts by people who do sets at the Comedy Store. Good shit.
With Jimmy Kimmel making edgy jokes about the president and the first lady and president coming out against him, do you feel it’s a dangerous time to make comedy?
HEIDECKER Not really. I think it’s less dangerous than it was in the ’60s. Yes, there’s going to be blowback when you say things that hit the wrong way, but nobody I know feels scared to say what they think. There are consequences for your actions and your speech, but I’ve said terribly inflammatory things in the guise of humor and I don’t lose sleep over it.
COLLINS There’s a cottage industry of saying there’s no more dangerous time to do comedy [than right now]. If you say “I’m being canceled for my beliefs” — congratulations, here’s your 90-minute special on Netflix. It’s a very easy thing to say.
It is a scary time for speech in general, for good journalism, for tough investigative stuff, but that doesn’t mean you don’t do something. The Onion always makes fun of the big thing in the cultural zeitgeist. We have not made fun of gut-microbiology influencers for far too long, and now they’re running the Department of Health and Human Services; we have to parody these people. If it’s scary, then you’re not ready for the job.
Where are you in the legal fight to make this happen?
COLLINS On Thursday, we have a hearing to finalize this with the families and the receiver. We already have a deal with the families and the receiver to take over Infowars on a licensing basis. The reason it’s a licensing deal and not an outright purchase is because there’s a stay in court. It was supposed to be an emergency stay, lasting days or weeks. It’s lasted since August for some reason. We’re waiting for that stay to get lifted so the receiver can sell these things instead of just leasing them.
Until then, we’ll lease this and get these families some money. They’ve not received a penny yet. They’re owed $1.4 billion by Alex Jones. He’s moved stuff around, stalled this out, done everything he can to make sure he doesn’t pay up. We want to get them at least a cut of very colorful hats in the meantime, and once we’re allowed to purchase it, they’ll get money outright. We’re almost there. On Thursday, we hope to turn the lights on in a very otherwise dark studio.
For the first six months, the license is something like $81,000 a month?
COLLINS Yeah. It’s basically a pay-to-play to make sure the stuff in that studio doesn’t melt
and can eventually be sold. Otherwise, I think Alex’s plan was just to ride this out and declare it valueless so he could buy it back from his landlord. We wanted to interrupt those plans so these families could get some money. At every step, it’s been about him trying to evade actually paying up. We don’t mind stepping up here.
And whatever profits the new Onion-run Infowars makes go directly to the families in perpetuity?
COLLINS They’ll get a cut of merch. The actual details of the structure are TBD. The families care most about getting this out of Jones’ hands first, so we’re going to do that. The profits of buying the company — when we’re hopefully eventually allowed to do it — will 100 percent go to them. That’s the big-dollar figure we’re hoping to get to them. We’re just waiting for that to happen.
Alex Jones tweeted what he called your mugshot, Tim. What was that?
That’s a mugshot from a program I do called On Cinema at the Cinema, where my character ran an EDM music festival and gave out poisonous vape pens, which killed 19 kids. My character was arrested and went to trial. It was declared a mistrial due to one juror. All wonderful, great content. Comedy. Fictional. Did not happen to me, although the character shares my name.
He also posted a ton of old Awesome Show clips and clips from the movie I made with Eric [Wareheim], seemingly as if they were literal, not sketches, about my true beliefs in child torture and satanism. It’s absolutely beautiful, because 90 percent of the reaction to how he’s reacting has been mocking him. It feels like the final gasps of a beached whale.
Have either of you ever dealt with Jones directly?
COLLINS Weirdly, no. I’ve had to talk to a lot of people on his staff because I used to be a reporter covering this stuff. On election night 2016, my beat was Infowars. I turned on Infowars and watched him and Roger Stone come to grips with the fact that they were in power now. It was a really strange night. So a lot of his underlings, who have since left, I’ve had to talk to and get quotes from. But I don’t think I’ve ever actually talked to Alex. He’s said a lot about me over the last few years, but I’ve never talked to him.
