First Draft Episode #251: John Hodgman
MAY 5, 2020
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John Hodgman, comedian and author of The Areas of My Expertise, More Information Than You Require, and That is All, as well as collections of humorous essays Vacationland: True Stories From Painful Beaches and Medallion Status: True Stories From Secret Rooms. John is also the host of the Judge John Hodgman podcast as well as I, Podius with Elliott Kalan.
Sarah Enni: This episode is brought to you by The Life and (Medieval) Times of Kit Sweetly by Jamie Pacton. Moxie meets a Knight's Tale in this funny feminist YA romcom about Kit Sweetly, a serving wench at a medieval themed restaurant who takes her brother's place as the Red Knight for a show. Doing so, rockets her to internet fame and a whole lot of trouble with her bosses, but the girl knight and her friends won't go down without a fight. The Life and (Medieval) Times of Kit Sweetly is out today from Page Street Books. Get it wherever books are sold.
First Draft is brought to you by HIGHLAND 2 a writing software created by John August screenwriter, author and co-host of the Scriptnotes podcast. I just finished writing a first draft of a book and I wrote the entire thing in HIGHLAND 2, and by entire thing I meant 90,000 words and counting. It's a long one.
Here's why writing it in HIGHLAND 2 was so enjoyable. HIGHLAND 2 is simple but really powerful. The main screen of the software is one endless scroll of plain text which, when you compile the final document, is automatically formatted into the industry standard for a manuscript. That means that as you're writing you don't have to worry about page breaks or even indenting paragraphs. And a few quick and easy keyboard shortcuts in HIGHLAND let you leave notes in-line that won't appear in the final document.
You can mark new chapters and more all without breaking flow, so you can leave your copy editor out of it and just get to writing. There's one navigation sidebar that has multiple functions. Within that sidebar, you can drag bits of text that you might want to come back to later, or monitor stats like word count and page count. And within Highland 2 there's sprint functionality so you can set a timer for fifteen minutes or thirty minutes or whatever time amount you want and use that as inspiration to really get down to it and get words on the page.
HIGHLAND 2 is clean, beautiful, and organized, which is to say it didn't distract me, it just got me to write. Check it out @highland2.app that's Highland and the number two dot app, or find the link in this episode's show notes.
Sarah Enni: Welcome to First Draft with me Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to John Hodgman, actor, comedian and author of The Areas of My Expertise and two other books of fake facts as well as the collections of humorous essays, Vacationland: True Stories From Painful Beaches and his latest Medallion Status: True Stories From Secret Rooms. John is also the host of the Judge John Hodgman podcast as well as I, Podius with Elliot Kalan.
I loved what John had to say about not doing the thing that you're meant to do. The difference between comedy and humor, and the power of thinking about your work as being disposable. Everything John and I talk about on today's episode can be found in the show notes.
A reminder that First Draft participates in affiliate programs, specifically with bookshop.org. That means that when you shop through the links @firstdraftpod.com it helps to support the show and independent bookstores at no additional cost to you.
If you'd like to donate to first draft either on a one-time or monthly basis, go to paypal.me/first draft pod.
You may have noticed something new and different in your feed over the last few weeks. I've launched Track Changes, a podcast spin-off series of First Draft that's getting into everything you don't know you don't know about book publishing. The first two episodes are already out, Publishing 101 and Agents: Who are they and how do I get one?
And the next full episode comes out on May 7th. It's all about how you and your agent sell a book. But later this week, be on the lookout for a bonus episode where we hear from industry experts about what is happening in publishing as a result of coronavirus.
In researching for the mini series, I learned way more than I could possibly fit into one series. So I've launched the Track Changes newsletter, a subscription newsletter, that every Thursday brings you further insights into how books get made. Both projects aim to provide transparency and give writers the information they need to think of their art as their career. You can sign up for a 30 day free trial of the newsletter and learn more about both Track Changes projects @FirstDraftPod.com/TrackChanges.
Okay, now please sit back, relax, and enjoy my conversation with John Hodgman.
Sarah Enni: So hi John, how are you?
John Hodgman: I'm fine, thank you.
Sarah Enni: Good. So I like to get a little bit of bio to jumpstart the conversation. And I'm going to go way back and ask about where you were born and raised.
John Hodgman: I was born in Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's one of my security questions, so enjoy my bank account everyone. Because most people, if they were gonna try to hack my life, they would be like, "Where were you born?" And they would say, "Brookline, Massachusetts," cause that is where I grew up and was raised and I make no secret of that.
Sarah Enni: You talk about in Vacationland, a little bit about your childhood home where you grew up. In that book you talk about growing up as an only child in a pretty enormous house, which paints kind of an interesting picture for a bookish kid.
John Hodgman: Yeah, I was an extremely pretentious only child, and very bookish. But I think really with an emphasis on ish. I mean, I think even though as someone who has written five books and worked in book publishing as the beginning of my career, I still love the idea of books maybe a little more than I love reading books.
I mean obviously, reading a book is the most engaged and rewarding way of absorbing culture, I think. You inhabit other heads fully and interior-ly, if that's a word. But I loved movies and television, you know what I mean? But books are work in a way that even challenging movies aren't. Even the easiest book is a little bit more work, asks a little bit more from you, than some of the more challenging movies.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, that's a really good point. It's interesting.
John Hodgman: You're gonna get a lot of hate on the internet for that.
Sarah Enni: No way! Not on this corner of the internet.
John Hodgman: And look, I've done a lot of different things in my life professionally and creatively largely to get away from writing for the same reason, right? Cause writing is, for me, the most creatively rewarding and most meaningful expression of what I am and what I can do. But it's also the one that is the most emotionally challenging to do than say podcasting, this I can do all day long.
It's fun to talk. Or acting, where they just treat you like a big old baby. I wish I could do more of that. But I went on television accidentally and you know, published a book of humor called The Areas of My Expertise in 2005 and that put me on The Daily Show as a guest. And we had a good time, Jon Stewart and I. And they invited me to come back as a cast member, which was an accident and I wasn't supposed to be on television, but culture has corrected itself and I am not on television that much anymore.
Sarah Enni: Well I want to lead up through that and talk about... I love your descriptions of your childhood, they are just so colorful and really fun. But it's interesting to hear you reflect on...
John Hodgman: I had a happy childhood. Yeah, it was fun.
Sarah Enni: I think about this a lot, about people being maybe naturally suited to a certain age. And you've spoken about feeling like you were meant to be, I think you said, a thirty-nine-year-old sexless bachelor.
John Hodgman: Yeah, emphasis on sexless. I mean that was the thing. As an only child moving into adolescence, I had very limited experience with any kinds of confrontations with siblings. I didn't do sports, so any kind of high emotional intensity interaction was very terrifying to me. So yeah, I made myself into a thirty-nine-year-old sexless bachelor and I kept that up pretty well into my late teens.
