* Photo: Ramona Rosales * John Hodgman is an expert. At everything. (OK, maybe not sports.) But where he really excels is in creating the illusion of expertise — and not letting pesky facts intrude on that authority. From his first book, a compendium of faux trivia aptly titled The Areas of My Expertise, to his fiction-spewing shtick on The Daily Show to his role as the bloviating PC in those Mac ads, Hodgman handles the most obscure subjects with an aura of invincible confidence. The fact that it's fake? All the funnier. Hodgman talks to Wired about his latest book, More Information Than You Require (out in October), and his new area of bona fide expertise: being semi-famous.
Wired: Is your character on The Daily Show the same person narrating your books? Or, for that matter, the PC in your Mac ads?
Hodgman: I should clarify at this point: I'm not that John Hodgman. There's a guy who goes on The Daily Show claiming to be me. And there's a guy who goes on the Mac ads claiming to be me.
Wired: You should sue!
Hodgman: No, I would say that the Resident Expert on The Daily Show is all me, or at least a heightened aspect of myself. Aside from finding humor in the deadpan descriptions of things precisely as they are, I just veer off into the fantastic and the absurd.
Wired: And that has made you slightly famous.
Hodgman: Well, I always had this desire to celebrate and somehow be a part of things that I thought were really great. When I wrote about Battlestar Galactica for The New York Times Magazine in 2005, I was mainly geeking out about the fact that I was standing on the set, you know? So it was very unnerving and surreal to go from being the guy who wrote about Galactica to making a cameo appearance as a doctor in an upcoming episode.
Wired: Yes, I meant to say something mean and jealous about that.
Hodgman: Oh, I had long since come to peace with the reality that such a thing would never happen in my life, and I was very happy as a writer of fake trivia and stories about fake cameo appearances. It is not typical, I think, for a then-36-year-old person with a kind of lazy eye, weak chin, and impending middle-age pudge to embark on a career in the visual medium of television. So the new book really needed to shift a little bit in order to accommodate this new dimension that I have entered into. Whereas the old book was written by John Hodgman, a former professional literary agent and professional writer, this book was written by John Hodgman, current famous minor television personality. Even I must accept the bizarre reality that is my life now. Why would that happen? Why?
Wired: Because it's funny?
Hodgman: Comedy does offer an avenue to television and film careers for untelegenic people that great drama does not.
Wired: Did you always plan to write comedy?
Hodgman: I was trying to write serious short stories. But people would tell me they were hilarious. I realized that I was ignoring the most important and easiest path to laziness of all, which is that jokes are the shortest stories there are.
Wired: Even when you fill them with historical half-truths and obscure references?
Hodgman: Part of the transaction between writer and reader is the pleasure of building a community and encouraging people to play along. So there are in-jokes that I make because I'm a geek. And then there are in-jokes I'm not sure anyone will get, that I leave as a kind of Easter egg.
Wired: It's more fun to write and more fun to read.
Hodgman: I don't want to give anything away, but there is Moon writing in my new book. If you read it the right way, you will find a map to a hidden door in a mountain, behind which is a room filled with wonders! Also, there's a disclaimer: There is no hidden room.
The Extended Remix of Adam Rogers' Q&A with John Hodgman
Wired: You and I are almost exactly the same age, right in that generational zone that puts us right in the middle of Generation X. We were important for a while, then people started to ignore us right away.
Hodgman: Yeah, but don't you know that we're getting more important every day?
Wired: Well, you've been blogging about the presidential race. And Matt Bai argued that, even though he's a little bit older, Obama would be the first Gen X president.
Hodgman: Well, yeah. But I always found the term "Generation X" produced a lot of anxiety in me.
Wired: Really?
Hodgman: Well, because of the novel. And as somebody who is an aspiring writer it was sort of nerve-wracking to have someone basically write the book about your generation, or what people would claim to be the book about your generation, before you had the chance to even think about what your generation might be. And then you realize you don't want to be writing about any generations anyway.
Wired: That's a young man's game.
Hodgman: That's one of those kinds of books that you like the idea of writing it, but it's really a very bad idea. It's a romance of the young fiction writer to write a generational novel along the lines of The Sun Also Rises, or whatever. And generations usually aren't that interesting when they're not tested by war or anything.
Wired: Thank goodness nobody tested me by war, by the way.
Hodgman: I know. And when they have all their testicles, and were not forced to grow up too young, you know. I guess that was sort of the story. But it was very anxiety-producing to be an aspiring writer who was also very lazy and didn't actually do a lot of writing. And then all of a sudden Douglas Coupland came along and basically wrote the novel of his generation. The next question is, well, then what's left for me to do? And it took me about a decade and a half to figure out it was fake trivia.
Wired: Well, let's do some details. Trace your trajectory from an office job through to the Mac commercials and The Daily Show and the books.
