Judge John Hodgman - Bonus Episode: Jesse Thorn Interviews John Hodgman for Bullseye

Episode Date: November 3, 2017

Judge John Hodgman sat down with Bailiff Jesse Thorn for NPR's Bullseye to discuss his newest book Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches. The interview won't air for another few days but we are delighted to share an extended version with our JJHo listeners now. We hope you enjoy it! You can catch Bullseye With Jesse Thorn every week on MaximumFun.org, or wherever you download podcasts. Vacationland is available in stores now. Visit bit.ly/painfulbeaches for more information.

Hi, Judge John Hodgman listeners. It's Bailiff Jesse Thorne. This is a special bonus episode of the program. You probably know that I host an NPR show called Bullseye. It's an arts and culture interview show. And I was lucky enough to have our beloved Judge Hodgman on the program as a guest. We were talking about his brand new book, Vacationland. And I thought I

had such a good time talking to John. It was such a lovely and insightful interview on his part that I would share it with Judge John Hodgman listeners. So here is an almost completely unexpurgated version, much longer than what will run on the radio, of my conversation with my pal, will run on the radio of my conversation with my pal, John Hodgman. John Hodgman, welcome to Bullseye. It's great to have you on the show. Thank you. It's great to finally meet you, Jesse. We met on this show by telephone. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is John Hodgman, and I'm sitting across from my friend, Jesse Thorne, whom I was told in the year 2005 was a young woman living in Santa Cruz who would be calling me for a local radio show.

Yeah. I will not. I will not fault my publicist, my book publicist at the time. I was on tour for my first book in 2005, and I will not fault my book publicist for making an error of that kind. He had a lot on his plate. But I certainly, when you reached me on the phone in Western Massachusetts, I was like, this woman has an amazing voice. And even once it became clear to me that you were a man, Jesse, and not a woman, Jesse, I still found your voice to be uncanny in a way. Because you were a very young person then. You are younger than I am. And I am now an old person. Maybe then I was 25 or something. Yeah, and I am now an old person. Yeah, maybe then I was 25 or something.

Yeah, right. You were a young person, and yet you had this incredibly beautiful, polished, and professional radio demeanor that I enjoyed very much. And you also expressed interest in my work with intelligence and obvious homework doing. Well, one of the strange things about your career is when I interviewed you 12 years ago, it was on the occasion of the release of your first book. You were about to come to San Francisco, where I lived, on a book tour. Yes. And I knew you as an occasional contributor to McSweeney's.

That's correct. And my wife and I, then girlfriend, went out to your book reading at a bookstore on Haight Street in San Francisco. And the audience of that book reading was composed, as I recall it, of several staff members of the bookstore. That's true. A strange man. Some of whom I think were called by the bookstore manager 30 minutes before saying, we need bodies. Yeah. A strange man who had been driving you around for the day to media appearances. Dave Eggers, the bestselling author Dave Eggers.

Yes. And one of my mentors and patrons. Yeah. Dave Eggers, baby. Also one of my mentors and patrons. And. Dave Eggers, baby. Also one of my mentors and patrons. And myself and my wife. Yes. That was it.

And you had brought with you your friend and mine, Jonathan Colton, the musician, now if NPR is asking me another, who was dressed in a coonskin cap and shirt. Yes. A buckskin shirt and coonskin cap and shirt. Yes. A buckskin shirt and coonskin cap. Yes. Both of which he provided, by the way. I want you to understand that when I... He went into his costume trunk? Yeah, when I informed my best friend, Jonathan Colton,

that I did not want to go on book tour alone and that I would ask him to come with me. And wouldn't it be funny if I claimed to the crowd that this bearded gentleman, because Jonathan, as we all do now, but he was ahead of his time, had a very big, luxurious beard, but this bearded gentleman was actually my feral mountain man servant that I had rescued from the woods of New Haven, Connecticut during college. He not only gave affirmative consent, which I have on record, but also that he went online and bought his own buckskin shirt and coonskin cap. And so we traveled around together because, you know, I had, before I wrote this book, I had been a literary agent. I had been in the publishing world of New York.

I enjoyed it very much for various reasons. I couldn't do that anymore, in large part because I wanted to create stuff myself. I had written for McSweeney's, which was how I met Dave Eggers. And then I was writing absurdist humor for the website that morphed into this original book, The Areas of My Expertise. And I knew from my experience with Dave and the events that McSweeney's would have in New York that I wanted to do something a little bit more fun and theatrical than a boring reading because that would get the audiences pouring in. And so on that evening in San Francisco, a single odd poured in. There was maybe one person there who did not know who I was. They would read the notice in the newspaper and see that 50% of the two unknown performers on the show would be wearing an outfit that they had purchased on eBay for the occasion. And that theatricality would then... Right. It was a moment of...