People would like to know more about that. I wrote a pilot for a TV show called “Only Child” based on that time in my life, that did not get made. But our mutual friend Ben Acker (listen to his First Draft here) has a podcast on my network, or the network that we share, the Maximum Fun Network, called Dead Pilots Society. And we did a table reading of “Only Child.”
Sarah Enni: You did that? That's great. I'll link to it in the show notes.
John Hodgman: It was a lot of fun. When something doesn't get made, you know, if you write a book that doesn't get published, I guess that's pretty sad. That's actually probably sadder.
Sarah Enni: But I would say that the odds of writing a book and having it not be published are lower than writing a TV show and not having it get made.
John Hodgman: Yeah. That happens all the time. You would not be in a contract to write a book, and get paid to do it, and then have the publisher go, "Yeah, you know, we're just not feeling it anymore." But that happens with TV all the time.
Sarah Enni: All the time. And TV pilots die an ignoble death. If you write a book, you could also put it on Wattpad or put it online or sell it on Amazon yourself. TV pilots, no one's clamoring to read those in their spare time.
John Hodgman: Yeah. There's nothing you can really do with it, which is why Dead Pilots Society is such a fun podcast cause it's like all of these things that didn't get made get a table read. And so that was very nice. I mean there is also something very liberating about being in an industry in which people are frequently commissioning you to write things that are unlikely to happen.
It lets you take chances and fool around in genres that you wouldn't necessarily mess around with. Try things out for size and so forth. And that's fun. It's liberating to imagine your work is disposable and I think that writers of prose are not encouraged to think that way because it's a huge investment. There's a lot of sunk cost in writing a novel.
Sarah Enni: Two to five years. It's hard to think about that as disposable.
John Hodgman: That's why I never did one. But you know, writing in prose is often quite personal and yet it is, I think, beneficial to think of it as being disposable to a degree. I mean that's what a, dare I say a first draft, is all about. Look, I'm king of the seques.
Sarah Enni: I really want to talk about writing for TV, or writing for yourself, but I want to build up to it. Because I can't not talk about you being a literary agent, which I just think is so fun, and interesting, and informative. You went to Yale and studied literary criticism, and then moved on to become a literary agent. What was the... that's a very particular job.
John Hodgman: You see how it's all about book-ish? Do you see what I mean? I did study creative writing in college, later in college, with Don Faulkner, who was the writing teacher there. They didn't have an MFA at Yale though. And then I studied in the summertime at a program at Yale with a great short story writer who sadly just passed away named Lee K. Abbott (short story writer with collections such as All Things, All At Once), whom I would recommend people check out.
Wildly wonderful, funny, great guy and kinetic writer of short stories. Kind of the last of the Raymond Carver (author of short story collections Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and Cathedral) generation of that boom of short story writers who would just write short stories and never write a novel. That doesn't exist anymore. But my degree was in literary criticism. I liked the idea of books. I like thinking about the idea of books, about taking apart what texts are and the work they're doing compared to the work that they think they're doing.
And then when I was graduated from college and moved to New York City, I rudely discovered that lots of people had useless degrees like mine. And even if only two people had them, no one wanted to hire you to do literary criticism. Even if there's only one graduate from all of colleges with a degree in literary theory, that person would still be un-hireable. You know what I mean?
New York did not prepare a romantic sixth floor garret for me to do my thinking about the ideas of books in, and I had to get a job. But I loved the world of books and the world of writers. And I realized that if I worked in publishing, I could be around books and writers, but I wouldn't have to write things myself. Which was what I knew, even then, was what I wanted to do. But you avoid doing the things that you know you want to do a lot.
Sarah Enni: Well I want to ask about that because that's a concept that's very near and dear to me. My first book came out last year...
John Hodgman: Congratulations.
Sarah Enni: Thank you. And much to my surprise ended up being about exactly that, about the young woman who is the lead of the book, makes art, but it's so scared to....
John Hodgman: You gotta say the name of the book.
Sarah Enni: The book is called to Tell Me Everything. And Ivy, the main character, is an artist but is so scared to show her work to anyone. And, of course, that's my debut book so it was very meta, and all my friends were like, "Oh, this is about you." Which I didn't realize until it was happening.
John Hodgman: You don't know what's going on when you're writing.
Sarah Enni: Well, no, no. You don't. But I'm interested in how conscious was it at that time? You were a literary agent for like seven years. That's a long time to not do what you're meant to be doing.
John Hodgman: Yeah. But I'm lucky that it was only seven. I mean, most people get into a career track that might not be what they're meant to be doing and lose a life to it, you know? And not unhappily. I stayed for seven years cause I was working in a beautiful office. This was a beautiful townhouse that had a garret-like top floor where my cubicle was. After hours I had a key to it and I could stay late and work in the boss's office, which truly looked like what your cinematic imagination would conjure for a garret to write in. I could pretend, you know what I mean?
And then during the day, I liked my colleagues. We got along really well. We were doing work that was meaningful and valuable. Working with authors that cared about, I mean, the core of the work at a literary agency though is selling, it as a sales job. Which to someone who has no stomach for confrontation, negotiating over the phone or in person for another person is, I can't even say the words, it's so scary.
I could have maybe made an argument, and gotten away with it, to say, "You should just hire me to scout. And work editorially with people and get things together and then hand it off." That's what I was doing essentially as an assistant, they relied on assistants for that kind of work. And if they had said, "Yeah, we'll pay you this meaningful salary and you don't have to sell a book, you just have to find people and be an artist in repertoire." And, as they say in recording, "Just deal with the talent." Whew, come on, I'd still be doing that! Great, great. Taking people out to lunch.
Sarah Enni: That does sound like a dream.
John Hodgman: But luckily, the business of book publishing has no business calling itself a business. And there was no way they're gonna pay a salary. I mean, they're trying to not pay salaries at all. So over time I realized that because I couldn't negotiate very well, and that is a core part of the job, it was a disservice to my own friends and clients to remain their agents. And I also had started writing on the side to supplement my meager income for magazines, which also existed at that time.
Sarah Enni: And I want to ask about this, and also about your mom's unfortunate passing from lung cancer being a turning point.
John Hodgman: I wrote all about it in Vacationland. My book, my penultimate book so far.
Sarah Enni: It's a little premature maybe.
John Hodgman: Pretty sure, pretty sure. There's Vacationland and then Medallion Status, which came out after Vacationland and is kind of a followup. And then I don't know. I don't know if there's gonna be another, we'll see. For now, it's the penultimate book that I ever wrote. So I guess I was twenty-eight or turning twenty-nine when my mom was diagnosed with cancer. I had just gotten married, still married. She had lung cancer, she was a lifelong smoker. It was not a pleasant surprise, and it sadly was not a surprise.
