Eric Andre has been trying to read the Bible. But even with the help of pandemic-enforced downtime (and Adderall), he just can’t get into it.
“I’m only in the Old Testament, the Jewish part of it, but it’s fucking bonkers,” the comedian says in a Zoom call from a Palm Springs hotel room. He’s on a mini vacation, contemplating the drugs he might do in the desert and the trip he’ll take the next day to Salvation Mountain—a candy-colored hippie wonderland by the barren Salton Sea, emblazoned with Christian sayings. It will serve as the backdrop for a glorious Instagram post, but it will not make a believer out of Andre.
After all, Andre assesses, “God is not likable” in the King James version of the Bible. “God is like, ‘Cut off your children’s penis tips and have your slaves cut off their sons’ penis tips! I have spoken!’ And you’re like, What? What are you talking about? Don’t the slaves have it bad enough?”
The comedian is on a tear now, gleefully leaning in to his sacrilegious schtick. “I’ve never been able to get through it, because it’s so boring and poorly written…. I can’t even get past Genesis. It’s so confusing!” he exclaims, then sighs. “It’s not a good read.”
Shock is like a second language for Andre, a comedian who’s done supporting turns in everything from the sitcom 2 Broke Girls to the surreal FXX comedy Man Seeking Woman to Disney’s new Lion King adaptation. He takes center stage, though, on The Eric Andre Show, which will debut its violently funny fifth season this Sunday after a four-year hiatus.
“Chaotic” may be the best word to describe Andre’s iconic, namesake Adult Swim series, a walking acid trip that combines the high-stakes pranks of Jackass with the bizarro aesthetic of Let’s Paint TV and the unbridled energy of Japanese game shows. The bit, basically, is that Andre is hosting the worst late-night show on television. (A show within the show, Bird Up!, pursues the broader goal of being the absolute worst show on television.)
His unsuspecting celebrity guests are subjected to an absurd line of questioning (“Do you think God’s got a cooter, or a big ass kielbasa?”) and forced to sit by as he unleashes bugs, snakes, and raccoons in the studio; electrifies them with shock collars; gets naked; and physically destroys his desk with his own bare hands. In one episode from the new season, Andre interrupts a guest by declaring matter-of-factly that it’s “time to scream,” then starts screeching at the top of his lungs. In another, he shoves a piece of cake up his ass, muttering “Take it there” to himself as the guest watches in horror, completely transfixed. His unwitting victims this season include Tiffany “New York” Pollard, Luis Guzman, Blake Griffin, and the late Naya Rivera, who gamely handles Andre’s antics.
Andre’s man-on-the-street pranks take the gambit even further. In one upcoming episode, he boards the subway with a rat on his shoulder, insisting to disgusted New Yorkers that he’s looking for its owner. In another, he dresses up like a construction worker and plunges himself into fake concrete, screaming and shouting so passersby think he’s trapped. His absurdist setups alone can get a crowd going, but the show’s crew will occasionally amp things up by attracting onlookers with free food. “I’m filled with adrenaline, but I’m thinking about how it’s going to look in the editing bay,” he says of the pranks. “My brain is split into 15 directions.”
In real life, Andre is extremely mellow. He practices transcendental meditation twice a day, every day—an anxiety-soothing habit he picked up almost 10 years ago—and works to separate his real self from his onscreen persona by undergoing extreme physical transformations for the show. In season three, he wore a shiny gray suit and straightened his hair to look like Katt Williams; in season four, he got as pale as possible, lost weight, and didn’t shower, change his clothes, brush his hair, or cut his nails for weeks. He turned the temperature up in the studio to amplify his body odor. “I smelled like baked shit,” he says. “The girl I was dating at the time hated being intimate with me…. We broke up.”
For the show’s fifth season, Andre wanted to do the exact opposite of everything he did in season four. He redesigned the set to look like a purgatorial version of Las Vegas, then he got aggressively tan, bleached his teeth, doused himself in Brut cologne—“I wanted to reek in a different way”—got weekly manicures and pedicures, shaved his head, and got rid of the rest of his body hair, including his pubic hair. “It was excruciating pain, especially down the center,” he says. “It was rough. I don’t think I’d do it again.” He also gained 20 pounds, gorging on pizza and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.
“I was kind of depressed ‘cause I was like, ugh, is this what I’m going to look like at 60? Horrendous…. I looked like Pitbull fucked Kojak,” he says with a gregarious laugh. “It was like, Surprise! You look like Vin Diesel after he dies.”
Andre grew up in Boca Raton, the son of a Jewish mother and a Haitian father. He was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a wild child by his own account, the polar opposite of his mild-mannered older sister. His parents had different tactics when it came to raising their hyperactive son.
“My dad was very aloof, so he didn’t really tackle anything head on. He had his work,” Andre says during our second Zoom call, when he’s posted up in his Los Angeles home. “My mom was too nice. She took a Montessori approach to everything. She was never critical or trying to restrain me.”
Shows like Ren and Stimpy, Beavis and Butthead, and The Simpsons imprinted on young Andre, shaping his comedic sensibilities and offering an escape from his less than ideal surroundings. “Florida was very segregated,” he says. “Me, my dad, and my sister were the only Black people in a white neighborhood.”