Hodgman: Having grown up in Brookline, Massachusetts, I then went to Yale University, where I pursued a degree in literature, which is essentially the same degree as the comparative literature major — which is to say very theory-based and very deconstructionist, Derrida and Foucault and A Hundred Years of Solitude over and over again, but with the distinction that in the literature major you only needed to know one foreign language, compared to the comparative literature major in which you needed to know two. And if there's one thing you should know about me, it's that if I have the choice between learning two foreign languages or one foreign language I will learn one foreign language.
Wired: The question dangles in the air: What did you pick?
Hodgman: Spanish, primarily to read Latin American literature. And then that quickly became a focus on Argentine literature. And that quickly became a maniacal focus on Borges only. Who himself had to learn Spanish in order to become literate.
Wired: It's a good point.
Hodgman: He never read or wrote in Spanish when he was growing up, or at least if you are to believe his fable of his own life that he told. Spanish was considered to be — that was a house language that you would speak, you know, among your family. But the written languages were English or German.
Wired: Oh, so he was — so Borges thought he was writing in the, in the — what do you call it?
Hodgman: The vernacular.
Wired: The vernacular, thank you.
Hodgman: Yeah, Spanish for him was the vernacular. That was not a language that he — if you believe the fable — that he even knew was a written language. And he didn't know there was literature in it. Relatively early in his life he figured that out. But you know, scholars of Borges who are better versed in Spanish than I will tell you that his Spanish, or his Castellano, as they say in Argentina, if I'm going to be a real pompous jerk, is very stilted and constructed in a very sort of non-Romance language way, because he was very fond of English and other languages. And he grew up reading the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Wired: Full of errors.
Hodgman: That explains why he was so stupid about so many things. Like that dude who could remember everything. Can't happen.
Wired: Yeah, I never bought that.
Hodgman: So, if you're detecting an air of incredible privilege, small-P privilege, of just having an opportunity to enjoy a pure life of the mind plus alcohol for four and a half years — stretched out due to a six-month period of selling cheese in England — and not only enjoying, but not even thinking for a second that there was anything self-indulgent or wrong about spending your parents' money without having any thought whatsoever to preparing a career of any kind, then your detection is correct. That is exactly what that period of my life was.
And it became only traumatic when I left college and went to New York City to get into book publishing and realized that apparently there were a lot of people who had studied literature and English who came to New York to follow a romantic dream of being a writer and/or editor and/or book publisher of some kind. Simple supply and demand, which I later learned about, dictated that those people did not get paid an awful lot. I ended up working as a receptionist at a literary agency in a beautiful old brownstone, primarily because it was in a beautiful old brownstone and it matched my mental image of what a publishing house should be. I found that to be a perfect intersection of my theoretical fondness for theoretical literature, and also my inherent laziness. Which is to say I like writing a lot, but I don't like writing a lot.
Wired: That's a real writer.
Hodgman: Sure. But I didn't know that at the time. I just felt conflicted. But I enjoyed working with writers and bringing, you know, people who have the, I don't know, the ability to actually string words into sentences that I found interesting and beautiful were very exciting to me. Because it sort of felt like they were doing it so I didn't have to. And I realized pretty early on that as an editor or, as I learned what an agent did, as an agent, I could help other writers and gain a lot of satisfaction out of that without having to actually do any writing of my own. It just seemed to make sense to follow the agency path because, you know, you got a piece of the action. And I had become immediately and very nervously aware of the need for capital.
Wired: New York will do that to you.
Hodgman: New York and a rather undisciplined and fairly stupid understanding of how credit cards work. So, I became a literary agent's assistant and then started representing authors who I really liked. The other thing I figured out was that I was not alone in the world in the desire to write books. Everyone wants to write a book. Very few people are able to do it. And I say that in full understanding that the books that I have written are not properly books. They very rarely contain complete sentences. I still have not written a novel or anything of that kind. Those people who are able to do that are very far and few between and often insane. Whereas most people who want to write books are not going to be able to do it. But they often are interesting for other reasons, and I could use that to my advantage by essentially gaining access to interesting conversations with all sorts of people who wanted — who turned to me suddenly, a person in his mid-20s, as an authority on a world that they were interested in. Accomplished businessmen and women, and people who had done all sorts of things and interesting things in their lives looked to me as an authority because they all wanted to write books. And that was how I got my first taste of fraudulent expertise.
You know I used to go to writers' conferences and that sort of thing, and meet people who had done fascinating things and whole careers, and now they wanted to write their detective novel about a guy who can speak to bears or whatever. You're sitting there hungover and telling them what you think you know about publishing, and they're believing every word. It was a terrible, terrible con, as so much of publishing is, to run on otherwise good-natured souls. Anyway, I also managed to weasel my way into the lives of some really talented people who I simply wanted to be associated with. Then I also sort of weaseled my way into the lives of say, luminaries like — you know sort of personal deities — like Dale DeGroff, who is the godfather of the cocktail renaissance of New York City.
Wired: We've had a couple of his recipes in Wired.
Hodgman: Well, of course, you know, he's the man. And I could scam my way into an afternoon drinking with Dale DeGroff. You could also justify a career in publishing, at that time it was the twilight of acceptable afternoon drinking in publishing. I don't know that that's still the way it is. And then of course you know in 1997 we got the Internet in the office, and that was how I found my way to a website of one Bruce Campbell. And weaseled my way into his life as well.