Being for the benefit of Mr. Kite. It was a moment of real crisis for the benefit of Mr. Kite. It was a moment of real crisis for me, existential crisis. Really? Because I knew when... So the book, The Areas of My Expertise, and the two that followed it, I knew that they were weirdo books written essentially for an audience of one, which was the weirdo 14-year-old that I was when I was 14, who had read the Laszlo letters by Don Novello,

in which he wrote crank letters to major companies and printed the very serious replies, and also various books of trivia, like Big Secrets by William Poundstone, which was first revealed to me, The Secrets of Club 33, the secret and now not-so-secret restaurant in Disneyland, and all this sort of cryptic ephemera and weird trivia that I loved when I was a kid, plus play acting and comedy.

And I wrapped it all up into this book of fake trivia called The Areas of My Expertise. And the conceit was, I had been asked to write a book of trivia. And I said to the editor, what if we write a book where the trivia is all made up? So instead of the nine U.S. presidents who smoked more than nine cigars a day or whatever, it would be the nine U.S. presidents who had secret hooks for hands. And the editor said, I prefer my idea. And we hung up amicably. And I went out and sold the book to someone else. But I knew that it was, you know, the book began with rejection. And I knew that it might only reach a very small audience of like-minded strangers who would get it. But I also obviously hoped that it might reach a large audience

because I wanted to continue writing these books and I wanted to be able to feed my human child, of which I had one at that time. So facing down the audience in San Francisco, I felt like this may be it. Some bookstore weirdos, This may be it. Some bookstore weirdos, the young man who interviewed me for his interesting radio show, his wife, Dave Eggers and a baby. That might be that might be the audience that I'm going to reach. And I already knew that that was a possibility. And this seemed an affirmation of it. I mean, because you had, among other things, in your career as a literary agent, part of your job was evaluating the commercial prospects of books. Yes.

Well, sure. I wouldn't say that I was trained for that job, but it was in the description. So you understood that part of the stakes of the situation were that you might write this weird book and you were in a nice position to go on book tour and promote it. The publisher was very behind it for sure. But if it didn't work, which me and my wife and Dave Eggers and Dave Eggers' baby, Dave Eggers' wife, the novelist Vendula Vita, did not make time to appear. I don't blame her. She had just had a baby.

I don't blame anyone who doesn't go to a book reading in my life. However, like, when you were looking out at that audience, you knew what the stakes were. Yeah, I knew that I would, it was very possible that I wouldn't get to write another book or at least another book of this kind. And at the time I had a career, you know, writing for magazines, regular journalism for magazines, which I enjoyed very much. But the whole, the whole point of writing the book was, you know, having been a literary agent and having seen a lot of books come out,

especially by my friends, some of which were successful, some of which were less successful, I was very resistant of the idea of writing a book just for the sake of writing a book. A lot of people, especially a lot of middle-aged dads, feel like now's the time to write that novel I always wanted to write because it makes them feel complete and whole somehow to have written a book. And so I, even though I had been approached, and the reason that I, when I was approached about writing an actual trivia book and I turned that down, a money offer was made. And I turned it down because I don't want to write a book just to have written a book or just for the sake of writing a book. I'm doing a job now, which is writing assignments and profiles and 750 essays about cheese for magazines. That's a fine job. But if I want to write a book, I want it to be a real expression of who I am

to the point that I can't not write it, that I can't help but inflict it upon humanity in a couple of hundred pages. And one would hope that it might resonate with other human beings, but ultimately, that can't be the point of any book or any really meaningful piece of art that goes out there. So it wasn't just a merely a question- In this particular case, when you say meaningful piece of art, you're talking about a list of 700 names for hobos. 700 invented nicknames for hobos riding the rails in the 1930s. Because one of the things about this book that you are currently describing in loving artistic terms is a very silly book. Yeah. artistic terms is a very silly book yeah but the odd kind of animating feature of this book and

its sequels is how deeply personal the nonsense isy nonsense, such as a list of 700 names for hobos that actually had emotional, personal emotional resonance for you. For me and perhaps me alone. Yes. Almost certainly you alone. Well, no, I mean, you know, I. Excuse me, everyone, I'm crying. No, it mean, you know, I... Excuse me, everyone, I'm crying. No, it's true. There is a list of 700 hobo nicknames.

And the only one I can ever remember is Giant Leathery Batwings Roland. Hobos of the 1930s had nicknames like Frypan Jack, right? Or Tennessee Ernie Ford, who sang hobo songs. Like, that was a kind of hobo nickname. And I remember the day, and it was in that same house in western Massachusetts when I was writing my book, and I had had a number of ideas, but then it just struck me, I should do, I don't remember, I was like, I should do a list of hobo nicknames, phony hobo nicknames. And I should do a number of them,

and that number emerged to me as 700. And then it became a challenge, and then it became a descent into a very painful mania, and then it was finally finished. The idea of it was that I would list 700 hobo nicknames and that the list would take up a few pages and then continue to infect the rest of the book as a running sidebar because it would be so long and that it would be a visual joke so that the reader would say, I can't believe he's still doing this. Like a different channel they could turn into and go,

would say, I can't believe he's still doing this. Like a different channel they could turn into and go, this is still going on. It was never meant to be read. It was a literary sight gag. But I also knew that I couldn't just repeat names or lorem ipsumit in any way. Like there had to be a unique, invented hobo nickname up to 700 for each slot in order for the joke to work. The joke had to

demand sweat from me, mental sweat from me, and despair at certain points in order for it to seem properly deranged enough to include in the book so that the reader wouldn't have to work at all and not read it. They would just have to dip in every now and then and go, that's a different one, that's a different one, that's a different one. And I think to that degree, I love absurd humor and I loved it then, but it had to serve something. And even though it's hard for me to express why, there were ideas that I had for the book. Like I wanted to tell a story about how the famous fake photograph of the Loch Ness monster that everyone sees, it looks like a silhouette of a swan's head poking up over the water.

