Here’s why Tim Allen’s Home Improvement character tended to express himself through grunts. Allen was best known as a stand-up comic before Home Improvement, which had been developed especially for him. ABC originally offered Allen shows based on movies like Turner & Hooch or Dead Poet’s Society, but he instead wanted to focus on something original and based on his own interests. The result was Home Improvement, where he played Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor, host of a popular DIY series called Tool Time.
Home Improvement would become one of the biggest sitcoms of the ’90s, and its success spurned Allen on to movies like Toy Story and The Santa Clause. The show also gave Pamela Anderson an early role as Tool Time girl Lisa, though the actor later left to star in Baywatch. The sitcom was still doing well in ratings when Allen and co-star Patricia Richardson decided to walk away from lucrative paydays for a ninth season, as they felt the show had run its course.
Home Improvement frames Tim Taylor as an average, loving family man who enjoys the simple things in life, including “manly” pursuits like power tools. One of Allen’s most common comic tics on the show was grunting, be it to express confusion or happiness at wielding tools of varying power. Allen’s grunting was so commonplace it even features in Home Improvement’s opening titles. That’s because the grunts are a holdover from Showtime’s Tim Allen: Men Are Pigs, the 1990 stand-up special that put the comic on ABC’s radar.
Men Are Pigs was a half-hour special that featured Allen – who was replaced by Chris Evans in Lightyear – in an extended bit about how men are basically apes and grunt all the time to express themselves, from eating to using tools. Diving deeper, Allen revealed in an interview with Detroit Comedy Scene that he first came up with the grunt “hook” during a show he was performing in Ohio. According to the comic, he was “dying” on stage and could hear the “grunts” of people eating and mumbling in the crowd. “Out of frustration, I started grunting parts of the transitions between observation so they would better understand my stories and for a spell, they actually got really responsive. I never forgot this moment.”
Tim Allen’s grunts became a strange comic signature on Home Improvement, and there are now YouTube videos compiling Taylor’s every groan. While Allen later reprised Tim Taylor for an episode of Last Man Standing, there’s been no talk of reviving Home Improvement for a new series. Considering it began and ended in the ’90s, maybe it’s best left as a nostalgic favorite from the decade.