But she was only fifty-eight and within five or six months she had passed away. Aggressive treatment, but it was too late. And obviously terrifying and awful. One of the things that breaks your life in half, into before and after. And yet, as I discussed in Vacationland, my book, I would prefer for my mom to be alive, but if she had not died, I might still be working at Writers House and wondering how I'd spent my life.
And the reason for that is, something very specific happened, which is that I went back to Brookline to be with her and help take care of her, and help take care of my dad, be with my dad. And I left my job for a long stretch of time. And if you're a conscientious person and maybe an egotist, which I think I'm both, you want to believe that you're indispensable.
If you are a cowardly only child who's afraid of conflict, you don't want to ever make anyone mad at you and therefore it's very easy to stick in a situation, professional situation specifically, where, "I can't leave cause my clients will be mad. I can't leave cause my colleagues and my bosses will be mad, and the world will stop, and then what am I gonna do?" And the being away and leaving my job for a long stretch of months and realizing the world didn't stop and my clients were probably happier in the hands of professional negotiators.
And equally realizing that in the most on the nose way being reminded that life is short. It's like, "Oh yeah, I'm not gonna go back to that job. That's crazy." You step out of a thing for a while, you're like, "Oh, this is better. This is better."
Sarah Enni: Right, and perspective. I also started writing after my dad passed away.
John Hodgman: Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
Sarah Enni: So I had the same feeling. I think on Fresh Air you described it as a perverse gift to be gifted with.
John Hodgman: Yeah, I forgot I was on Fresh Air. That was a good day. Wow.
Sarah Enni: That's was a great interview. Yeah. I just think that's really interesting and I love talking to people about moments in life that changed their life. But it's also interesting that the writing had already kind of started to creep in and then you get this chance to step out of your life, a total shift in perspective, and then how did you move forward from there?
John Hodgman: I was thinking about your protagonist Ivy, who avoids being an artist in your book Tell Me Everything. Is she a writer? I'm sorry to say that I haven't read it.
Sarah Enni: That's okay, I'll send you a copy. She is a photographer and a fine artist.
John Hodgman: Right, okay. I think people of conscience have ambivalence about becoming artists because they're afraid of sharing their work or their deepest part of themselves. And I say people of conscience because normal human beings would have a thought like, "Why should anyone care what I think or see?"
Sarah Enni: Being an artist is inherently an exercise in narcissism in some very real ways.
John Hodgman: Right. And that's why, I mean, it's an industry that obviously favors sociopath's cause there are lots of people who don't have that second thought. You know what I mean?
Sarah Enni: Right.
John Hodgman: And unlike Ivy, having not read the book Tell Me Everything yet, for me I was not afraid of attention, I wanted it. I wanted to share of myself. I believed that mostly what I was doing would have value. I mean, I'm a straight white man, so the world needs to hear what I have to say. I mean basically, there was not a lot of cultural training for me to second guess the value of what I might want to do. And naturally I felt like, "Yeah, I would like to have my work out there." But the other thing, I didn't want to engage with myself in order to make the work happen.
Sarah Enni: Well that's interesting. Do you mean...? Well, cause I...
John Hodgman: To think about himself a lot, that sounds strange, right? But it's easier to not. It's easier to not think about yourself.
Sarah Enni: Very much so.
John Hodgman: And the process of sitting down and, I'm not a pure sociopath. I don't believe that my work deserves or that it's necessary that my work and my innermost thoughts need to be out there. I have some self doubt about it. And then I also have some self doubt about whether I'm capable of it. And so sitting down to figure out what's in your own head is scary, and uncomfortable, and avoidable for almost everyone in the world.
Sarah Enni: Yes, that's true. But I want to ask about, that's so interesting cause that leads me to your first three books. You begin engaging with this act of internal examination, which is writing, but you couch it in kind of a persona.
John Hodgman: Yeah, well they're haha, funny books. The Areas of My Expertise, I mentioned, was the first one. And there are two others that were kind of a goofball literary theory, art project. But it was Geoff Kloskey, who is a friend and is now head of Riverhead Books, I think at the time he was at Simon and Schuster, but someone I knew from the world of publishing after I left and I was then just writing for magazines, writing service journalism for like Men's Journal and profiles.
Sarah Enni: You were writing about cheese, is that right? At least part of it.
John Hodgman: Yeah, I definitely wrote about some cheeses. It's hard to get away from that in my life. I wrote about food for Men's Journal, which is a great job. I mean a great job. I don't know why I didn't keep that one. And then I wrote profiles of creative people typically for the New York Times Magazine. That would have been after my mom passed away, from 2000 to I guess 2007 I stopped that. So another seven years of mostly doing that stuff.
But I was also writing humor online for the McSweeney's website. Dave Eggers wrote a lot of things, also started a literary slash humor magazine journal called McSweeney's, and continues to be a great website, that was just publishing very esoteric, absurdist humor for the most part, and a lot of literary satire and stuff.
And so I had started writing some stuff for that website, specifically real slash fake advice column called Ask a Former Professional Literary Agent. In which people would write in, email me - it was very exciting to have email at the time - questions about what to write, publishing questions. And I would answer in the guise of a version of myself who had a very tenuous grasp on reality.
So it was a very absurdist advice column, but the questions were real. And I tried to... even though a lot of people would say, "What's the best thing to write?" I'm like, "You're asking the wrong question. The question is what's the most pretentious hat to wear? What kind of beret you should wear." Or whatever. And then things went into different territory as the column went on. And people would ask about knee pain and love life stuff. And I would answer in the guise of this worldly accomplished, but maybe homeless, former publishing professional who had this air of deranged authority.
Sarah Enni: And deranged authority kind of comes up in personae that you have occupied.
John Hodgman: Yeah, and so that version of John Hodgman was an elaboration of me. And I started writing comedy that way. So Geoff Kloskey said, "I know you want to write a book at some point." There's a guy named Ben Schott who had written this compilation of weird facts in the UK called Schotts Original Miscellany, and I loved the book. It was very McSweeney's in tenor and tone. And Geoff was, and maybe still is Dave's editor said, "You should do a version in America." I'm like, "Yeah, but he did it already."
He already had collected all of this esoteric facts, like what all the markings on laundry tags mean. You know, lists of interesting, weird facts. And truly, I mean, truly one of the most pristine jokes that I've ever... I think about it all the time. Cause his book, Schotts Miscellany was real things, right? It was just weird things that you never think about. I can't think of better examples. Go look at the book.
I'm sure there's going to be a link in the show notes.
Sarah Enni: Absolutely.
John Hodgman: He's great. And he's done lots and lots of books, but this one joke that was so good. It was like a list of unconventional measurements and all of them were real. You know, we don't measure weight in the United States in stone, but you do that in the UK, and blah, blah, blah. And then there was one, it was a millihelen. M. I. L. L. I. H. E. L. E. N. [Chuckles] A millehelen in his definition was the power to move a single ship.
Sarah Enni: [Laughs] Wow, that's amazing.