Wired: Another deity.
Hodgman: Oh he has been a personal deity of mine for a long time. Since Nick McCarthy showed me Evil Dead at midnight at his house with a bunch of other guys, in high school. And I am — and Jonathan Coulton, with whom I went to college, followed his career through the Brisco County, Jr. years. And you know when you are a Bruce Campbell fan in the years before the internet, you were pretty much in the wilderness. You felt pretty alone. You did not know that there was anyone else there that saw things the way you did.
And as soon as the internet invaded our office in 1997, I, like pretty much everyone else in the world, started discovering and rediscovering our generational memory. You know, after we all got done — you can't even say "Google" — Alta Vista-ing ourselves, the next thing you plugged in were the weird, esoteric subjects and people that you half remembered or felt a personal passion for. And suddenly everyone started discovering each other. I discovered that there were lots of people that liked Bruce Campbell. And within that particular niche we would all start talking together and a little community would grow and geekdom found its voice and its power in that way.
One thing I discovered as I was searching around for Bruce Campbell was Bruce Campbell. Had his own little website where he would write amusing little stories about shooting the movie McHale's Navy in Mexico. Or anecdotes about, you know, taking a bike ride and seeing a fox after shooting an episode of a TV show called American Gothic. And he could write pretty well. And like many of those early celebrity sites on the web, they were actually started by the people who claimed to have started them. I wrote him a little e-mail saying, "Have you ever thought about writing a book?"
Within a day or two I had gotten an e-mail back saying, "I have. I always wanted to write about what it's like to be a B-movie actor. Do you have any ideas?" And within another couple of days I was on the phone with him. The magic became manifest in my shocked and thrilled ear as I heard his voice.
Wired: That's a lot of credibility, getting Bruce Campbell's book out.
Hodgman: I was acutely aware of paying off this incredibly offensively stupid credit card debt that I had incurred — I mean it was the shame of my life. And at that time, celebrity books were the business to be in, in book publishing. As much as I love representing interesting cool novels about alternate universes and Howard Hughes pastiches, or pastiches about Howard Hughes living in Las Vegas and controlling a completely enclosed utopia of his own — that was another novel that I represented — I wanted to get in the money. And my feeling was that — you know, this was my big coup. Here was my celebrity book. Whoopi Goldberg had a huge book. Brett Butler had a huge book, Kelsey Grammer had a huge book. This is going to be the big Bruce Campbell book. I was going to be able to get some real money for it and help make my teenage man-crush superhero a star in book publishing.
And it's interesting that even though there were lots of people on the Web who traded information about Bruce Campbell, for some reason 45-year-old book publishers had not heard of him.
He was extremely patient. It took us about a year to sell it to St. Martin's Press. I would try to explain to editors and publishers that Bruce Campbell does not just bring what Brett Butler brings to books, which is a sitcom. Bruce Campbell brings an enormous, dedicated community of horror and sci-fi fans who know each other and meet each other in conventions and will line up for hours at a convention to meet Bruce Campbell and have him sign something that they had bought. Maybe Bruce Campbell doesn't have a million viewers like the wonderful Brett Butler sitcom Grace Under Fire did, which justified her enormous advance and terrible sales, right? He had probably 25,000 avid fans who are going to buy this book no question. The one thing that was missing in Bruce Campbell's life was something that he owned in the dealer's room that those kids would go and buy and bring to him. And in an industry in which a book that sells, you know, 15,000-20,000 copies in hardcover is considered to be a real success, I would think 25,000 guaranteed hardcover sales would be a modest advance. But it just goes to show how blinkered people were by the idea of old-media celebrities being somehow more meaningful than somebody who cultivated an audience (and was digital) and got their devotion in return.
Wired: Campbell's also a good example of somebody who comes out of the geek world. Maybe in the late 1990s they didn't understand yet what a potent market that was.
Hodgman: They certainly did not. And to some degree it's like, well, they kind of had a point. It's like, "Well this guy is a so-called celebrity that I've never heard of. And his last job was a TV show that lasted a single season." The idea of a cult hit being a powerful force in aftermarket sales of books and paraphernalia was completely unknown — even to me. I couldn't explain what it was. All I knew was Bruce had fans and the need to sell something that he owned the copyright on.
But geekdom in general, I couldn't make the argument beyond that to say, "But there are horror-movie fans who really like him." Because horror movie fans and sci-fi fans and comic book fans and all these potent geek purchasing communities that now have a lot of power and juice were held in utter contempt at the time. There was another book that I was attempting to sell at one point about live action role-playing gamers. It was by a guy named James McElroy who is also someone I had gone to college with — that's what happens when you're a literary agent. You find the people you went to college with who are fool enough to let you be their agent. And Jamie had written a book, a year in the life of a competitive cheerleading squad, which was the first book I sold. It sold for pretty good money at the time and did okay, because competitive cheerleading was at that moment making a big splash on ESPN2. He wanted to follow up with a year in the life of a group of live action role-playing gamers in Maine. The main character of the story was this guy who had purchased acres and acres and acres of wilderness that he was going to turn into a 24/7 fantasy world where the game would never end.