We all know that that's a hoax now. And I wanted to write a story explaining about like, of course, it's a hoax. We know that it's a hoax because the person who took the picture was the Loch Ness Monster. So there's no way he could have been in the picture. He or she, I should say. You know, that's a funny idea that you can play out into a comedic little story and that's fine. But I always wanted it to be an honest expression of whatever was going on in me. I always wanted it to be an honest expression of whatever was going on in me. And so, yes, there was no reason for a list of 700 hobo names other than it overtook my imagination and I had to do it. And therefore I inflicted it upon the world. And if the world of people for whom that would resonate included only you and only Dave Eggers and Dave Eggers' baby and a few other people in the audience. I can't say that it would have been, economically, that would be a disappointment to me. Artistically, I would be very happy and sort of, that was sort of exactly what I expected.

So it was a confirmation of my expectation that what I'm doing may only reach a very small group of people and I will always continue doing it, but I better keep a day job. And then everything changed. Everything changed because you were invited on The Daily Show as a guest, performed admirably, were a delightful guest. Thank you. And were then offered a chance to be a correspondent on The Daily Show. A contributor specifically. Contributor on The Daily Show.

And to audition for the series of Apple computer advertisements in which you co-starred for, as it turned out, a number of years thereafter. Yes, exactly. From April of 2006 to January of 2010. From April of 2006 to January of 2010. Said the man who each night before band leveling caresses his pay stubs. And let it be known to whoever is within the sound of my voice, Jesse Thorne wasn't going to mention it, I am currently in wardrobe as the PC from those ads. I'm ready to go back into the white void at any moment. But you ended up playing this kind of series of characters, right?

Your character of your first book was a kind of smarmy know-it-all. Yes. Your character from your second book was an eccentric millionaire. Yeah, that was the third book. The third book. There was a transitionary. that was the third book. A third book. There was a transitionary, there was a second book. So there were three books that compiled all of complete world knowledge.

Uh-huh. The Areas of My Expertise, the second one was called More Information Than You Require, and the third was called That Is All. And the first one was by John Hodgman, a professional writer. And the second one was by John Hodgman,

a famous minor television personality, because by that time I'd been on television a little. And the third was John Hodgman as a deranged millionaire. And while those were characters, and obviously, you know, they presented derangement each in their incarnations as their bedrock, that this character of John Hodgman was a cruel monster, a know-it-all snob, an obsessive nerd, all of those things, those were heightened versions of myself. They were all true. I was a professional writer. I became a famous minor television personality. And I won't say a deranged millionaire, but a person for whom the fact that he had actually been paid a lot of money for doing work on this world had become deranged, in a weird way, deranged by financial security that I had never really expected in my life as a creative person. I mean, it seems like as you face down the end of those books, the last of which was, the last of which in the show that came out of it were substantially about the end of the world. Yes. What you were really facing down was that you were in some ways thrilled with how these things had gone, but in some ways uncomfortable or maybe even embarrassed about how things had gone for you. Yes. In the third book, which was written by John Hodgman, a deranged millionaire, who has predicted the end of the world, in large part influenced by the ideas of the Mayan apocalypse that were circling at that time.

The world was going to end in 2012. That book is written a little bit out of a kind of embarrassment for enjoying such good fortune, a kind of embarrassment for enjoying such good fortune, getting to go on television, which, if you look at me, you can see it's entirely implausible that anyone would look at... I mean, I'm not a bad-looking human being, but my face is asymmetrical. My body is not Adonis-like.

I am now sporting some really questionable facial hair to boot. It's not as if everyone was looking at me going, get that guy on TV. If anything, they might say, let's give him a swing at public radio. You didn't get discovered at the gym like Herb Alpert. No, no, exactly. But also, honestly, a sense of shame for having money and having not merely the good fortune, but the fortune that being on television and becoming a kind of celebrity had afforded me. Now, look, I'm a white male from Brookline, Massachusetts. Both of my parents were professionals. One is retired. One is no longer alive.

But we lived in a very, very comfortable upper middle class environment. I never really wanted for anything. I'm an only child, so I never had to share anything, never mind a bed or even a room. In fact, I had a suite of rooms to myself that I wandered around in, swirling a snifter of whole milk as a child. Both of my parents were the first in their families to go to college. They came from very working class backgrounds, to which I felt a kind of an emotional and moral attachment, but we were not working class, right? But I had chosen a life of artistry, and the only thing that my dad had ever asked me to study in college was to take one course in bookkeeping, which request I promptly denied and refused to do, instead to study literary theory and read George Harriman's Crazy Cat comics in the basement of the library and just have a good time. I squandered all of these advantages. The classic college experience.