John Hodgman: And if you get that joke then you get that joke.
Sarah Enni: Then you get the book.
John Hodgman: Well, yeah, I mean, I kind of felt a door open in my mind. It's funny, I think about it all the time and I don't recall why he got away with this one joke. The book had whimsy to be sure, but it was factual. But the power to move a single ship, I was just like, "Oh." And then I was like, "Well, what if I did a book like this? But all of the true facts and astonishingly esoteric true facts and bits of weird true history, were in fact false and made up by me?" Specifically this character that I had already honed in the Ask a Former Professional Literary Agent persona. This deranged authority on what I called complete world knowledge in the areas of my expertise.
Sarah Enni: Well I want to ask about writing comedy, writing humorous. And this is such a specific like sub-genre of comedy, right? Writing in books is different. It's a whole different way of being funny than it is in speaking out loud, or off the cuff. But I just want to ask...
John Hodgman: Because it does not require laughter. It's very forgiving.
Sarah Enni: It requires context and you have to think about how it's going to look on the page.
John Hodgman: When you're writing prose humor. I mean, I don't even know that you can call it comedy because it's comedic. It's comedy-ish. But comedy, I think, really speaks to the art of provoking audible laughter from human beings or watching it, or seeing it, or experiencing it. Right? And humor, the obligation of laughter is minimal. Like a low chuckle is enough. And whether or not you provoke that laughter, you will never know because it's gonna be experienced the way all books and prose is experienced, which is alone and in silence somewhere else by someone else.
Sarah Enni: An imagined audience.
John Hodgman: Or you could do a reading, I guess, of a comedic passage from a book or whatever.
Sarah Enni: And you did an audio book...
John Hodgman: And that's what happened too, because around the time that I was still working at Writers House, which is the literary agency where I worked, I was playing with the idea of writing. I was writing for magazines. I think the first thing I wrote were capsule video game reviews for Time Out New York, thanks Tom Samilian for assigning me that job.
I was in a writing group with other then young people, as I was then young. And we're all writing our short stories and circulating them, and then meeting and talking about them and so forth. And I submitted some around and I had a short story accepted at the Paris Review and it was incredible. And I was edited by George Plimpton on the phone, like tearing the story apart.
It was an incredible experience. And he had been a hero of mine too because he was the definition of a dilettante. A guy who lived in a book-lined lair, and did all kinds of fun adventures, and had a sense of humor but was taken seriously, the two things that I kind of wanted. And there was a reading to celebrate that particular issue. It was an issue full of young undiscovered or previously unpublished writers.
And I read the story, which was not intended to be a comedic story, about a guy who sublets an apartment in Manhattan and doesn't realize that the woman who is normally living there is subletting it to him to get away from a stalker. So he inherits the stalker.
Sarah Enni: Oh my gosh.
John Hodgman: It's a good bit. I mean, it was a bit, as they say in comedy. But I wasn't playing it for laughs and then I read it and I was getting laughs. I didn't mind. I was like, "Oh yeah, this is funny." I didn't know it, but it was funny.
Sarah Enni: Well that's kind of what I'm really interested in is not everyone can or is interested in writing comedy. So I'm interested in how...
John Hodgman: Everyone's interested in writing it.
Sarah Enni: That's not true.
John Hodgman: Well, in my world.
Sarah Enni: Some people hate to laugh, but I have some friends who are truly not interested in that as a lense on what they write. And that's great and fine, more for us. But it kind of sounds like you couldn't keep yourself from it.
John Hodgman: Yeah, and I had an experience after my mom passed away. As I say, I'd been moonlighting on the side at Writers House, the short story came out a couple of years before I left, I was writing little bits and bobs for different magazines. And then when I left, when I decided to not go back to the job, I was like, "I have to make money."
And I was very lucky that Mark Adams, who is now a nonfiction writer of great and appropriate renown, he writes travel books Meet Me in Atlantis was his book about following the strange men typically who are trying to prove an historical Atlantis. And his latest book is about Alaska (Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska). Mark Adams, Mark C. Adams, very, very smart and funny writer and a dear friend.
And he was an editor at Men's Journal Magazine and he was the one who assigned me my first work there and essentially gave me a job. And I was writing about cocktails, at first, which is something I have a fondness for. And I was totally imitating my friend Adam Sachs, who was already established as a food and drink writer for GQ. And Adam is a very funny writer, but I was just doing an imitation of what I thought magazine writing was, quote unquote.
And it was humorless also. Like it wasn't honest, A, which is the most important thing. And B, in the same way as when I was writing that short story that got published, I was trying to be serious, like literally I wanted to be taken seriously, right? So I was trying to be serious about it and Mark said to me, "Why don't you just, you're funny, you should be funny."
And I was like, "I thought that that would be kind of like lesser, you know?" I was like, "You really want that?" He said, "Yeah, people like funny stuff. We want to publish funny things and you are it, you do it. And it comes naturally to you and it doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. Not a lot of people can do it." I was like, "Oh, I never thought about that."
I always felt it was like a tick that I had to get rid of. It didn't occur to me that, I mean, I'm pretty funny. I'm pretty funny, but lots of people are funnier. Do you know what I mean? But it is the way that I navigate the world and my own expression. And it felt like something I had to get rid of in order to be serious and I had to literally be serious. And Mark was like, "No, that's an asset dude."
And years later I would listen to Jesse Thorn, who is my co-host on my Judge John Hodgman podcast, which in many ways it's the same thing as Ask a Former Professional Literary Agent but with less absurdism. But Jesse has an interview show called Bullseye. He's one of the greatest interviewers in any medium and this happens to be radio and podcasting, it's on NPR.
And he was interviewing George Saunders (author of Tenth of December and Lincoln in the Bardo), a great serious writer who is also very funny. And George Saunders was describing the moment, I don't think he needed a Mark Adams in his life, at some point he gave himself permission to be funny when he realized it's okay for me to be funny in my work.
And George Saunders, if I remember correctly, said something along the lines of, "I felt as though I had been in a boxing ring for a decade with a hand tied behind my back, and now I had all of my talents, so then I could write funny."
And the important thing about being funny was when magazines existed, that was actually an asset that they wanted in the late nineties, early two thousands a quippy funny voice, which is still desirable in whatever passes for magazines now, the A.V. Club or whatever, right? And that kind of service journalism world. So it was marketable. So that was good. But more importantly, it was me, you know, as honest.
And the thing that I would always say when people would ask me about the books of fake facts, cause I was doing fake facts early on before everyone was doing them. You know what I mean? Now it's not so interesting. But how do you know that a fake fact is a good one? And I was like, "Well, I'm never lying." Like they're not lies. The fantasies that I'm inventing have to have an element of truth in them in order to be real.
So the example that I always give from the first book to describe what it's all about, and it's really kind of the only thing I can ever remember is, it's a lot of lists of interesting facts. But instead of a list of the nine U.S. Presidents who were addicted to sex or had smoked cigars or had weird hobbies or whatever, it was the nine U.S. Presidents who secretly had hooks-for-hands, like pirates.