Wired: Yikes.
Hodgman: I mean, look, he was singing my tune. This was a story that I wanted to read desperately, and he had written a really good proposal. But it was around the same time, maybe '98-'99. And it was still: no way, not in a million years would anyone touch somebody who wore fake tusks and called himself an orc, you know what I mean? As mainstream editors passed, I started turning to those editors who published science fiction and fantasy stuff, and they were even less receptive. They were like, "We know these people, we go to these conventions, GenCons and DragonCons and everything else. And we don't like them. I don't want to have anything to do with them. We think they're a problem."
Think about the initial reviews of Fellowship of the Ring. There were real doubts about whether or not this book could be in any way interesting to a mass audience — completely ignoring the fact the book had sold millions upon millions of copies. You know what I mean? It's like, "There is no way Americans are going to go see a movie with hobbits in it." And there was lots of snarky reviews right after it came out, saying, "You know, for a movie with hobbits in it it's sort of okay." But it was really look-down-your-nose kind of stuff. That was the big eye opener for a lot of people who just casually discarded it and didn't care, and ignored the clear and mounting evidence that geeks as a culture were not only a vibrant, interesting, devoted bunch of incredibly smart people, but they were also purchasers.
Anyway, the Bruce Campbell book sold for an extremely small advance, which Bruce was generous enough and wise enough to take because he realized that if it did okay it just meant that he would get more in royalty. And it ended up selling, I believe, 75,000 copies in hardcover.
Wired: Jesus.
Hodgman: It was a huge success. And one, to their credit, which St. Martin quickly realigned their thinking on and took advantage of it. I don't mean to say — I trust you understand that I'm not suggesting that geekdom has value solely in its ability to buy crap.
Wired: Right.
Hodgman: Geekdom has value in a lot of ways. And it's particular value is in its ability to buy stuff that is not crap, and indeed its fairly high standards for popular culture that is not intensely stupid. Arguably you did not need to make a movie of The Golden Compass. You certainly didn't need to presume that people would be too stupid to figure out what the premise is simply by showing them the premise rather than giving them incredibly offensive and stupid opening narration. Phil Pullman had proved that if you tell the story smartly and correctly, why, even children will understand the book and enjoy it in millions upon millions. That's what I really bristled at and still do bristle at.
Wired: Watching the new Batman movie, it was cool to of sit there and think, Ah, they're finally learning to do it. Like they're finally learning to combine what used to be separate strings, to strain out the camp that infected even the good Superman movies, and turn them into these cool tales about interesting people doing cool stuff that managed to appeal to my Batman geekery as well as my William Friedkin geekery, you know?
Hodgman: Yeah. I mean, you know, there are good geeks and bad geeks. There are geeks with taste and there are geeks without taste. There are good comics and there are also comics. I mean really awful comics.
Wired: Sure.
Hodgman: So, I would say as a class of readers and thinkers and story enjoyers who absorb pop culture and are devoted to stories, the real difference isn't what kind of subject matter they like. It's the high quality of stories that they demand, and the intelligence, and how well that story challenges their intelligence, you know, as opposed to panders to it.
Wired: It's why a couple of years ago we recalibrated the kind of Hollywood stories we do. For a long time we did stories about the sort of movies that we thought would appeal to our readers, but then tried to find the angle that let us do them in a more serious-minded way. Anyway, we ended up doing a lot of stories about special effects. It took a long time for a few of us to convince the bosses that, actually, special effects were the thing that a typical Wired reader cared about the least. I mean you can make a TV where the walls are cardboard and the airlock moves every time somebody shuts it and it's still one of the most popular science fiction shows ever because the stories are great.
Hodgman: You're talking about Lost.
Wired: I was actually thinking Dr. Who, but you know …
Hodgman: Yeah, of course. That was a bad joke. OK. But I think Lost is fascinating on a lot of levels, because to me it was at the epicenter of the Jock v. Nerd fight in popular culture that I think is really going on right now. You know, there was clearly a lot of discomfort, it seems to me, among some people who were involved in making Lost in deciding whether or not it was just going to be a science-fiction show or not. There was clearly a retooling between season two, which was incredibly geeky with all sorts of references to B. F. Skinner and esoteric pseudoscience from the '70s, and you know 3/4 inch video tapes. Pure geek subjects. And obviously the mystery and the mythology of what the island is and whether or not it's the product of science or of you know something supernatural. And then there was clearly a retooling to focus on the other element of the show, which had always been there as, "Are these three pretty people gong to fall in love with each other?"
Wired: Right.
Hodgman: The fight would go back and forth almost from episode to episode. And détentes were clearly established, where it's like well, if you give us this cheeseburger soap opera episode we'll let you do this weird episode where the guy's being brainwashed using techniques outlined in John Ronson's book.
Wired: That's going deep.
