Skweezy Jibbs Made a Movie, He's Bringing It to Phoenix, and His Advice for Surviving the Phoenix Heat Is to Stuff Your Depends With Ice

Before we get into this: my recording only captured my side of the conversation. Even though this piece arguably reached a point during writing that it should have just been scrapped, I am continuing on because this feels nothing but fitting for the man being covered. What you're about to read is reconstructed from memory. The spirit is intact. Mostly.

I was in my car when I got on the call. This was a fatal mistake with the real-feel temperatures reaching triple digits.

Skweezy Jibbs jumped into the Zoom meeting with his signature purple “SKWEEZY” baseball cap on and we started to get into it with me apologizing for feeling like I’m pulling some sort of reversed and environmentally based “Hot Ones" episode on him. He asked me the temperature and I checked my phone before confirming it was a brisk 97 degrees out in Scottsdale, Arizona where I was talking to him from. I let him know that if he’s fishing for stunts that he should probably be able to cook an egg on the sidewalk by the time he’s visiting Phoenix for his movie tour next month. This prompted the question from him if the urban legend of baking cookies in a parking lot was real and I confirmed that yes, you can absolutely bake cookies in a parked car in Phoenix in the summer. I joked that if I suddenly disappeared he'd know I'd been vaporized by the heat. Jibbs made a remark about him picturing it being like a scene out of “War of the Worlds” (specifically the Tom Cruise version.)

Now that the conversation felt like it was flowing, I jumped into my first question for him.  “For somebody who’s just blindly walking into your movie who’s never heard of Skweezy before, what should they expect?”

I could see him piecing together the answer he wanted to give me for a moment…and then my phone overheated and closed all running applications.

I ran back inside and found an unoccupied office that I was able to temporarily take over, that in hindsight probably would have been a better place to start off initially. Once my phone cooled down, I got a four word all caps email on the already extremely chaotic and all caps email chain reading “DID U GET VAPORIZED”. I confirmed I had not, got back to the Zoom meeting and apologized, noting that the whole thing had an almost-planned quality to it. And then we jumped back into things. 

To answer my question regarding anybody walking in blind - If you are reading this and haven't seen the trailer yet, Skweezy would very much like you to go watch it right now. Like, right now. Like stop reading this, click that link 23 words back, and then come back to finish reading this. He doesn't want you walking into the movie blindly at all; he wants his audience to know exactly what sort of roller coaster they're getting on. 

Skweezy Jibbs is the persona of Portland based comedian Tim Savage, who has been doing this since 2007; longer than a significant chunk of his current fanbase has been alive. His new film, “Skweezy Jibbs Makes a Movie,” documents his attempt to create what he describes as “half ‘John Wick,’ half ‘Magic Mike’, half ‘Transformers,’ half ‘Fast and Furious,’ and half ‘Bad Boys.’” It currently sits at an 8.6 on IMDb. The film was produced with the same crew behind “Portlandia,” “Documentary Now,” and “The Rehearsal,” which goes a long way toward explaining how something that sounds like a backyard production on paper ended up being the kind of movie that converts complete strangers into fans before the credits roll.

The film has been touring city by city since November with Skweezy doing live Q&As after every screening, and the stops have been selling out consistently. Hoping for a glimpse at what's to come during our stop on April 27, I asked what some memorably unexpected moments from those interactions have been for him. At one of those Q&As an audience member raised his hand and wanted to know about the wigs being worn in the movie. Specifically why Skweezy was wearing one. Specifically why he was wearing a wig that looked basically like his own hair. Skweezy walked him through the logic patiently: you wear a wig because it's a movie. That's how movies work. The guy still wasn't getting it, though. Skweezy still wasn't getting why the guy wasn't getting it. He hit me with a “you know?” and I just agreed that yeah, “movies need wigs.”

When I asked whether he's in character or out of it when he's actually putting something together, he told me that the way this interview had been going so far should kind of give me my answer. To be fair, it did, but then I got a bit of a peek behind the mentality that Savage operates on in addition to that answer. Initially starting out saying this would be off the record, before immediately reconsidering on the grounds that “the character Skweezy Jibbs wouldn't know what off the record actually means” and saying that the statement he was about to give was “off the record, on the record.” I think I just pissed off editors that aren't even a part of this publication. 

Savage shared that the movie brings the character to something of a full circle moment. Not a retirement, not an ending, but a closure that long-running fans are going to feel. 

It's worth noting here that for someone who is almost always "on," there is clearly a real person behind the "HOH" making very calculated decisions. Two decades of living inside a character doesn't mean the character and the person have become the same thing. If anything, the more time spent in this conversation the clearer it became that Savage knows exactly what the character Skweezy Jibbs is, what he isn't, and precisely where the line is. The fact that most people can't find that line is kind of the whole point. The people walking out of screenings unexpectedly emotional are responding to something that took twenty years to build carefully enough that it feels effortlessly unscripted. 

I asked what he knows about Phoenix. "Well what I know about phoenixes," he said, "is that they rise from the ashes." He knows we're hot. And that Phoenix looks like it should be pronounced “puh-hoe-ee-nix”. That's about where his knowledge ends, though.

At one point I asked what he's genuinely bad at. "Everything, dawg." He doesn't let that stop him, though. It's that kind of answer that makes it easy to forget there's a twenty year creative apparatus running underneath it.

Next, in an attempt to dive a little deeper into his background separated from the character, I brought up “Attack of the Vyperians”, a book that he published under his real name. A decision I found interesting, as he thanks Skweezy fans in the opening pages, and it definitely reads like something that the character could have arguably written.

 "Oh we're going all the way back to THAT!" He laughed as soon as it was mentioned. At the time it came out, he explained, Skweezy simply wasn't yet the established thing he has since become. The decision to publish under the name Tim Savage wasn't really a decision at all because there was no other contending option. 

Next, he offered up some exclusive news adjacent to the subject that hasn’t officially been announced anywhere else to date: more books are coming, and they'll be under Savage’s real name. No further details, but certainly exciting news for any die hard fans. 

I think that the most grounded moment of the whole conversation came in closing when I asked if he'd point people toward other absurdist comedians in the same vein of Skweezy that he has discovered. He said he genuinely can't recommend anything though, because he's watched too many people completely miss the satirical nature of that kind of comedy, taking it further than anyone intended. He doesn't want to add to that.

He closed with some survival advice for me, drawn from time spent living in Florida. Buy Adult Depends. Stuff them with ice. When it melts, stuff it up with more. 

“Skweezy Jibbs Makes a Movie" will be hitting Phoenix on April 27th, 2026 at AMC Westgate 20 in Glendale, AZ. Tickets are available online.