And I wrote a little backstory for each of these presidents. Thomas Jefferson designed his own hook. And I think the one in the book is FDR had a hook for a hand, but no one knew about it because, out of respect, the press would only photograph him from the wrist up, which is a reflection of the real truth that it was not publicized that FDR was a disabled person and used a wheelchair.
Later I would retell the joke. I think that was how I told it on The Daily Show cause it was a harder hit, which was to say FDR had a hook for a hand, but no one knew cause it was shaped like a wheelchair, which is just weirder and not quite as elegant and more specific. But it's a hard hit. It's a TV show hit. That's performed comedy as opposed to, and I'm not even sure it's better, I'm not even sure people think it's funny and maybe some people feel that it's able-ist, but that was a bigger hit than photograph from the wrist up, which is very subtle.
But in any case, all of those things, you know, like Thomas Jefferson was an inventor, and FDR did have this secret. And in general, the idea was we imagine that there are these secrets to the people who hold positions like the presidency. So there was a kernel of truth that made it something other than just a non-sequitur, A. And B, everything within the book, I mean, even though the John Hodgman narrator of those three books was various exaggerated versions of myself, there was nothing in the books that I was not genuinely interested in and curious about.
And that was not some true expression of my own obsessions or preoccupations or whatever. So it had to be true in order to be plausibly fake.
Sarah Enni: Right. And also much more rewarding as a joke if it's not only human close to the truth until it's not, but of genuine interest to you. That's obviously gonna read differently I think.
John Hodgman: Yeah. I mean I think that there are two sides to it, as you point out. I started doing this act on The Daily Show. This was the resident expert character that I portrayed on The Daily Show until I transitioned into the deranged millionaire literally as a joke on Donald Trump. And it was a mistake in my life and it was a mistake in culture, I think. I hate to think that I may have given oxygen in any way to that thing. But the resident expert, which was the bulk of my work on The Daily Show, was this guy who would come in and explain esoteric concepts.
It was always important to me that I always wear a brown jacket, be as tweedy as possible, rather than what the other cast members and correspondents were, which were news person suits, to explain esoteric ideas and then lard them with absurdity. The one that I remember was explaining some abstract element of economics and Jon Stewart saying, this was all scripted of course, I've worked on it with Jon and other writers, nothing was off the cuff.
But Jon saying, "This is really depressing." And I'm like, "Well, they don't call it the dismal science for nothing, Jon." And he goes, "Oh, I understand." Which is true. They refer to economics as the dismal science. But then I said, "No, it was named for Sir Eustace Dismal, the late 19th century economist during the industrial revolution who first proposed making smokestacks out of children."
Just to hammer home the awfulness of the industrial revolution. And I said, "Of course, that idea never panned out, because if you make the smokestacks out of children, who are you gonna get to clean them?" Because children were used to clean smokestacks in the industrial revolution.
So, in so far as that joke worked, I'm sure there are lots of people watching television where it's like, "That's weird. That's gross. That's funny cause it's absurd." Then there are some nerds who are like, "I get it. He's talking about the fact that they used children to clean smokestacks." All of that joke works better as a piece of writing because it's constantly pinging off of this horrible truth.
And then I think more importantly to any writer, is that I had heard that thing about smokestacks being cleaned by children, it's a horrible image, and it stayed with me, and this was my chance to express my feelings about it.
So everything, even the biggest lie, has to be true. You have to express a true thing that you're interested in. And sometimes you don't know what you're interested in until you're writing it down. Or you find yourself thinking about a thing over and over and over again, and you don't realize that you're doing it until you're writing it down. And that's why the writing it down part is so magical and revelatory.
Even though when you sit down to a page that's empty, either on a screen or in real life, and you're like, "Well, there's nothing in my head. My head is exactly like this. There's nothing in there." And then you just start moving your pencil around or whatever, and all of a sudden all this stuff flies out. I mean, it's therapy. That's what talk therapy is, you know? And so learning what your preoccupations are is the first part. And confronting them, even when they are uncomfortable, is also a point of discomfort. But then it's easy after that. I mean, and then writing is easy.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Oh yes, sure. Let's talk about The Daily Show, especially from the perspective of working with other writers and honing a voice. And as you say, performing it and learning how to write for performance. I'm so interested in what that was like.
John Hodgman: Yeah. So initially on The Daily Show I wrote my own scripts, and I'm talking about within the first four months of a stretch of time that lasted nine years. So it was not a long time that I had the privilege of writing my own scripts on my own. That they would sit me down and be like, "The genius must not be disturbed. He's gonna knock some smokestack humor out of the park. Let's leave him alone."
And then I would work with Ben Carlin, who was the executive producer at the time. And then David Javerbaum, who was the head writer and then became an executive producer. They would very gently sort of nudge it when it wasn't quite Jon's voice, cause they knew Jon's voice better. And they taught me, you know, "Jon would say this, but he would not say that. Because where Jon's point of view is, and this is, blah blah blah blah blah."
And this was not like, "Jon would never say such a thing!" It was like, "Jon's playing a character too." Jon Sewart is playing a Jon Stewart character. So it was like, "That's not where he would come from in this, and blah blah blah." And then as I got trusted more, my responsibilities were withdrawn, were reduced.
As it became clear that I could produce the material, then it was like, "Let's make him part of the machine because A: He's taking too long." Because you would go in with an idea at 10:00 AM and you'd have to have something ready for rehearsal at 4:00 PM. And between that time, Jon will have read it at least once, if not twice with notes. And the notes might be, "This doesn't work." And you'll be like, "Um, I beg to differ. It works really well." But you can't say that because Jon knows what works on his show.
This is where not being a complete sociopath really worked for me, because I was able to acknowledge that he had expertise that I did not. And that's hard, I think, for a lot of creative people going into any collaborative work, particularly if it's a genre that they've not worked in before. Making art is about having a point of view, and to some degree being a tyrant. You have to stand for your work. Television, as a different kind of art form, is usually about surrender. And learning to surrender to criticism is very valuable if you're not a natural surrender like I am.
Now I'm in a different place of collaboration where I know a lot. My filmed credits are minimal. I mean I've been on screen a fair amount, but the things that I've written that have made it to film are, I think, zero. Other than what I worked on on The Daily Show. Like that script, The “Only Child” thing, didn't go. I've written a couple of other things. I have an animated thing coming out with my good friend David Rees later this year, called Dicktown, which you can look at on Hulu for, and FX, I think.
But I've got a lot of experience performing comedy on screen, performing comedy on stage, telling stories in a room, reaction dependent stories where there is an expectation that you're gonna be funny at a certain pace.