Hodgman: Really esoteric, fun stuff. And then we'll do this love triangle for a while but we'll let you build this alternate reality game just as long as it doesn't get in the way of the soap opera we're trying to keep on the air. And I think there was a real discomfort in deciding, you know what, this is a science fiction show. Because there was this lingering stink to the idea of a science fiction show that's always going to be a B-material, unsuccessful, niche audience stuff. Completely ignorant of the plain reality that people who like science fiction shows tend to be the most devoted audience members, do you know what I mean?
Wired: Sure.
Hodgman: And that the show was doing really, really well when it was talking about B. F. Skinner and all that sort of thing. But even down to the kind of storytelling that was happening, there was like geek DNA versus nerd DNA. I don't know what was happening in the writers' room, I don't know if there were these fights on that level. But I know that the end product would sort of veer between okay, is this going to be a science fiction show like The X-Files where there's a long story arc that subdivides into a secondary story arc? And they all interact with each other, and it's all telling this larger story, and there has to be the hallmarks of every science fiction show, like there has to be continuity? You have to have — if someone says this in episode 2.15, in episode 3.19 they can't say the opposite. All of that sort of geeky stuff. Or is going to be like a soap opera where indeed you may have supernatural elements or even sci-fi elements, but it's more like, "You know what? We reboot every episode. None of it matters, it gets in the way of us getting to the kiss scene. Fuck it, we're just going to ignore it. Every episode is its own pocket universe, as it were, and we don't care."
And on that level Lost was fighting, too. I really felt more invested than I should be in who was going to end up winning. And I kind of feel like they both knocked each other out ultimately. But I think it was a real bellwether in terms of where we were going in terms of mass media culture. Whether or not what was typically considered to be a niche of culture — science fiction, supernatural stories, fantasy, whatever — was finally going to be recognized as mass culture. And when I talk about geek culture being a niche culture, I'm not just talking about the genre of science fiction, fantasy, comic books or whatever, I'm also talking about a certain quality of storytelling and a certain intellectual requirement to the story that I think is what's most off-putting to people who believe that mass culture just needs to be stupid by definition.
Ooh, I did not mean to go on such a rant. I apologize.
Wired: That's all right. It's stuff I've been thinking about a lot too, actually.
Hodgman: Anyway, around the time the Campbell book sold, I was getting involved in another sort of niche, which was the McSweeney's world. I sent in some submissions to the first issue of McSweeney's that were rejected, until finally Dave accepted a joke letter that I had sent to my friend in Seattle, in which I sort of did a riff on this Lewis Lapham essay that had been circulating in which he gives advice to his nephew about entering magazine publishing. And it was really pompous and ridiculous.
So, without being asked — my friend had sent me an e-mail, and I got maybe one e-mail a year at that point. So, I sent him an e-mail back in which, I'm sure to his confusion, I claimed to be his cousin who was a very important person in book publishing, a professional literary agent, who had all sorts of advice for how he would become a successful writer, most of which involved him buying from me a device that I called an Inner Voice, which was a small little man that you inserted into your brain who would speak interesting ideas to you. And by the way would my friend allow me to sleep on his couch, because I had no place to go.
Wired: Right.
Hodgman: That was the whole joke. And Dave published that, and that would eventually become sort of the foundational voice for the column that I wrote on McSweeneys.net, as a former professional literary agent — once I had stopped being a literary agent — as the sort of deranged fraudulent authority on originally subjects pertaining to literature and publishing, and later on subjects pertaining to everything except sports. Because even I couldn't fake an authority on sports.
Wired: OK, so now you're writing straight-ahead comedy.
Hodgman: I wrote a semi-serious short story for the Paris Review in '98. I was trying to write serious short stories. I had no interest in writing a novel because I just didn't ever feel like I had an idea that was novel length. And also I might have pointed out I was kind of lazy. My attention span was pretty short, and I would write short pieces and did not find much of a market for it. But when I would read my so-called serious short stories people would tell me they were hilarious.
Wired: That sounds potentially insulting.
Hodgman: Well, there were jokes in them. It was more of a third or fourth layer. They weren't the thing that was in focus. Eventually I realized, as someone who was interested in writing short stories, that I was ignoring the most important and easiest path to laziness of all, which is that jokes are the shortest stories there are.
Wired: Did you have a sense of the particular flavor of the humor that you were doing?
Hodgman: You know, I know now better than I knew then, in the first blush of writing funny stuff who I was consciously or unconsciously imitating. I've had this pleasure of being able to think about it and go, oh yeah, now I know who I stole that joke from or that pose from. My friend Adam gave me a book of Peter Cook monologues, and I remembered how much I had liked the "One-legged Tarzan" sketch from Beyond the Fringe years before. Like every other geek who grew up watching PBS and Dr. Who in Boston in the '70s, I liked Monty Python. But I had completely forgotten that I had seen Terry Jones and Michael Palin's 1970s book Dr. Fegg's Encyclopaedia of All World Knowledge.
Wired: Uh-oh.
Hodgman: Well, I mean, that's what happens. Things invade your brain and come out modified just enough to avoid a lawsuit.
