John Hodgman
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

My father-in-law’s cookies aren’t as dry as John Hodgman’s wit. Currently Hodgman is best known as the bespectacled correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and as the PC to Justin Long’s Mac in a recent series of Apple commercials. But before his television work, Hodgman enjoyed a career as a well respected print humorist for publications like New York Times Magazine and McSweeney's--a stint which culminated in the hysterical book of lies, The Areas of My Expertise. Hodgman is also a contributor to This American Life; a radio show played nationally. This American Life has now collected some of their best segments onto a CD called This American Life: Stories Of Hope And Fear.

Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?

John Hodgman: Let’s see, I was up all night long due to horrible jet lag having returned from Australia on Sunday. At four o’clock in the morning I was editing for the New York Times Magazine, which is one of the many hats that I wear. I am very nervous about those efforts I have to say. They might be completely deranged.

DRE: [laughs] Will you have to change them?

John: Well, people send in stories to me and I had suggestions for them which I sent back. But the suggestions may very well have been, “You should put more cats in this story” or something like that.

DRE: [laughs] What were you in Australia for?

John: I was working on a story for the New York Times Magazine in my sometimes role as an actual journalist.

DRE: About what?

John: It is a story I’m not at liberty to reveal at this time but I will say it did not involve Steve Irwin or giant stingrays.

DRE: [laughs] Did you do anything for the Daily Show while you were there?

John: They don’t have The Daily Show in Australia. They seem to have no culture whatsoever in fact. No, that’s not true. They have television and radio and everything and in many ways they’re almost like a completely functioning country of their own. The Daily Show does not currently require an Australian correspondent.

DRE: How’d you get involved with This American Life?

John: That was the first of the absolute dream jobs that I never imagined that I would actually have. I have listened to This American Life more or less since its inception. I listened with great affection and also with great rage that I had not managed to do a radio show like that. It is one of those things that you love so much that you just want to be a part of it by any means necessary. I was at a wedding and when I learned that another guest at the wedding had just been hired as a producer on the show, I pretty shamelessly attacked him with kindness and said what a fan I was. We started talking and we sort of built up an acquaintanceship. We were talking on the phone one day about this show that they were doing on the subject of superpowers and I said, “You know, when were a part of that wedding, I was playing this party game that I like to play from time to time where I ask people which superpower they would prefer if they could only choose one of two, flight or invisibility.” That became the first story that I did for This American Life.

DRE: It’s funny that you mention that because not too long ago I interviewed the creator of the new TV show Heroes. He mentioned that he heard something on NPR about that very topic.

John: Oh really? I know nothing about this Heroes. I’m going to use the internet to look it up. [pause] So would this be Tim Kring? Sometimes credited as R. Timothy Kring?

DRE: Yes.

John: Really? He also wrote the screenplay to Teen Wolf 2, another concept of mine, he wrote on Misfits of Science, good Lord.

DRE: He wrote Misfits of Science? Really?

John: According to this, yeah.

DRE: Wow, now that’s pretty cool.

John: Do you know this internet? It is pretty useful.

DRE: It is. There’s a lot of information about you on it too.

John: Well, there are no editors for this internet thing so there’s no control over that unfortunately. So he said that he had heard that story, huh?

DRE: He said he had heard something on NPR.

John: Then you are about to be subpoenaed as a witness in my lawsuit.

DRE: I saw you did a report on Christmas for This American Life.

John: Yeah, several of us were charged with creating new Christmas fables so I had the idea to talk about the origins of the Christmas tree. It was a very tortured, long-winded story trying to meld the real pagan origins of the Christmas tree with the story of It’s a Wonderful Life. As we were doing [This American Life creator] Ira Glass, who is a hero of mine and really perhaps the best editor I’ve ever worked with, kept going “I don’t understand why he says, ‘Merry Christmas you old building and loan’ in this part of the story.” It became clear that he had never seen It’s a Wonderful Life. Maybe he’s seen it since, but I bet you he hasn’t, just a little trivia there for you.