Then there is pleasure in defying that expectation and not being funny for a long time and letting them squirm, and then hitting them. I guess you would call it dramatic writing or writing for performance. It has a different DNA that I learned from working on The Daily Show and learned from surrendering to people who had greater experience.
Now I'm in a position where if I'm working with someone going like, "That's actually not a hard enough joke for this moment." Or, "That's not big enough." Or, "This needs to be simpler." Because writing for performance is often about like simple, simple, simple, simple, simple.
Now I guess you would say it's like writing a tweet, you know what I mean? Your thing is gonna pass in front of someone's eyes, in real time, and then go away and it'll never be there again. No one re-reads standup comedy. Well, no, that's not true. I mean there's lots of standup comedy that is re-readable as it were, and demands it. Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip, it's a master work of performance nuance, setting it up, paying it off, telling a story, telling a story that's very true.
But in that moment, you can't be like, "Uh, pardon me, Richard Pryor, could you...? Let's flip back a page and really savor this moment. Really savor mudbone in this moment." You know? So once they put me into the machine, I got paired up with DJ, David Javerbaum, who writes jokes. He is also someone who lives and breathes humor and jokes in a brilliant way. He and I would sit together and work on the things and it was like, "Nope, nope, nope."
And I learned if he throws it away, it's not just cause he's my boss, he knows what works better for this venue. And maybe I'll lose a few battles that I wish I could have won. I don't remember what they are. So that's the benefit of having, I mean, it was almost literally a daily show, right? Four nights a week. And it was topical. It's like it's gets thrown away, it gets thrown away, gets thrown away, and you learn to just discard. Discard ideas, discard stuff.
Sarah Enni: I had the great fortune to talk to Jill Twiss who was working on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver for six years, and she talked about that in a way I thought it was really great. Same thing. She was just saying, "You learn that you and your comedy is a renewable resource." You can just trust like, "Well this isn't working and I believe that I can move forward and come up with five more jokes." And that's really powerful, like you're saying, the dispose-ability of it is kind of freeing in a way.
John Hodgman: Yeah, and I was making some dour cracks about Vacationland being my penultimate book. My ultimate book and final book, thus being Medallion Status: True Stories From Secret Rooms available now wherever you get books and audio and electronic and print additions. I read the audio book, all of the words except for two words, which are read by John Hamm, the actor. Those two words are American Airlines, cause he is the spokesperson for American Airlines and that seemed like a funny joke. I have to credit my producer Kevin Thompson for that one.
But yeah, I make jokes about this being the last one, and I make that joke only cause I'm scared cause I don't have anything in the pipeline for the first time in a long time. I haven't been on The Daily Show now for five years. I don't have an acting job lined up. Dicktown, the animated, it's a short form animated thing. It's like eleven minute episodes, you know that took two years to make because animation is very slow. And it's been done now for six months and it won't come out for another four, I guess. It's changing. I mean it'll be out there eventually, which is great. It's gonna be a lot of fun.
That's an animated show about a version of a precocious John Hodgman child, but who is now grown up. And in this show, my character John Hunchman, was a precocious and affected fifteen-year-old who solved crimes in town for local children. Much like a beloved young adult series of mysteries that everyone knows. But I will not name cause I do not wish to be sued by the estate of Donald J. Sobol. It is an homage.
But anyway, my character was a prodigal boy detective in this town called Richardsville known unaffectionately by the locals as Dicktown cause it's a bad town.
And I was famous then, but then I grew up and now I'm in my late thirties, early forties, my character. And I have not left town and I am still solving crimes for teenagers, much to my embarrassment. I failed to launch as they say. And David Rees, who is the cartoonist and humorist and satirist and TV show host and many, many things. R. E. E. S., look him up. And my dear friend and a true genius.
But David Rees's character is my character's former high school bully and arch-nemesis who has also failed to thrive in his life. And is sort of the last person I know in town. And I don't have a driver's license for reasons that get revealed. And David Rees is my driver and muscle as I solve crimes for teenagers in this town.
Sarah Enni: That is amazing. I love that.
John Hodgman: Please keep an eye out. You gotta be plugging at all times cause there's so much culture out there.
Sarah Enni: That's true.
John Hodgman: But that's done in the can. I would love if they would let us make more of those. I have no idea if they will. David and I are working on some other TV projects. I don't have a book contract at the moment. Unlike Medallion Status, which I knew I wanted to write after Vacationland. I already had those stories in my mind, I don't know what's in my mind right now.
Sarah Enni: Interesting.
John Hodgman: So it is a scary place to be. I don't know when I next sit down at a blank page, I don't know what the stories are right now.
Sarah Enni: You're in the gathering stage perhaps.
John Hodgman: Uh, yeah. Or maybe retirement. I mean, I've kind of done my life's work. I don't know. I feel really good about the stuff that I've put out there. And I love doing the podcast Judge John Hodgman. But whether the next thing is gonna be a book or not, I don't know. But I try not to panic because... what was the name of the person, John Oliver?
Sarah Enni: Oh, Jill Twiss.
John Hodgman: Right. But like Jill Twiss said, and I don't know her personally, but if she worked on that show you know she's a genius. It's important to remember that your creativity is a renewable resource. Your brain is working all the time. And as I quote Kenny Shopsin at the end of this book, I can't go into who Kenny Shopsin was, look him up. Sadly he's passed on too, but one of my great inspirations.
But you know, when I was working on my third book of fake facts and facing that deadline, Kenny said, "Your brain won't let you fuck up." Like, "You've got stuff in there. Don't worry about it. It'll come out. As the deadline gets closer, it'll come out." And that's true. You know, you just gotta sit down and do it again.
Ugh! That's the other thing. It's comforting to know this a renewable resource, but it's also like, "Uh, I've already dug down there." You know what I mean?
Sarah Enni: Yeah.
John Hodgman: It's hard down in the mines.
Sarah Enni: And trusting and knowing that you're gonna find something down there doesn't replace the hard work of it.
John Hodgman: Well, first of all, you don't know. You never really know that you're gonna find something down there. Maybe you know in the abstract that the brain is not tapped, but the fear is that it is, for most people. And you don't know whether you're gonna bring up diamonds or coal, and even coal has value. Maybe it's just gonna be sand, you know what I mean?
Sarah Enni: I don't want to let you go without talking a little bit more about Medallion Status and Vacationland. My feeling about the journey that you kind of go through with Vacationland and Medallion Status was, Vacationland is kind of dealing with privilege and coming to know yourself as someone who has experienced it. And then Medallion Status is like sort of slowly losing it or losing status and figuring out what's left behind. But my particular joy in it was reading about your evolution of your relationship with Maine.
John Hodgman: Oh yeah, the State of Maine. That's one of the States of New England.
Sarah Enni: Yes.
John Hodgman: I mentioned before New England has one Commonwealth, that is Massachusetts, and a number of States: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island. I have to remember Connecticut cause one time I forgot got and I got a lot of letters.