Wired: My mom sent up a stack of old Mad magazines from when I was a kid. You know, she was cleaning out the house. I started to go through them, and I had to stop. I was terrified that I was going to find jokes that I was writing.
Hodgman: There's nothing less funny than trying to describe what makes humor funny. But it was always productive for me to stop and look at a set of presumptions, whether they were presumptions specific to the publishing industry or just life the way a caveman or a space alien or in my case a deranged, self-inflated blowhard would look at things. You know, to make sense of things simply by describing them exactly as they are, trying to erase cultural presuppositions out of your mind and just saying, oh this is what it is.
Wired: I understand that humor, like a frog, tends to die when you dissect it. But the reason those things are funny is …
Hodgman: Usually I kill my frogs before I dissect them. I kill them in a humane way.
Wired: You're not having the most fun with your dissections then.
Hodgman: I am not a monster.
Wired: I know there's a line in here about somebody being pithy, for the biologists.
Hodgman: Now you have gone to new places.
Wired: I went somewhere else, yes. I'm back.
Hodgman: Yeah.
Wired: So, you have to know the antecedents to get the joke, right? You have to get the references to get the bit.
Hodgman: To some degree you're absolutely right. You have examples of jokes that I've written where the reference is so esoteric you couldn't imagine anyone laughing at it. And to me, I didn't realize the reference was that esoteric. Say I went out there believing most people would know who the Cybermen were. But when I talk about in my book Art Garfunkel's album from the early '80s, 1981, called Songs for Dead and Dying Rabbits, I realize I am presuming that people know that Art Garfunkel wrote the song "Bright Eyes" for the movie version of Watership Down, which is this totally absurd song about a dying rabbit, you know.
Wired: That one went past me too.
Hodgman: Did it really?
Wired: It did.
Hodgman: You never heard that Art Garfunkel song "Bright Eyes"?
Wired: Well, I saw Watership Down so I know I've heard it, but — again, antecedents, right?
Hodgman: Yeah, but here's the thing: In the same way that I feel that you could have made a movie — why you would bother? — but you could have made a movie of The Golden Compass that was good, and part of the way to do that would be to not include an opening narration explaining the rules of the fantasy world that you were in, most people are willing to go along. If you proceed with enough confidence and skill at revealing what needs to be revealed, most people will go along with the story. I don't know that the Art Garfunkel joke is really the best example of this, but the John Hodgman that writes these books always proceeds with absolute confidence that people understand exactly what he's talking about even if he's making a casual allusion to the soundtrack of Watership Down. And I think that if I do my job correctly that confidence will, you know, will sort of buoy people along and realize, well, okay, you know he's just deranged.
Wired: You get the benefit of the doubt.
Hodgman: Exactly. I was very touched recently when a writer named Mary Roach, who wrote the book Stiff, blogged a little nice thing about my first book and how much she enjoyed this piece about having a good snowball fight for children, including different styles of snowballs — snowballs that would have glass in them, snowballs made from last winter's snow that you kept in the freezer, snowballs that were lit on fire with a flammable gel. And it also had hints for making snow forts, including "make sure to include an icy compartment to store your vodka," and also "watch out for wampas."
Wired: Very nice.
Hodgman: Now, obviously, I know what a wampa is. And immediately our brains flash back to the ultimate snow fort of all time, the Rebel base on the ice planet Hoth. But Mary Roach, to her, she didn't know what a wampa was. She didn't have any idea. And to her that was the joke, that this deranged narrator was advising to be careful about something, presumably a kind of creature, that only he understands. You're correct that when I'm left to my own devices I will trade an in-joke of various kinds, because they give me great pleasure. I always enjoy telling an in-joke and letting people laugh along, because I find that they're inclusive more than they are exclusive.
Wired: You can build a community with an inside joke.
Hodgman: Well, that's exactly so. Part of the transaction between writer and reader, between writer and audience, to me, is the pleasure of writing to build that community, to create that community, to encourage people to play along. And so there are in-jokes that I make just because I'm a geek and it's funny to me to say, "Watch out for wampas." And then there are in-jokes that I will make that I know people will recognize. And then there are in-jokes that I will make that are there for certain select readers. And then there are in-jokes that I make when I'm not sure if anyone will get it, and I'll leave it as a kind of an Easter egg. In my original book, I had to give a little entry for all of the 50 American states. And West Virginia, I discovered, used to have a vibrant economy producing marbles for kids to play with. So, you know I made very passing reference to that, which would mean nothing to someone who doesn't know that about West Virginia.
Wired: And if you don't know, it's still funny to think somebody makes marbles.
Hodgman: Yeah, that in itself is a joke. It's true: People make marbles. Yet also it's just sort of fascinating and beguiling and frightening to appreciate that everything that we interact with was grown or was made. Somebody's job has been to stamp out harmonica parts, you know. That to me is very interesting. So, yeah, I think it's hilarious that people make marbles. Those things that we take for granted, you know, the detritus of everyday life. When you consider that there has been a human mind behind most of them. I think that's fascinating and tragic and funny and great.