DRE: I’ve never seen It’s a Wonderful Life either.

John: Oh no. Come on.

DRE: I’m Jewish.

John: Well, ok so is Ira Glass. But you ought to see it, it’s an important cultural relic.

DRE: With The Areas of My Expertise, did someone come to you with the idea of doing a book after you had worked on McSweeney’s and all that?

John: Well, the book is very much an outgrowth of the work that I’ve done primarily on McSweeney’s. Primarily the advice column that I wrote called Ask a Former Professional Literary Agent. I had been wanting for some time to really find a way to develop and play with that deranged voice of authority that I embodied on that website. What I really liked about it was that I’d be asked legitimate questions and give crazy answers that somehow circled around to an unusual kind of truth. I couldn’t figure out what to do with that character. Then one day I got a call from an editor that I had known from when I was a literary agent saying “You should do a book of trivia.” I thought “That’s a great idea, I really, really, really want to do a book of trivia.” But, there was another book of trivia that was coming out in England and in America at the time that I really liked and it just seemed that the ground had just been covered not just by that but by all these books that I’ve loved for so long like The Book of Lists and particularly a book by a guy named William Poundstone called Big Secrets, which was this book I had stumbled across in the early 80’s about the secret rituals of the Masonic lodges and the secrets of the unmarked private club in Disneyland, which is the only place that serves alcohol in Disneyland. All these weird little secrets and secret places lurking within American pop culture. I really wanted to do a book like that but I wondered what I could bring to it that would be new. Then it struck me that I could bring lunacy and craziness and fake history and all of this phony authority that I had brought to those advice columns. I immediately called the editor back and said, “I know you want me to do a book of trivia but I have this other idea that I think is really good. What if we made it all up?” He was like, “Hmm, I liked my idea better.”

So it wasn’t initially a go. I had to spend some time writing a proposal and material for this book to make my case and eventually he and some other editors at some other publishing houses were swayed and much to my surprise one and a half short years later I had a book deal.

DRE: Your written work and the work you do on The Daily Show is very similar.

John: For better or for worse I am the creator of all of that stuff so there is a certain redundancy in subject matter. The Daily Show has been one of the most surprising things that have happened in my life. I don’t consider myself to be a political humorist or even a humorist with a particularly strong political point of view but as a person I have a pretty strong political point of view and I believe that there should be honesty and transparency in politics and not bullshit. So I would watch that show with enormous amounts of affection, happiness and relief that there was a televised outlet that was approaching what’s really going on in the world with an appropriate measure of “what the fuckedness!” I would also watch it with a huge amount of envy and rage that I couldn’t force myself into the game. Then we managed to convince Jon Stewart to let me come on to promote the hardcover of the book and like a Hollywood movie they turned to me afterward and said “Would you consider coming back and playing along some more?” Of course I said yes. I didn’t believe that they meant it at first but they certainly believed it. It wasn’t long before I had this nauseating experience of being on the other side of television which takes a little while to get accustomed to.

DRE: Is there more truth in lies?

John: Well obviously. I was trained in literary theory at Yale University, which was a period of high post-modernism that suggested that all texts and no texts were reliable. They were all a function of a point of view. Various accumulated cultural pressures, prejudices. Personally I believe there is such a thing as a true fact and I think that we have to rely on that in order to live right as a society. I don’t think anyone could have said it better than [Stephen] Colbert in identifying what is a pretty devious scourge of truthiness. This idea that something sounds or feels right because it has some ring of plausibility to it or it’s something that we want to believe and therefore it takes on the gravity of truth even though it is not true. I think that’s awful but at the same time I profit from it. On the other hand there is something about a story that is able to convey truth that bare facts cannot bring to life. Those kinds of stories include tall tales and jokes and lies. One of the first things that came to mind when I was thinking about the book was “Truth is stranger than fiction but never as strange as lies.” I think that anyone who has been lied to knows that is true. The elaborate and baroque storytelling that goes into telling a lie is just one of the strangest things to witness and it is disturbing, weird and strange. Lies are really just very compelling stories where the teller is really more invested than usual in getting you on their side. If you look around us, we see a lot of lies today that are all stranger than truth and then to a different degree those lies reveal, perhaps inadvertently, a different kind of truth.