Exactly. Yeah. But, you know, I knew that what I was doing was squandering the gifts that, you know, my parents had given me and the gifts that American society had arranged itself to give people who look like me. Because I had college classmates who came from different backgrounds, both cultural, socioeconomic, and racial, who I went to Yale. And they didn't come to Yale to F around. They came to Yale to work hard and get a degree that would help them take the next step forward in economic prosperity for the next generation. And I was blown it all away by, you know, goofing around with Jonathan Colton and reading A Hundred Years of Solitude a couple of times.

Great book, great dude, a kind of an education, but not one when you show up in New York City after college, does the world say, thank God you're here, we needed you? Because no one needed me. And I went to work in publishing in what was already the mid-dawn of its waning days of great glory in American culture, literary book publishing, and kind of squandered those years trying to sell books and taking some naps in the corner. And by the end of the 1990s, when I was married and soon was having a kid on the way, I realized that I can't pull together a living just writing about

cheese. What am I going to do? We thought about leaving New York, and I thought about getting a real kind of job of some kind. And I lived in a state of anxiety. And then, you know, in a fell swoop, my financial situation changed immediately. And what I appreciated almost immediately was I don't feel any anxiety anymore at all. Sleepless nights, insomnia. It's not like I was always worrying about money. I was worrying about my self-worth. I was worrying about whether I'm a good person. I was worrying about can I be a good dad? You know, I was worrying about whether I'm a good person. I was worrying about, can I be a good dad? I was worrying about all of those things. And all of a sudden, once I had a firm financial foundation and then some, my mental health picture cleared up immediately. It was like taking

an antibiotic when you've been suffering with a sinus infection for several weeks and you feel like you're never going to get past this cold. And someone says, no, take a pill. Money is the pill that provides mental health. And we live in a society that doesn't like to associate finance. I'm not just richness, but financial security with emotional well-being. Absence of want. Yeah, absence. We're in a society that tries to tell you two things.

One, everyone has got a fair shot at making it, which is not true. And that money can't buy you happiness, which I can tell you is absolutely not true. you is absolutely not true. I mean, money cannot actually, you can't go to a store and buy happiness, but you can buy the conditions that make happiness much more statistically likely, the freedom to fear that you can't provide for the people around you, a moment of breath to plan for the future, and an opportunity to be generous to the people who have helped you in the past and to the rest of the world. That's an incredible feeling. And I felt ashamed that I felt so good because it was money. I felt ashamed for my culture and I felt ashamed for me too. But it's also a book of jokes by the way i mean i think you probably also felt

ashamed speaking of your culture not just because of your culture as an american who's uh uh taught that uh money is essential for happiness but also that you can't buy happiness. Right, exactly. But also because you are, if nothing else, a New Englander. Yes. And if there is one rule in New England, it's that you cannot be happy about having money. Oh, correct. I mean, or anything else to some extent. You cannot be happy.

The Red Sox, maybe, but the Bruins. Well, and that not even then. You know, I'm a person who grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. At the very, you know, in my later years of high school, almost literally in the shadow of Fenway Park. We were at the very end of Brookline. I could walk to Fenway Park, but I never did. Like that was, you know, and I like baseball and I like historic baseball parks, but it was like, it never occurred to me

to go to a sports game of any kind because my interests were different. They were, you know, it was like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the clarinet and rushing home to listen to public radio. That was my, you know,

but. Check in on your imaginary girlfriend, Terry Gross. Yeah. He's, oh, hmm. Hi, Terry Gross. And that was a very New England-y narrative that you would root for something that would only disappoint you.

And that was the disappointment you expected because you secretly don't believe that you deserve happiness in the first place. And that is a puritanical element that still reverberates through New England, which, by the way, Jesse, if you don't know, that's a region of the United States in the northeast corner. Thank you for clarifying. I'm from San Francisco originally. Very good. I know that city well. In fact, I met you there. But the culture that I was ashamed of was not merely, I mean, New England culture is its own thing. But, you know, I began to appreciate at this time when that book came out, it was just at the beginning of the Obama administration. And it was the end of the Bush administration was still reverberating. And we had been all plunged into economic crisis. And it just made me appreciate just how much of our political culture is set up to keep as many people worried about their finances as possible.