They're like Easter eggs, I suppose, in the way that you know you create something that you hope someone else will find. It's like a secret, little secret messages from my brain to yours, to see if there's a connection there. Sometimes I'm surprised by what pings back in the darkness.
I love games and codes, and so much of my interest in Borges was the gamesmanship that went into those stories that he would write. Those stories that pretended to be literary essays, and those metaphysical stories that pretended to be cheap pulp detective novels, and the codes that were written into them. That was my pretentious bread and butter when I was doing literary theory. What's encoded in the language that's telling a story that might be different than the story that the writer thinks he or she is telling.
Wired: If you can encode secret stuff in the writing it becomes more fun to write and more fun to read.
Hodgman: Yeah, exactly. I don't want to give anything away, but if you read this new book in the right way there you will find a map to a hidden door in a mountain.
Wired: Goddammit.
Hodgman: There is some moon writing in my works, let's just say.
Wired: There's another reference.
Hodgman: We'll see if anyone can figure that. I'm sure they can. So, what else?
Wired: Well, now I'm wondering if I can take the galleys out on the right night of the year to see the writing.
Hodgman: There's a hidden room for you to find full of wonders.
Wired: And he was never seen again.
Hodgman: Just please file your story before you go.
Wired: Wow, you really were an editor.
Hodgman: Also there's a disclaimer: There is no hidden room.
Wired: Let's talk about performance. Is your character the same person who is the ostensible voice speaking in the books or in the "Ask A Former Professional Literary Agent?"
Hodgman: Which guy? Is who that guy?
Wired: The Daily Show correspondent.
Hodgman: Oh, that dude with the glasses who goes around claiming to be me?
Wired: That's the one.
Hodgman: That guy is going to get sued.
Wired: You know where he's going to be.
Hodgman: Yeah, I should clarify at this point. I'm not that John Hodgman. I'm sorry if you thought that I was. That's a different guy. Yeah, there's a guy who goes on the Daily Show claiming to be me. And there's a guy that goes on the Mac ads claiming to be me.
Wired: You should be able to find these folks. Because they're probably pulling in big Hollywood money.
Hodgman: I don't do it for the money. They do. I don't think about such things.
I would say that the Resident Expert on the Daily Show is all me. I will sometimes be asked if I'll be doing an interview in character or not, and I don't even really feel like I'm doing a character. I am doing a heightened aspect of myself when I appear as John Hodgman as an expert. Aside from finding humor in the deadpan descriptions of things precisely as they are — if we're going to kill this frog even more — there's also this sort of veering off into the fantastic and the absurd. As I say in the introduction to the new book, reality — to paraphrase a great detective — reality is plausible, even probable, but it's not always interesting. And the obligation in my life, the obligation I feel is to make it interesting. Or to reveal what is interesting in it through absurdity.
Wired: You were somewhat surprised to find that there's fame to be had from doing that.
Hodgman: Well, that was problematic only in so far as that it makes my real life largely as implausible and ridiculous as the invented life I had sort of woven around John Hodgman, former professional literary agent. You know, it is very difficult — and this is part of the real anxiety of approaching a new book — to make the sort of jokes that I would make in the first book. For example, in the first book you know the idea of the former professional literary agent, the joke largely was when I said that I live a life of wealth and power and leisure, anyone who worked in publishing knew that was absolutely false. That was a disjunction between reality that made the character, John Hodgman, me, delusional. But the sort of joke where I list the various cameo appearances you made in movies, much like George Plimpton used to make cameo appearances in movies as a tweedy intellectual, has less integrity and is thus less funny if I am actually making cameo appearances in movies.
Wired: Who's the funny man now?
Hodgman: It really took the ground from beneath my feet. It also helps that I got one of those celebrity antigravity devices.
Wired: So jealous of those.
Hodgman: Yeah. You can't have one.
Wired: Oh, I know.
Hodgman: It is not typical, I think, for a then 36-year-old person with a kind of a lazy eye and a weak chin and kind of a impending middle-aged pudge to embark on a career in the visual medium of television. I would joke about making cameo appearances in movies, but I had come to peace with the reality, undeniable, that that would never happen in my life. And indeed had achieved a very happy career, it would seem, as a writer of fake trivia. So it was very unnerving and surreal to walk into a fancy hotel in Los Angeles and be recognized from television by name. Or for that matter to be invited to do these cameos in movies, or to go from the guy who writes about Battlestar Galactica for the New York Times Magazine to the guy who does a cameo appearance as a doctor. I do a lot of doctors. On the set, acting, quote unquote.
Wired: I meant to say something mean and jealous about that by the way. I forgot about that.
Hodgman: Yeah. I spent a lot of that time feeling upside down. And not just because I was in Vancouver, Canada, or Down Under as they call it. Actually they call it Down Over, I believe. The other side of the world.
Wired: That's just how they order eggs.
Hodgman: But I mean to say that I was a literary agent and then when I stopped being a literary agent I became a magazine writer, and when I stopped being a magazine writer I became a book writer. It was all largely — I mean being an agent and writing Bruce Campbell or being a magazine writer and pitching a story about Battlestar Galactica, it was all this desire to celebrate and somehow be a part of things that I thought were really great.