DRE: I used to live on the Upper West Side so I really hate the Hallelujah Man.

John: You hate him?

DRE: I really do.

John: How can you hate an old man who’s so moved by faith that he shouts himself hoarse every night? I thought he was a lovely character. Yeah it is like hearing a car alarm go off to some degree, but I think his intentions are good.

DRE: He gets around. I’ve seen him up at 115th Street.

John: Someone who had interviewed me recently said they had seen him in Midtown once.

DRE: Really?

John: Yeah. I worry for his health frankly. I don’t know how he keeps his voice going, honestly, it’s crazy.

DRE: Yeah, I saw him at a post office once. It was weird to see the Hallelujah Man in a real setting.

John: Did you ever see the woman whose hair looks like a helmet?

DRE: I probably have.

John: Well, you got to get back here. Where do you live now?

DRE: We moved to Queens. I really liked the Upper West Side. Have you been there for a long time?

John: Yeah, we’ve been here for almost ten years.

DRE: Oh ten years. It’s changed a lot that’s for sure.

John: Yeah, we’ve seen a lot of interesting developments that’s for sure.

DRE: The way that you appear on the show and in the commercials with the glasses and the suit, is that the way you usually dress?

John: Well unfortunately yes. To my surprise The Daily Show allows me to dress myself. I would have never guessed that they would allow such a thing to happen. With the Apple ads, they really went out of their way to make me look bad in terms of my wardrobe and to really emphasize the middle-aged spread and bad taste that I was naturally leaning towards anyway. They said that my regular eyeglasses, the ones that I wear on The Daily Show, were too cool. They came out with a great big selection of really bad eyeglasses and they asked me to choose one. As it happens just the week before I had purchased a pair of prescription sunglasses which are regular prescription glasses with magnetic clip-on sunglasses on the front. But I showed my wife and she said, “They look good.” I said, “Well what if I take off the sunglass part? What do you think of just the glasses?” She said, “Oh my God, you look like a serial killer.” I happened to have those with me at the Apple taping and I said, “Before we look at those crazy frames that you want me to wear, let me just take off the sunglass portion of these glasses and see what you think of these.” I took them off and I looked at them and they said, “Oh wow, those are really hideous, let’s use them.” So the glasses in the Apple ads are mine and they really do look just awful.

DRE: Are you amazed at how much press you’ve gotten from these commercials?

John: I anticipated it to some degree. I have always been a Macintosh user and a big fan of their product. I also knew their history of their advertising. While I’m not someone who loves advertising but I liked that Big Brother ad they had. So I thought it would be an interesting adventure to be a part of one if they would have me. I was a little surprised by the attention that it got in the press but I was really surprised by the attention it got on blogs. It didn’t occur to me that there were going to be people out there who do not cover the advertising industry or are not writers for magazines desperately searching for copy who would feel it was news to report that a company was advertising a product. That really blew me away but I was excited about it too. I prepared myself for the possibility, the likelihood even, that my whole life and career and work that had come before would be steamrollered over by my affiliation with these ads. I’m happy I knew that part of the deal and I accepted that but it really hasn’t happened that way. Certainly a lot more people in the world would know me walking down the street as the PC guy but on the other hand, people haven’t completely forgotten the other work that I do and I’m grateful for that.

DRE: I read that you basically have had this persona of a straight man since you were six years old.

John: Yeah I suppose so. I don’t know how to explain that. Let me take a sip of coffee and we’ll put words into my brain.