Sarah Enni: I'm sure you hear about it.
John Hodgman: I forgot on the podcast and I got a lot of letters. But you understand Connecticut, you're forgettable. Sorry Nutmeggers!
Sarah Enni: Vacationland is all about Maine. And really, really funny observations about how Maine just does not give a single shit about what you think about it. Or, the people within it kind of don't.
John Hodgman: Yeah. Well, so Vacationland is a bunch of stories that I told on stage. I mean, when I last faced this, "I don't know what I'm gonna do next" business, I was seven years younger than I am now. And I decided, on the advice of Mike Birbiglia, to do a residency at Union Hall, which is a small performance space, and bar, and bocci court here in Park Slope.
They have a great comedy and small music room downstairs. And I just got up on stage and just started talking. I mean, I had some idea of what I was gonna say, but you know what I mean? That's how you force stuff out of your brain. You know? People are waiting for you to say a thing, so you better say it.
And your brain makes all kinds of connections. And very quickly I was like, "Oh, I don't have any fake facts to tell. I mean, I did some dressing up as Ayn Rand and pretending to be Ayn you know? But that was sort of the most archly comedic thing that came out of that experience. Mostly I was telling stories about what happened that week and I felt very lazy about it. Do you know what I mean? I felt like, "Oh, this is just [blows a raspberry] this is like autobiographical observational humor like everyone does."
And I was like, "Not everyone does it." And again, it was like I had to be honest, even if that meant being truthful now instead of doing the fake facts. Like that's where my brain had gone. And what I was preoccupied with at the time... we were making this transition in our lives, and I'm talking about my wife's and mine, and our children.
When my mom passed away, I inherited a small house in Western Massachusetts. And because I'm marginally self-employed, and my wife teaches high school, we could escape there for much of the summer. And it was a really rural place. Not very fancy and not a very fancy house, but an amazing experience to live a different life, and live amidst different rhythms and values and stuff.
But that was always my place. My wife had always grown up going to Maine, particularly coastal Maine, mid-coastal Maine, which is a hard and brutal place. Maine is called Vacationland, that's the nickname of the state. They gave it that nickname before they had invented what vacation really was. They thought that when affluent people started escaping Boston to avoid typhoid and heat, they would go up to coastal Maine cause it was colder and darker.
And affluent people from Boston's idea of vacation was sitting down with a martini, looking alone, not talking to your family, looking out over an ocean that you would never swim in because it wants to kill you, like all oceans do, but Maine isn't kidding. It's cold and there's no comfort in the beach because it's made of sharp rocks and shards of shells.
I had gone up to Maine many, many times with my wife and we would stop along the way at Perry's Nut House, which was in Belfast, Maine. This sort of roadside nut and fudge and goo-gaw and souvenir stand and that always had this shelf of Maine humor. People telling half funny stories about giving people from away, bad directions. Maine humor is almost defined, and has been openly defined by one of the most current Maine humorist John D. MacDonald.
Wait a minute, John D. McDonald is also the author of a series of mysteries starring Travis McGee! But his name is MacDonald, look it up. Anyway, in the introduction of his book, he's like, "This is not necessarily stories that are designed to produce laughter." And I'm like, "Comedy that's designed not to produce laughter. That's kind of my thing. How dare you!"
And when I was in my twenties, late teens and twenties and early thirties growing up, I would be like, "Well, I may not know what I'm doing with my life right now, but at least I'm not a middle aged man telling stories about Maine onstage." Until that's exactly why I had become, you know?
And so Vacationland is very much about accepting transition, natural transition in your life, and not rejecting transition.
Sarah Enni: Right, and then Medallion Status kind of...
John Hodgman: So even though it very much is about, I mean, at one point in the middle of the book I point out like, "The central drama in this book is the fact that I'm torn between two summer homes, one in Massachusetts and one in Maine. Are you enjoying my relatable comedy stories?" You know? That was a hard laugh when I would tell that on stage, originally. Because it gave the audience permission to acknowledge what had been creeping into their minds the entire time I was telling the story.
But it's also, it's about privilege and it's about acknowledging privilege for sure. But it's also about accepting that you get older and life changes. And Medallion Status is a different group of stories. And I'd started telling the stories in Medallion Status on stage when I started writing down Vacationland and I never developed Medallion Status into a show the way I developed Vacationland into a one man show, a one person show, on stage. But the stories were already being developed as The Daily Show, particularly, came to a close.
And this unexpected career on television was going through its own transition, which is to say, diminishing. And sort of having to accept that what passed for the fame that I experienced, which itself was surreal and bizarre. And there are lots of weird stories about meeting The Property Brothers and famous Instagram corgis and other things about fame. And feeling the privileged slip away.
And while it seems, obviously, that all of my stories are very specific to me, and I am a straight white man who grew up in an affluent suburb of Boston with two parents who were married and loved him. I had all the privilege in the world, the most important privilege being that I did not grow up in any fear, and I was loved. But that's it. We all do go through hard transitions in life. Our parents pass away, we lose jobs, we lose loves, we have to learn to accept that. And then we also lose status.
I have to look it up, there is an interview from early on in the Medallion Status publishing process where I was interviewed for Publishers Weekly and I can never remember the name of the woman who interviewed me, which is a real disgrace. And leave it in the podcast. I apologize.
Sarah Enni: Well, I'll link to link to her.
John Hodgman: Yeah, link to her, cause she pointed out something that is gestured at in the book but I hadn't really appreciated until she said it's like, "Anyone who has been a parent has experienced fame." Cause if you have a child, if you have a toddler or a seven-year-old and you come home, [makes a blowing up noise], it's like you're the most famous person in the world. And it's a really good feeling. Lots of people go through life without being seen and people don't care about them. Having a child is a built-in way to have someone care a lot about you.
And you feel really seen when mom or dad or whatever comes home. And that kid is like, "Oh boy, Oh boy!" And then of course anyone who has had a child knows what it's like to be famous and then knows what it's like to not be famous, because your children get older. They're actually whole human beings who themselves need to be seen, and they need to go out into the world. And you get, you know, canceled. Your show gets canceled [laughs]. You know what I mean? Which is, you know, our kids are wonderful. And our daughter just turned eighteen, our job's done. That job's done. We all lose jobs, you know what I mean?
So that's what Medallion Status is about. Making peace with losing jobs.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And I had so much fun reading it and I did actually laugh out loud.
John Hodgman: Yeah, it's all so funny and good everybody. It's funny.
Sarah Enni: I did also laugh out loud. But I really loved also where it ended up, which was this kind of lovely vignette of a party in Maine and feeling at home. And it was kind of fun to read the two books back to back and feel like, "Oh, now he's not from away, or a little bit less."
John Hodgman: I'm less from away in Maine. I mean, the rule of thumb in Maine is you're from away unless you have two sets of grandparents who were born in Maine and no one left. And there are lots of people like that there. It's a wild place. And it just reminds you that there are lots of wild places. As much as we are connected by the internet, and for the better, there's a lot of regionalism left.