Wired: Sure.
Hodgman: They were all excited that someone from the New York Times Magazine was there to write about them. I was mainly there geeking about the fact that I was standing in the CIC, you know? It did not occur to me that my career would go through a black hole and come out the other side completely inside out, where I would be someone who knew the creators, and maybe I could come on and just press a button in the CIC, as a joke. And not only that but that they would write a small part that involved me having to actually act for two days with professional actors who had done things like train and pay dues to be where they are. That was not expected. And even though I obviously agreed and said yes, the reality of that surreality did not hit me until I was actually there on stage and really on the other side, literally on the other side of the camera, and the other side of culture, the culture that I loved. The impulse was still the same, I was still a weasely stalker trying to get in on something better than me. Not many people have that opportunity
Wired: Yeah, yeah, but what's the set like?
Hodgman: It's very intricate. They built hallways and rooms that connect and move from place to place. And when you're taking a break, you're not sitting next to the craft service table somewhere. You're going to go sit somewhere else in the infirmary next to charts and records and post-it notes that have the corners cut off that no one will ever see.
Wired: No kidding?
Hodgman: Yeah. It's awesome.
Wired: That's cool.
Hodgman: To get up and to work with actors like Michael Trucco and Katee Sackhoff who are really good, you know, and to realize that you have reached levels of fraudulency and fake expertise that were a joke to you as a possibility not three years before — it was hard to deal with. So far, I hear that my little part as a doctor has not been completely excised. We'll see. But even if it doesn't make it onto TV I know it happened, because I know that it was like stepping into another dimension, in which all businessman are cowboys, or the Nazis won, or I was actually on television. All businessmen are cowboys — that was a plot from an episode of Sliders.
Wired: I was trying to figure out if it was a Westworld reference.
Hodgman: It wasn't even an episode of Sliders that I saw, because I don't know that I ever saw an entire episode of Sliders, largely because I thought that it was an interesting idea and a clever, cheap way to do a science fiction show, but it was called Sliders, and that could not be forgiven. But I saw the promo for it, and it was the promo where Jerry O'Connell and Salah go to a world where all business meetings are solved by shootouts. It's like this big corporate business and sort of a riff on Texas businessmen who wear cowboy hats with their big glass towers but they also carry guns and shoot each other. That was what I gleaned from the promo.
Wired: It's a world just like our own, with one slight difference.
Hodgman: Exactly. It's a world just like our own — we live in a world that's just like the real world with one slight difference. I'm on television. Even I must accept the bizarre reality that that is my life now. Why would that happen? Honestly, Adam, why?
Wired: Well, if the jokes hit, right? That's what I'm telling myself.
Hodgman: I do believe that comedy offers an avenue to television and film careers to normally ugly and untelegenic people that great drama does not.
Wired: What do you read, what do you watch, what do you keep up with? What's in the Tivo?
Hodgman: For the books, I spent a lot of time revisiting and visiting anew actual trivia books largely from the '70s, and then also going back to the '30s and the '20s. Reference books, particularly old reference books, are their own kind of fiction, you know? I found a wonderful, old, self-published, practically Xeroxed pamphlet of superstitions of old New England at a roadside stand in Maine. And every one of those superstitions and ways of defeating witches and ways of curing yourself of gout by rubbing a black cat on your neck is the sort of ephemera that gets tossed away. Those are the sort of stories I love to read and love to find. Obviously the Internet is an incredibly valuable tool to find dubious scholarship on all sorts of subjects. When I learned that Wikipedia was all volunteers I I got excited because that meant that none of it was reliable.
In terms of general pop cultural absorption these days, I was Tivoing or DVRing Lost and Battlestar, the Daily Show obviously 'cause I have a professional obligation to enjoy myself. I was watching Hell's Kitchen because I really find astonishing the friction between Gordon Ramsey, the actual incredibly principled and talented no-nonsense chef who knows things, inhabiting the same body as Gordon Ramsey, the guy who will apparently do anything for money.
I am reading somewhat belatedly the Michael Chabon book, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which is just fantastic. And then, you know, comic books. I reread Watchmen recently, getting ready for the movie. I have probably read that book ten times and I'm still discovering new things in it. Talk about secret messages and hidden codes. The echoes and little subplots that are playing themselves out in the margins of the margins of that story, in the third layer back of the perspective panel to panel, I think there are few pure storytellers as gifted as Alan Moore.
In fact, it has become unpleasurable for me to read many comics because of how Watchmen and Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns are imitated without attribution over and over and over again.
You know, I love Miller. I saw — I met and had drinks with him on Sept. 10, 2001. I went home. I had just reread Dark Knight Returns and was marveling again at the grim fury of the idea of that electromagnetic pulse hitting the world or hitting the Western Hemisphere, and Jim Gordon looking up and the plane flying into the building. I was talking with Frank Miller about that, and then the next day was the next day. That's crazy. But there you go.
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