Because when people are afraid, when people aren't comfortable, when people have wants, they can be manipulated to vote out of fear rather than out of sort of rational decision making. And it's a drag. How about that? I mean, you are also facing down middle age, which can take the wind out of the sails of even the most enthusiastic. Yes. And powerful. Heterosexual, white, male, cisgendered. Yeah. Well, person. It's a particular

I remember the moment that I realized I was not going to live forever. It was an afternoon again in western Massachusetts so I live in New York I'm from the Boston area but my mom passed

away in 2000 and left my wife and I a small house in western Massachusetts in a very rural part of the state. Where, because my wife is a high school teacher and therefore doesn't work in the summer, and because I've always been a kind of self-employed or self-unemployed person, we could spend a big chunk of time there every year, particularly over the summers. And I would go there and I would write and so forth. And there's a place called the Book Mill in Montague, Massachusetts, which is a really great used bookstore and cafe and an old sawmill overlooking a little river. And I would go there, very idyllic place to write. And I just remember working on that last book, just beginning to work on it right after I had turned 40, and just being grasped by this deep, deep bone knowledge that I'm not going to live forever. live under the threat of death all the time, you know, or physical harm or other kinds of vulnerabilities that I, as a middle-class straight white dude, had not felt. That was part of the

reason why it did not occur to me that I might not be immortal. After all, I was the hero of every story that I'd ever pretty much ever witnessed in my life. I was, I was, you know, Luke Skywalker. I was Joseph Campbell's eternal hero and I took eternal seriously. And two, I was and am an only child and, and therefore a center of a different kind of familial universe. And, uh, and to learn as an only child and as a straight white dude that nothing lasts forever, learn as an only child and as a straight white dude that nothing lasts forever, not even John Hodgman. That shamefully came as a surprise to me. And frankly, I took it as an insult. And there are moments of clarity in your life when you kind of face who you actually are. are. And I realized that I was, you know, this, you know, a dad and a husband and a

white male monster in general staring down the second half of his life and wondering how to fill it. You would think that my mom passing away would have taught me about mortality, and it did. But it's something that, you know, the acknowledgement that we're not forever is a hard truth that every civilization makes up a lot of distractions from, including whole world religions and mythologies and other stories that we tell ourselves to suggest that it's not true that we end. So that's when I decided it would be fun to write a comedy book about the end of the world

for the weird 13-year-olds who really love my book. And that was the result. That was how that book was born. Was there a particular time that you decided that you were no longer going to be John Hodgman in quotation marks and were going to be John Hodgman actual person as a writer and performer? Yeah, it was at breakfast with John Roderick at the Little Purity Diner in Park Slope in January of 2013. My last book of John Hodgman in quotation marks, That Is All, had been published in hardcover and paperback, and I had recorded a comedy show based on it for Netflix. And I really didn't, I felt like I had told certainly every fake fact that I knew how to tell.

And for all of the archness and glibness of those books, I had poured a lot of the real me into it. I told every story that I felt like I knew how to tell. And I certainly couldn't go on the road telling any more Mayan apocalypse jokes because 2012 came and passed and you may have noticed the world didn't end. And it was embarrassing for me. So I was out. I was just empty. And it was a different kind of, a different kind of, but entwined sort of shock as the midlife moment of knowing that you're no longer becoming something, you're ending something, when you realize, I don't know who or what I am anymore. I wouldn't even know what to write or to create. And maybe I should stop. But that wasn't an option for me because I didn't, A, didn't want

to stop, and B, it was not the case that I was such a deranged millionaire that I could perhaps do the right thing for culture and disappear and let someone else have a chance. I had to sell something, and I had to discover if I had more to say. So I went to Union Hall, a small performance space in Brooklyn, and set up a residency to just get up on stage once a week initially and just have an audience there that I would have to come up with stuff to say to. And while I did in those early shows, I mean, just panic is an incredibly powerful creative catalyst. shows. I mean, just panic is an incredibly powerful creative catalyst. And one of my other friends and mentors, Kenny Shopson, purveyor of Shopson's General Store. And when I talked to him

about my deadline for my book one time, he said, and I'm like, I don't know how I'm going to do it. He said, your brain won't let you down. And it was an amazing thing to experience my brain not letting me down. The refiner's fire of to experience my brain not letting me down, that the refiner's fire of standing up in front of an audience, you know, even though I believed that I had nothing to say, all of a sudden my brain started shoving stuff into the fire. And all of a sudden I had ideas. And they weren't ideas. They were what was left for me, which was just true stories about myself without quotation marks about me as a weird middle-aged dad and husband and person. of you talked about was the power of silence in an interview, that if you are quiet, the other person will fill the time. And it's sort of like the reason why therapists say so little, that when you are terrified at the anxiety that the quiet causes, which it naturally does,

you have to fill it with something. And if you don't have anything particular to fill it with, if you've used up your party anecdotes, what your brain automatically does is fill it with something important because it's big in your brain, you know. Whatever it is. So if you go up and you face down that silence, whether it's on

a therapist's couch or whatever, the thing that comes up when you run out of pat material is probably something that matters. Go on, Jesse. It's true. It's true.