After high school, Andre enrolled at the Berklee College of Music to study the double bass—then began experimenting with stand-up and pulling pranks. He’d plaster posters around campus for Weezer and Destiny’s Child shows, then watch with glee as duped and confused students actually showed up. After graduation, he decided to pursue comedy in New York—but elected to give up his apartment for a summer, sleeping in parks and asking audiences at open mics if he could crash at their places. This proto-Eric Andre Show experiment wound up working out frequently enough: “It would end up being a friend of a friend, or somebody I had a good instinct about,” he says. “It would never be, like, a cold, hard stranger. And I usually picked women over men just because men are dangerous. But you get an instinct from somebody pretty quickly whether they’re insane or not.”
Andre shaped the idea for The Eric Andre Show around that time, tickled by the dramaturgical irony of a late night host who doesn’t care about the job, coupled with the unlimited potential of street pranks in the busy city. He shot a test pilot in an abandoned bodega in 2009, with the help of Hannibal Buress and directors Andrew Barchilon and Kitao Sakurai, all of whom who would become integral to the series. After the show sold to Adult Swim, Burress took on the role of Andre’s undermining sidekick, who’d mock Andre’s monologues and stand next to the guests, oscillating between ignoring them and being actively hostile toward them. (Although, no, he never actually kicked Flava Flav in the face.) As feels appropriate for the show’s upside-down logic, Buress soon became more famous than Andre, thanks to his supporting turn in millennial catnip Broad City and his stand-up’s digs at Bill Cosby.
When Andre told Buress his plan for season five, though, Buress declined to return to the series. “He was like, ‘I don’t know, man. We’ve been doing it for a while. I’m down to keep collaborating, I just don’t wanna do the show anymore,’” Andre says. “I was heartbroken. Devastated…. The more I tried to talk him into it, the more I could tell he was pushing away.” (Buress’s rep declined to comment.)
Andre did, at least, convince Buress to quit the series on camera, so fans wouldn’t think the two of them had had a falling out. “He’s evolved and become very, very, very successful,” Andre says, zen about Buress’s exit. “I’m proud of him, so I totally get it.”
In true Eric Andre fashion, the show handles Buress’s departure by cloning one of his nose hairs to create “Blannibal,” a Frankenstein’s monster-esque clone played by James Hazley, a rock musician who they found on Craigslist. He fits perfectly into the Eric Andre Show universe, a cast that is largely comprised of Black and brown folks with outré artistic sensibilities—like Lakeith Stanfield, a longtime superfan, and Felipe Esparza, two new additions to the show this season.
“I love casting brown eccentrics,” Andre says earnestly. “I empathize with brown people that felt like they never fit into society and they never fit into a mold and they never fit into their stereotype. I love Lakeith. I love Felipe. I want us to be like the Parliament Funkadelic of comedy.”
Over the summer, a Change.org petition that called for Andre to be instated as the new host of The Ellen DeGeneres Show went viral, accruing over 100,000 signatures. At the time, DeGeneres seemed right on the verge of cancellation, after a slew of her ex-employees claimed she had presided over a toxic work environment. Andre was the internet’s idea of the perfect replacement. He cosigned the petition by retweeting it and sharing photoshopped images of himself as DeGeneres—though in reality, he doesn’t know or care much about the DeGeneres controversy. “We have a psychopath in the White House and we’re in the longest war of all time. It seems like small potatoes compared to the world crumbling into these right-wing authoritarian dictatorships and these industrialized nations,” he says. “Boohoo, Ellen was mean. Who gives a shit? I never thought she was nice! She seems like she’d be like, ‘Fucking get me a coffee! Now!’”
“Is that what cancel culture’s devolved to? ‘That guy’s not nice!’ James Corden is fucked if that’s the only criteria to get called out,” Andre continues, laughing mordantly. “James Corden and Lorne Michaels are screwed! They’re trembling in their fucking boots.”
He backs up a little bit, clarifying that, of course, it’s not acceptable for bosses to be miserable to their employees. It’s just that, in the scheme of things, he’s personally more concerned about other issues, going on another impassioned tear about Donald Trump and the climate crisis and the pandemic.
It ties back to one of the stealthier tenets of the Eric Andre Show, which, for all its chaos and lowbrow gags, keeps the same political punching bags in heavy rotation: the police, the military, the concept of patriotism, organized religion. But the comedian himself avoids analyzing his show in such overt terms. “I think art is primal,” he says. He speaks about his work in an atmospheric sense, saying his goal is just to take every joke “to the moon”—leaving off the “and back” part of the saying, because what’s the fun in coming down when you’re up that high?
A few years ago, Andre thought he might have to return to Earth. He thought Eric Andre would be done after its fifth season. There was no way he could keep his pranks going, no way to keep surprising unwitting celebrities and publicists who, bless them, never seemed to google Andre before dropping their clients into the void. But now that he’s here, with the fifth season in the bag, he’s completely changed his mind. He is Adult Swim’s homegrown auteur. He can do whatever he wants at this point, and his show has only gotten better with each passing season. Why, he thought to himself, would he walk away now?
“I was like, what the fuck am I doing? I’m going to throw away a show where I have total freedom?” Andre says. “I’d rather keep the show alive until I’m 100…. I can put it down and pick it back up whenever I want.”
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