Sarah Enni: Well I know you gotta run, but I'm going to wrap up with advice.
John Hodgman: I'm gonna get some advice now?
Sarah Enni: [Chuckles] I'm not gonna give it to you.
John Hodgman: Rats, that's terrible. How dare you?
Sarah Enni: You give a lot of great advice on your podcast, Judge John Hodgman, but I want to ask about any writing advice especially that you might have for someone who is interested in writing with a comedic slant.
John Hodgman: Well, if you are funny, you're in luck because there's a lot of outlets for jokes right now. Not all paid, most not. But I would say there's probably more opportunity to write for money making jokes, than any other way of writing. It would be my guess?
Sarah Enni: I don't know. I haven't thought about it.
John Hodgman: I mean there's a lot of comedic content and you can make a podcast with people like that. I mean, in the marketplace, jokes are still at a premium and Mark Adams is still right. People like funny stuff and not everyone can do it. So, I have no advice for people who want to write comedically other than I hope you're funny. The only advice I give to anybody who wants to write is, you have to tune into what you're interested in.
And that means just sitting down and doing it, and writing. I'm more interested now in giving comfort to people who have a comedic voice and a comedic point of view who don't feel like being funny anymore. Because I'm pretty funny, but I don't feel like writing comedy right now. I don't feel like doing standup or whatever my imitation of standup was.
Partly cause I don't feel like traveling in the same way that I enjoyed traveling before, I loved it. Still love getting up on stage, but not in the same way. And I don't feel like telling a lot of jokes. It's just not where I'm at. I mean, look, if someone would hire me to write jokes for a show, I need a job. Don't get me wrong.
But in terms of what's personally driving me right now, it's in the same way as like, "I don't want to write fake facts about Zeppelins." In 2014 when I started the projects that led to Vacationland and Medallion Status and Vacationland, Medallion Status are both very funny books, but they are not under any obligation to be funny. You have to give yourself permission to be who you are and to chase the things that you're interested in.
The more you do that, the more work you do to figure out what you're interested in, which is the hard part. And the more permission you give yourself to be interested in those things and to go down those mines and rabbit holes and see what worlds are living down there. The closer you'll get to being and finding and developing your voice, and then frankly, the more interesting you'll be to read. And the more interesting you are to read, the more likely you'll be able to have a career in it, if that's what you want.
So yeah, write what you know. But the hard part is knowing what you know. And then equally hard is making sure that you live a life such that you know, interesting things.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I think that's great advice.
John Hodgman: Yeah, I know I'm good at it.
Sarah Enni: Well, thank you so much...
John Hodgman: But here I go now to record my podcast, Judge John Hodgman available weekly on MaximumFun.org which is our podcast network.
Sarah Enni: Do you want to talk about I, Podius really quick?
John Hodgman: Yup. I also have a mini-series podcast with my good friend Elliott Kalan, former head writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He was the last head writer for the Jon Stewart iteration of the show. One of the funniest people in the world. Has a great podcast of his own about movies called The Flop House with current Daily Show writer, Dan McCoy, and current funny person and bar owner, Stewart Wellington, owner of Hinterlands Bar here in Brooklyn.
But Elliot and I recorded, I think it started as twelve but is now a thirteen episode podcast mini-series about the 1976 BBC mini-series I, Claudius, which was set in ancient Rome at the dawn of the emperors of Rome, the first Imperial family of Rome. And it's a big body, weird soap opera from the seventies.
Sarah Enni: Patrick Stewart's in it.
John Hodgman: Patrick Stewart's in it, and Brian Blessed is in it. All these incredible British character actors, Sian Phillips. It's just some of the best scenery-chewing acting. And you don't even mind that they're chewing the scenery. You don't even mind that the scenery they're chewing is made of cardboard. It's like really low production value. But it's an incredible piece of theater, it's really fun to watch.
And Elliot and I made it on a dare just cause I love I, Claudius so much. And I, Podius is the name of the podcast and by the time you hear this, several episodes will be out and archived and you can go and watch I, Claudius, get it from your local library or download it and watch it and enjoy it. And then listen to me and Elliot talk about it, which is a lot of fun too.
Sarah Enni: I'm so excited for that and thank you so much for spending your morning with me. I appreciate it.
John Hodgman: Thank you. You can catch up with me all the time, JohnHodgman.com. I'm @Hodgman on Twitter, H. O. D. G. M. A. N. Probably most active these days on Instagram. I'm @JohnHodgman, J. O. H. N. H. O. D. G. M. A. N. No 'e' in Hodgman. And I'll always be plugging Medallion Status hashtag Vacationland. Check out my podcast, Judge John Hodgman. Check out my SoundCloud. I have a SoundCloud, I forgot about that!
Vacationland, the one man or one person show, was recorded in Toronto in 2015 and I sat on it forever not knowing what to do about it. So I put it up for free on SoundCloud.
Sarah Enni: Amazing.
John Hodgman: Check it out on SoundCloud. Check out Dicktown on Hulu and FX when it comes out. All of this is in the show notes. Thanks so much for making this easy.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.
John Hodgman: Alright.
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to John. Follow him on Twitter @Hodgman and on Instagram @JohnHodgman, and follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram), and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).
This episode was brought to you by The LIfe and (Medieval) Times of Kit Sweetly by Jamie Pacton out today wherever books are sold. And by HIGHLAND 2 the writing software that I am using to revise my current project, or at least where I will definitely be doing that revision the minute I stop procrastinating.
A quick and easy way to support First Draft is to subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening right now and leave a rating or review on Apple podcasts. Leaving a rating and review on Apple podcasts only takes a couple minutes, but it has a huge impact on the show. I'm gonna read a recent review that was left.
This is a five star review from Bodacious One. Bodacious One says, "It's always interesting to see someone interview another person and see what that interviewer can retrieve. Can they get the subject to first relax and then open up? Sarah has done both with her interview with Cassandra Claire. I've learned fun and useful info."
Thank you Bodacious One. That's very sweet. You can go just a few episodes back in the First Draft feed and find that interview with Cassandra Claire. She was a total joy to talk to and I'm really glad that you found useful info from it, that's great.
Finally, if you have any writing or creativity questions that you'd like me and a guest to answer in an upcoming mailbag episode, please call and leave that question at First Draft's voicemail at (818) 533-1998. Or, you can record yourself asking the question and email it to me at mailbag@firstdraftpod.com.
Hayley Hershman produces First Draft and today's episode was produced and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks to transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson.
And, as ever, thanks to you, garret dwelling literary critics, for listening.
I want to hear from you!
Have a question about writing or creativity for Sarah Enni or her guests to answer? To leave a voicemail, call (818) 533-1998 or send an email to mailbag @ firstdraftpod dot com!
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