I mean, and I write about this in Vacationland, which is the book that grew out of the stories that I told. And I talk about the time that I went to therapy and the incredible power of facing silence in a room and having to fill it and to see your own words sort of hang there in front of you and all of their truth and sometimes self-serving delusion, ridiculousness, beauty, and what a gift therapy is, especially for someone who has never been told that they deserve to express their feelings, to sort of have them forced out of you to the point that having a therapist in the room is almost an afterthought. Might as well be a stand-up cutout of Captain Kirk or something, as long as that's what gets you to say what's on your mind. I was conscious when I was doing these shows, and as the stories grew more and more personal and revealing and so on, that I was essentially getting nice young people in Brooklyn

to pay me for my therapy. At the same time, I felt that I didn't want to stop or feel ashamed of it. Because I just knew on some level, in the same way I knew on some level it was important for me to write those 700 hobo names, that it was an essential thing that had to happen. And that good would come of it. For me, certainly, and maybe for others, but who knows? It must have been scary to do as an emotionally withholding, self-contained only child of New England-ish descent. Yeah. I think that it's unfair to put on the people of New England

my psychological dysfunctions that I had. Because I think a lot, you know, I'm an only child and I talk about it a lot. And until I would say probably five years ago, if someone said, wow, and the people always do, it's like, wow, being an only child, that must have been hard. I'm like, what's wrong with you? It's great. It's the greatest. It's a dream.

Especially if you're the only child of parents who are married to each other and love each other and love you and are nice. My parents weren't married to each other and didn't love each other at all. Quite the opposite. It still worked out great for me. You don't have to share anything. You're the center of a kind of universe of yourself. Yeah. Nobody bothers you.

You can ask for whatever you need. Right. And if there was something that I missed in the sibling experience, how could I miss something I didn't experience? I have no idea if it would have been better, worse, or different. And then you, as an adult, get into an emotional conflict of some kind, which you immediately presume to be cataclysmic. Right. But Jesse, that's a faulty premise, because how am I going to get into an emotional conflict?

When you're avoiding it by carefully, defensively positioning yourself. Yeah. It's all potential. Yeah. How am I going to get into an emotional conflict when my whole life and psyche is dedicated to avoiding A, conflict, and B, emotions? Because I didn't have a brother or a sister to challenge me or rough and tumble with me or call me names because I also was not sports inclined.

So I did not have the benign physical rehearsal of conflict that I now realize is a social benefit of sports. I believed all conflict of any kind, any kind of confrontation to be potentially fatal, whether that was a fistfight or a like, do you like me or hugging and kissing was like, no. And yeah, that's I mean, I truly designed my life in my in my early teens to emulate as much as possible the lifestyle of a sexless gentleman bachelor of Brookline, Massachusetts, that I that I felt destined to become. And so it was it wasn't until I had, destined to become. And so it wasn't until I had, you know, some therapy in my 20s. And then it wasn't until I was on that stage that I was like, oh, here's me. You know, like, I don't want to ever seem cliched. I don't ever want to seem vulnerable. I don't ever want to

seem comedically, artistically trite. I don't want to talk about my children. Everyone talks about their children. I don't want to talk about my wife. I don't want to talk about my feelings. I'm going to put them all in quotes of fake trivia that I wrote are somehow lesser because there is this sleight of hand where I'm hiding behind stuff. In many ways, my life's work. I love them. But what going on stage allowed me to realize and comforted me at a time when I needed it is there's still more. There's still more to say. There's still more inside you. There's still more to do. There's still another thing you can do in life, even when you think you've done everything you possibly can. There are still reasons to go forward. And for me, I'm mostly and specifically talking about creative life.

trauma, you know, actual real life trauma that people face, losing people, losing work, losing whatever, where you feel like everything's been taken from you and you don't know how you can go on. It is encouraging to realize there is a way forward. And it all starts somewhere in your brain and you touch it or you find a way to get in touch with it and it'll show you the way forward. You can get to the 700th hobo name, I promise you. What came out of your mouth that you didn't expect to come out of your mouth when you were required to go up on stage in front of 75 people who'd paid you once a week? The one that broke the taboo was a story about my son getting bullied over the summer, one summer in Maine. For those of you who read my book Vacationland, available now at all good booksellers, you will know that I spent sort of my 20s and 30s visiting a wilderness called Western Massachusetts.

And now that I'm in my 40s, I've followed my wife to a wilderness of her choosing, which are the painful beaches of coastal Maine. And we brought our children with us because we're not horrible people. And we enrolled our daughter and son in a sailing and rowing camp that my wife had attended when she had gone there over several summers and that she hated.

And I guess it's our job as parents to visit the same trauma that we have endured somehow to pass that along. So she enrolled them. And my son was having a terrible time because he was being bullied. I mean, he was 8 years old, so I'm not talking about being shoved into lockers, but being laughed at and excluded and sort of just not welcomed. Which is horrible. I mean, you know, as a parent, you know when your child is not happy and your options are limited to do anything,

it is a horrible feeling of powerlessness. And similar to how you feel when you are being bullied. I had this experience with my son, just watching him endure day after day this emotional pain that we had caused for him that he had never asked for it's not like he was begging to go to rowing class at the yacht club at this place you know and being responsible for it and not knowing how to counsel him for it because not only you know not only have i always avoided conflict but for some reason i I never really was bullied very much as a kid, even though I went to school with long hair and a black fedora and a Doctor Who scarf and a briefcase every day.

