The line between creative vision and personal compulsion has always been thin in Hollywood, though it is not often that the distinction is tested with a snake-headed walking stick and a sprawling East Los Angeles nursery.

Eric Wareheim, who with his partner Tim Heidecker spent the better part of two decades reshaping American comedy through the aggressively strange sensibilities of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! on Adult Swim, has lately been devoting himself to a pursuit that sounds, on its face, like a bit from one of his own sketches: the curation and sale of spectacularly weird plants.

Mr. Wareheim's atelier, called Serpentine, operates by appointment only and specializes in what he calls "misshapen" specimens — coiled trunks, torqued branches, the kind of flora that looks as if Dr. Seuss had been given editorial control over a botanical garden. The pieces, often placed in brutalist vessels, sell for four and five figures. A pop star recently purchased a towering Australian bottle tree for the island in the middle of her pool. (Mr. Wareheim did not name the buyer, which is how these things work.)

"I just had this awakening of putting a crazy tree in a cool vessel," Mr. Wareheim said, a sentence that could have appeared in any number of lifestyle publications circa 2024 but which, coming from the co-founder of Abso Lutely Productions — the company behind Eric André and Nathan Fielder — carries a certain additional weight.

This is not Mr. Wareheim's first departure from his comedy roots. He and Mr. Heidecker once started and sold an advertising agency, a detail that tends to surprise people unfamiliar with the surprisingly porous membrane between absurdist humor and Madison Avenue. He has directed commercials for Duracell and Little Caesars, and a spot for Novartis and the N.F.L. encouraging prostate cancer screening, with the tagline "Relax your tight end."

The plants, Mr. Wareheim said, emerged from a period of personal difficulty. "I turned to this and I was like, 'God, this is peaceful and quiet,'" he explained. "'I'm creating life versus something dying.'"

Mr. Heidecker, visiting Serpentine for the first time, offered his partner a rare compliment. "Tim called me an artist for the first time ever," Mr. Wareheim recalled. "I almost cried."

For a man who built a career on the comedy of discomfort, the validation appears to have landed gently.

Original story published in The Hollywood Reporter: "Comedian Eric Wareheim Is a Grower and a Shower (of Weird, Rare Plants)"