On Cinema co-hosts Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington squabble over Medicaid fraud and the semantics of murder in the latest installment of Rolling Stone‘s “The First Time.”
The clip find the two comedians in character and opens with Heidecker trying to remember the first time he met a rat when Turkington wanders in and reveals he’s here for an oddly specific interview about the 60th anniversary of Casablanca. Heidecker reluctantly makes room for Turkington, who repeatedly tries to turn the interview into an episode of On Cinema.
When Heidecker bluntly says he doesn’t remember the first time he met Turkington, the latter deadpans, “I don’t think if you’re going to have a successful Rolling Stone ‘On Film’ segment, probably asking questions like that isn’t what people are looking for. Probably a better question would be, what is the running time of Casablanca?’” (The answer: 102 minutes).
The rest of the interview is filled with in-jokes tied to On Cinema and its latest spin-off, a political mockumentary, Mister America, in which Heidecker tries to run for district attorney in San Bernardino, California. During the clip, Turkington is forced to defend himself from accusations that he used Medicaid funds to purchase VHS tapes, while Heidecker brushes aside the notion that a vaping system he promoted led to the deaths of 20 people at his music festival (not actually, this is just a plot point from Mister America).
When asked to recall the first time he ever killed someone, Heidecker replies, “I’ve never killed anyone, intentionally… In my own life, of course we’ve all lost people near and dear to us, the sort of butterfly effect that we see happening where, what could I have done differently to save peoples’ lives? Of course I’m thinking of my son, Tom Cruise, Jr. —”
“Who you killed,” Turkington butts in, although Heidecker continues, unmoved, “Who passed away under my watch and I’m responsible for that because… he my boy.”