I think I just presented too many targets for a bully to get a bead on. Like a razzle-dazzle camo? Yeah, exactly. Like a razzle-dazzle camo? Yeah, exactly. And so, like, you know, the few times I had been teased, it's not like I was going to get into a fight about it, so I just ignored it and pretended it wasn't happening and then go home and watch a videocassette of The Prisoner or something.

You know, Patrick McGowan understands me at least. That's not something you can say to an eight-year-old. I really didn't know how to counsel him. There was no way that he could not go because you can't quit. You know, you can't say to your children, it's okay to quit. I suppose if you were under actual physical harm, I would probably take him out of the yacht club and then burn it down. But this was just kind of run-of-the-mill, no-feel goods.

Right. And it's hard to explain to an eight-year-old why you can't just let him quit the thing because you don't want to explain to him, well, and then you're going to grow up, and if I give you permission to quit, you're going to grow up, and you're going to start giving yourself permission to quit, and then you're going to be asking everyone you know to borrow money all the time or whatever. I have to say something. I have to come up with something to say. And I said, look, today I'd like you to wear this particular shirt, this t-shirt to rowing club. Do you remember what the shirt's from? And he said,

yeah, it's from my birthday party at the, at the rock climb, indoor rock climbing place in Brooklyn. I said, right. And why'd you get the shirt? He said, well, cause I climbed to the top of the wall. And I said, did anyone else climb to the top of the wall? And he's like, no. And I said, before I say the next thing, you're eight years old now. I know you know some curse words. Is it going to bother you if I say a curse word? And by the way, to everyone listening here, I ask you the same thing. I'll take your silence as affirmative consent, but it's okay for me to proceed. And he said, no, no, dad, it's okay. Because he wanted to hear what I had to say. And I said, these kids all know each other because they've been coming here every year since they were born.

And they don't know you at all. They don't know who you are or what you're capable of. That's why they're scared of you. That's why you need to remember that. and if they bring something to you today, if they laugh at you or if they push you in any way, emotionally or physically or whatever, if you want to say something to them,

you can say that my name is Name Redacted Hodgman. I'm from Brooklyn, New York. I climbed to the top of the wall when no one else could. You don't know me, so you can't give me any s**t. And it was, as I said this to my son, it was the greatest, I thought it was the greatest dadding I had ever done in my life. And by the way, Jesse, this was all off the cuff.

I hadn't prepared this. This was all improv. This is a classic example of your ability to hit the stage and come up with something. That's exactly right. You know, America's greatest storyteller was born that day. And my son, I watched my son's eyes brighten with confidence and a smile just to begin to creep on his face where I had not seen a smile for, you know, a week and a half at all. Until the moment I said, and then all of a sudden his face turned gray and ashen.

His features fell because I had broken the rules. Because even though he said it was okay for me to say a swear word, kids always say it's OK for their dads to do things because they love their dads. I was completely oblivious to the power dynamic that I was abusing in that moment. I was I bullied my son into saying yes to me saying a swear word. And when dad says a swear word in that context to his own son, then that's a breaking of the rules. And now it was as if my son's face looked at his other like, now I don't know what could happen anymore. My dad just said, all the rules are off. Now I think those kids might kill me. All norms have been shattered. have been shattered. So that was a story that I told to a friend over lunch. And it never occurred to me in a million years that I would tell that story to anyone else. I felt it was too personal.

I felt that I didn't love swearing on stage. You know, that's the smallest of the objections to that story. I felt that it was too personal. I felt that it implicated my son in a way that I never liked implicating my children in my work for complex reasons. I felt that, weirdly, it might be hurtful to the kids who bullied my son, you know, like, and it felt, and it was raw and it was about my failing and who cares ultimately. That was the way I would protect myself from being vulnerable on stage. Cause like, no, everyone's got a dumb autobiography. Who cares? I told the story at lunch. I had the show that night. I went back to write the comedy for the show. I'm like, I can't just dress up like Ayn Rand again. I got to come up with

something new to do. I had nothing. I got nothing. I got nothing. I'm like, oh, I could tell that story. And I told the story and it went over well. And you know what? I'm lying to you now. I don't remember how it went. I don't remember if the audience loved it or hated it. I mean, all I know is that it felt right when I was telling it on stage. And all I know is, all I remember feeling is, this is what I've got now. This is what I've got. This is what I have to offer. This is the truest thing I have to offer. After 700 hobo nicknames, this is the truest expression of myself that I have.

And that's my job, if I'm going to continue doing this, is to just be honest. But this time for real. What other lies has our friendship built on? Why? What in that story that I told you counted as a lie to you? The part where you tried to tell me that the story went over great. Well, no, but see, that's not... First of all, Jesse, I've always been honest with you. Yeah. I actually was in town that day, though.

When you were... No, I... That's just an example of the kind of tool I have now that I don't think I had before. You know, in telling stories, whatever form they take, you know, jokes are just very short stories. People who do it well rely on tricks. And you can figure out the structure of a story as you're telling it.

You can figure out the structure of a joke as you're telling it. You know what the punchline could be. You know how it would be a fun way to conclude that story. Or not a fun way, but a... Ted Talkish. Yeah, okay, exactly. Moth-y.