DRE: Obviously you’re very intelligent…

John: I should hope that it’s obvious. I always had very good grades and I always excelled in school. I was well-liked by all my teachers and my peers.

DRE: That doesn’t usually happen with funny people. Usually people hate them.

John: No, I’m glad to say that didn’t happen with me. Funny was something that I came to as an appreciator not as a practitioner and I would hear things and hear jokes or approaches to life that I just found startling and enlightening and then tried to think that way myself. I still feel that way to some degree.

DRE: Were some of the people who you thought were famous straight men or famous sardonic type people?

John: No, it was people that I went to high school with [laughs]. Like Rich Jacobs, who you probably remember from Brookline High School, he would see me in the hallway and say “Hey it’s Hon Jodgman” in this very, very straight deadpan. Then he would just walk down the hall and not even expect a laugh and I thought, “Wow, there’s something going on in that person’s brain that I don’t understand but it’s hard to argue with Hon Jodgman. There’s something funny there.”

DRE: But of course there is a part of the book where someone gives you advice and you go, “Well you know what, fuck you.”

John: [laughs] I think you’re referring to my trip to the Mall of America. The person I was talking to said “It’s very nerve-wracking to work in the Mall of America because it’s one of the top terrorist targets in the United States.” That’s based on a real experience when I actually did go to the Mall of America in my role as a professional journalist. I met with someone at her cheesecake stand at the Mall of America the February after September 11th. I didn’t actually tell her to fuck off but it was hard not to. There was a lot of bellyaching at the Mall of America about 9/11, let me tell you. It really sent things on an economic downturn there.

DRE: Especially with her saying that to someone that lives in New York City.

John: Yeah, I’m like, “Well I appreciate that it’s exciting to you to imagine that the Mall of America is going to get bombed and maybe you’re right. Who knows what terrorists are thinking but at the same time I spent several hours that morning not being able to reach my pregnant wife and not knowing where she was, knowing that she worked, and still does, three blocks from there.” So that was a moment of authentic rage.

DRE: But it’s very funny to be in the midst of all this intellectual type talk and then just say “Fuck you.”

John: It’s important to occasionally work blue even if you’re a painfully dry quasi-academic tin-head like me.

DRE: Do you find crude things funny?

John: To prove I am a person of the people, [laughs] I was just watching an old Will Ferrell sketch on Saturday Night Live on YouTube before you called. It basically involved him stabbing a co-worker with a trident for about two minutes without dialogue and I thought it was the funniest fucking thing I had ever seen.
Stabbing is not funny, but stabbing with a trident is fucking awesome so that’s how I feel. I am very excited by low, stupid humor for sure. Funny is funny.

DRE: Do you know a John Hodgman that was a former CEO of AeroGin?

John: There’s a John Hodgman who makes the rounds of Google taking various weird CEO jobs at dodgy sounding new technology companies. I’m not judging his business practices, I’m just curious to know who he is. There’s also a John Hodgman who is a retired businessman and now a part-time instructor at Tufts University who is my father but they’re not the same guys. There’s also a guy named Hon Jodgman who is out there doing some crazy shit in my name, let me tell you.

DRE: I read you were working on a new book already.

John: Yes I am. It will be called More Information than You Require. It will be a direct continuation of this book. I aim to complete three volumes that will at last complete the complete world knowledge. If I have my way, when the books are published the pages will be numbered sequentially from one to the next. So as to provoke maximum worry for my sanity. That’s the effect that I’m going for.

DRE: What do you know about SuicideGirls?

John: It’s an organization devoted to nudie pictures and fine interviews.

DRE: Well we’ll have to get you a membership if you’d like.

John: I’m not looking for any favors. But I hear good things about the nudie pictures. There is the roving burlesque shows as well, correct?

DRE: Yes.

John: Good I’m all for the performing arts.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/John+Hodgman/