Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
For your health.


A 15-minute Sketch Show on Adult Swim, and a Spin-Off from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! based off of that show's "Brule's Rules" sketches. The show stars John C. Reilly as the incredibly inept and even more incredibly awkward-seeming Dr. Steve Brule, whose show is obviously shot on videotape for late-night public access TV seemingly sometime in The Nineties (early). Various sketches (or sketch-like set pieces) are introduced by Brule "for your health!"

First season lasted six episodes. Second season began airing in late March 2012.

Tropes used in Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule include:
  • And Knowing Is Half the Battle: Spoofed Once an Episode, when Brule summarizes what's been learned. "Some dads are not your dad" is one from the "Family" episode.
  • Black Comedy: Mixed with What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?. For all of the wackiness, with each episode it seems to become more and more a show about a complete failure of a person. Brule's dad abandoned him, his mother is insane and wanted to kill him and his dad so they'd always be with her, he's ugly and can't get girls (a problem he constantly attributes to "hunks") or friends. He comes off as kind of a slow man-child. The first season finale is essentially about his depression due to being a lonely, friendless loser.
  • Bloody Hilarious: Brule cutting off his finger in "Fear."
  • Cloudcuckoolander: Steve Brule practically lives on his own planet.
  • If I Can't Have You

Mrs. Brule: I was gonna mount your heads on the wall, you and your dad's...that way I could see you once in a while, if I wanted to.
Steve: But we'd be dead, Mommy.
Mrs. Brule: But you'd be here. I was gonna bury you under the house, so you'd always be here...

  • Nice Guy: For all his idiocy and incompetence, Steve is still a pretty nice guy. He's always friendly to the people he interviews, and generally just wants to make friends.
  • Parental Abandonment: Steve's father tragically abandoned him as a child.
  • Quarter Hour Short: It probably couldn't work any other way.
  • Spin-Off: Of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, specifically the "Brule's Rules With Dr. Steve Brule" sketch.
  • Stylistic Suck: The show emulates a cable access series from the late 80s/early 90s, complete with several deliberate technical errors per episode.
    • The segment transitions are riddled with visual artifacts to simulate the show being taped on very old VHS tapes.
  • Watch It Stoned: Well, like parent series, like Spin-Off, one supposes...
  • What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?: Oh, for Pete's sake, this is Tim and Eric we're talking about.
  • You're Not My Father: In the "Family" episode, Steve goes and finds a man that resembles his father to have a cheese and wine lunch with him in a park somewhere as well as give him hugs. This strange man only seems to be capable of grunting.
    • "Remember, some dads are not your dad."
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