Tim and Eric Endorse "1,000 True Fans"

"What’s nice is that unless you need to be a multimillionaire, you don’t have to go after that mainstream audience,” Wareheim says. It’s a few hours after Awesomecon’s conclusion, and the two men are sitting at a poolside hotel bar. “We’ve carved out an audience. And that’s enough.”

“I feel like we’re too popular as it is,” Wareheim says.

He’s only half-joking. Years ago, the next step for comedians like Heidecker and Wareheim’s would have been to cash in their cult status for something more visible and bankable — a sitcom deal, maybe, or a role in some mawkish Jim Carrey comedy. Now, thanks to the devoted audience they’ve developed both on the air and online, they can bypass those comedic rites altogether and instead beam their grody capers straight to fans. At least for a while. “Later on, we’re going to have to conform to some standards,” Wareheim says. “We’re not going to be very funny together when we’re 45.”

Tim and Eric from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! (in this Wired article) giving credence to the idea of "1,000 True Fans" -- what it is and how it works discussed in this previous post. In brief, though, it is summed up as:

...the point of this strategy is to say that you don't need a hit to survive. You don't need to aim for the short head of best-sellerdom to escape the long tail. There is a place in the middle, that is not very far away from the tail, where you can at least make a living. That mid-way haven is called 1,000 True Fans. It is an alternate destination for an artist to aim for.

(pic source: Jill Greenberg/Wired)