You know that there's a satisfying, like, hmm, way to resolve the story that you're telling. And you get drawn there. You know, your professional instincts draw you there. And that's how I learned the audience loved me talking about me and my family. Frankly, I don't know. I don't know whether they loved it.

it. I don't know whether the audience will appreciate this new book any more than I worried that my old books might miss them too. And I don't put it on them. It just might miss them. What I'm having to say might go beyond them. All I know is this is what I have to say, and I kind of can't control that. And I say it and I hope that it resonates with people and that they enjoy it. But there's no point in lying to you or anybody just to make an audience go, ah. How do you see Vacationland fitting in the proud tradition of Maine literature

that ranges from- How dare you. That essay- How dare you. That E.B. White wrote about when his pig got sick. Oh, well. All the way to a very specific type of humor that I wouldn't understand

that's distributed exclusively on cassette tapes. In Maine. At toll plazas or whatever those are called in the Northeast. What's that called? What's the highway thing where the... Interstate? But where you buy a sandwich, you go to the Togo's or whatever, you pull off onto a... Service plaza? Service plaza.

That's exactly right. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you this. I was saying how dare you, because I knew you were going to the topic of Maine humor, which is touchy for me. Because at souvenir shops throughout Maine, where I now spend a chunk of my life, and it has come to be a place that I love very much, even though it does not care about me and would just as soon watch me die hypothermically while swimming in its oceans. It is a harsh, rugged place that reminds you that nature doesn't care. And I consider it, as an only child, I consider it a mark of personal growth

that I can love a thing and accept that it does not care about me. That was impossible for me, I would say maybe four years ago. Because it does seem to be. I mean, I've never been to Maine. I've only read your book about it. Yeah. And that E.V. White essay about when his pig got sick. When his pig died.

It's not so much that the world around you is trying to destroy you. It's not that you, it's not a man versus wild story where it is trying to overcome you and you it. Right. But rather a sort of state of distant detente. Yeah. Like gazing at a lighthouse.

Yeah. You are a piece of sort of sad animated flesh scrabbling around for a short period of time on its rocky shores. And in that regard, Maine is not merely an unusual, weird, and beautiful state, but it is also a metaphor, which is a benefit for me because you can enjoy the metaphor and not visit me in Maine because I don't want to see you there. That's not just you, Jesse, it's everybody. The E.B. White essay, which, you know, my wife, Catherine, loves E.B. White. And I hadn't read E.B. White since I was a, you know, I'd read Charlotte's Web and so on. I had not read those essays until she read them to me aloud while we were driving to Maine one time. And in particular, it was the one about the death of his pig, a pig that he was raising for slaughter, but who got sick and he despaired that he couldn't make well again.

And that when the pig died of natural causes, he buried. Now, none of this is a spoiler. E.B. White is not writing a thriller, a plot-based thriller. It's all basically laid out in the first paragraph. It is the beauty and melancholy of the prose that evokes that feeling of we do things in an uncaring world for weird, deep reasons. And it became important for him to try to care for this pig and to feel the shame that he could not cure it. And then the sadness of letting something go, which is obviously a universal condition, even for people who are goat farmers or people raising geese. It's not just pigs. You understand what I'm saying. I could not begin to compare myself to that essay or any of his because they are so luminous. So I will stop.

luminous. So I will stop. But as for Maine humor, that is a style of arguable comedy, very popular in Maine of middle-aged guys telling stories about one Mainer giving a guy from away bad directions or another Mainer telling a tall tale about how he escaped from a bear. And there is a lot of Maine comedy. And there's a lot of Maine humor. And it sits on the shelf of every Maine souvenir stand in every part of Maine. There's one place every year we would stop. Every year my wife would drag me up to Maine. We would stop there throughout my 20s and my 30s and my early 40s. And I would go to that Maine humor section and just look at all of the people who are making this very, very specific kind of humor.

And no matter where I was in my career, I could say to myself with some relief and some repulsion, at least I am not that. At least I am not a middle-aged man telling stories about Maine. I trust your listeners appreciate my incredible sense of literary irony. I will now conclude this interview by strangling myself to death and shame. Well, John, thank you very much for coming back on Bullseye. Thank you very much, Jesse. My friend, I'm not lying when I say I love you. I love you too, friend. Bye-bye. That was my conversation with John Hodgman, the man you know as Judge John Hodgman,

but in real life, an actual human being. He has a brand new book. It's called Vacationland. Seriously, if you have not bought John's book, what are you doing listening to this podcast? Go onto the website of an internet bookseller. I won't tell you which one to use. No buzz marketing allowed. Or go down to your local bookstore and buy John's new book, Vacationland. And I will also say, if you enjoyed this interview, can I recommend that you check out Bullseye? It is in-depth interviews every week.

On this week's show, which has Hodgman on it, we also have Tig Notaro. It's a really intense and beautiful interview. We also have coming up Paul Reiser, Amy Sedaris, Greta Gerwig, Lee Unkrich, who directed the new Pixar movie, J.K. Simmons. So many amazing people in conversation. So go subscribe to Bullseye if you haven't done so already. Bye.