HEIDECKER I appeared on Infowars once. They were live-streaming at the Republican National Convention and I interrupted the livestream and did my impression of him, to him.
How did that go?
He seemed to enjoy it. Like all narcissists, they appreciate being impersonated.
I interviewed Sam Hyde back in the day — the right-wing comedian who was on Adult Swim and then turned on you. What are your memories of what happened with that? Was that just an anomaly?
HEIDECKER I choose not to really talk about that, because it’s too complicated and riles up too many actual psychos. So I’m going to maintain my focus on Alex.
Who has no psychos in his realm.
COLLINS One psycho at a time.
HEIDECKER I’ve dealt with all this before. The QAnon world — I was in the middle of that. So I know their moves, and it’s much less white-hot than it was back then. That movement is so fractured now and disillusioned and confused. We’re taking precautions, but it feels really deflated.
COLLINS That’s the thing about Alex Jones. He spent 15 years saying, “There are going to be guys on the streets wearing masks, shoving you in the back of a van and putting you on a black site.” Then all that shit happened and he was like, “Amazing. Cool. Let’s go.”
Functionally, the stuff he was worrying about took place, and he liked it. That’s become an issue for a lot of his fans. They’re getting everything they want, and the world sucks shit. The amount of infighting among all these various far-right conspiracy theorists is incalculable. Everybody hates each other, and the battle lines are all over the place.
HEIDECKER Which doesn’t mean they get to go off into the sunset and go away. I just watched The Truth vs. Alex Jones, which I’d been avoiding. If you haven’t watched it, it gets you white-hot and ready to go try to get this guy away from the public. He has to go away. He should be completely destroyed. It can’t be forgotten. It can’t be forgiven and it can’t be excused. There has to be a lesson for the future that you can’t just do this.
You’ve hinted at the long-term plan. But what’s the day-one plan for the new Infowars? What can you share?
HEIDECKER We have a plan for the first few months: We’re going to enjoy laughing at him and mocking his world for a little while. I think that’s going to get old and boring for everybody, including us. After that, we’ll have the means and the technology and the attention to start producing original content that isn’t really connected to Infowars or the satirical side of that — just what we think is funny. We’ll start rolling it out under that brand. Eventually, let’s say in five years, you’re going to have to take a second to remember what Infowars was before we got involved.
You’re sticking with the name Infowars forever?
HEIDECKER Oh yeah. It’s a fun name. It’s a stupid name. It doesn’t mean anything except that it has this great story you can tell people: “Oh yeah, that used to be that lunatic’s website. Now it’s where I go to see good shit.”
COLLINS The one cool thing Alex ever did was come up with the name Infowars — because it actually does a very good job of explaining what we’re going through right now, which is an information war at global scale. It’s the No. 1 economy of the United States right now: just building data centers to try to control the path of information. The name’s great, but Alex is so one-note. It’s just: get afraid of this thing, take this supplement, it’ll make you stronger for the day they come and take all your stuff. I’m sorry, I’m bored by it.
HEIDECKER I want to add, because I think this gets lost: second to the Sandy Hook families, the most important thing for us is that The Onion is the most prestigious comedy institution America has — aside from Mad TV, which unfortunately went off the air a few years ago. It’s that way because it is so rigid and strict and specific in its voice. At the same time, Ben and the new owners of The Onion — Global Tetrahedron — want to grow because they’re a company and they want to do more things. To grow, you have to spawn a new thing. So this converges with that desire for the company to do that in a really very Onion-y way — a very of-the-world, political, weird way.
COLLINS The reason we’re able to do this is because The Onion itself is doing so well. We’re the sixth, maybe fifth, largest newspaper in the United States now, depending on where The Washington Post is in terms of print-edition subscribers. We have 76,000 print subscribers to The Onion. We don’t want to mess with that. We want The Onion to be the last institution in the news that has high standards, if possible. In this other space, we can take more chances, because you can’t really defile Infowars’ name.
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