I hope you’re all getting a little rest in towards the end of the year, even amidst various excitements and obligations. My wife (Maris, who new readers may not know by name, but now you do) and I have a pretty cozy week of hanging out with friends and watching movies and eating Chinese food lined up, so we are celebrating both an observant Jewish Christmas and lighting Hanukkah candles all at once. (Movie-wise so far we have watched Juror #2 which came highly recommended, but I couldn’t get over the COME ON!!!! SERIOUSLY???? sensation I felt basically the whole time.)
Over the weekend our neighborhood took on the quiet holiday tone that sets in when residents scatter across the country (globe?) to visit family. But, since we’re Jews who just saw both of our families, we are putting “plant” in “transplant” and staying put in Brooklyn through New Year’s Eve. I was supposed to meet a friend for lunch today, but that got moved around a little so I am homebodying pretty hard.
As I mentioned last week, I sometimes tend to look THROUGH a period of time when I know I’ll be busy. In those moments, I fully forget that I’ll experience all the things that happen during that time. My eyes slide across my calendar like it’s a Chutes and Ladders board, and I imagine myself deposited on the other side of the busy period. I can feel a little overwhelmed looking at two full calendar weeks and imagining all the appointments and obligations hitting me at once like a truck. And then I realize that I’m very lucky in that it’s (almost all) stuff I like to do that (almost always) comes up one thing at a time.
I’d been looking at the back half of December as “the end of the year” in one capsule, and it wasn’t until early last week that I realized I have a bunch of fun events planned, and I get to enjoy them individually in succession, and sleep in between some of them too. Over the weekend I had a little extra downtime because I forgot to consider Saturday and Sunday exist, and I started having New Creative Ideas for the first time in a while, which felt terrific.
It was a slightly hectic pre-holiday week though, but in a very fun way! I was asked to hop on the podcast, where I talked (possibly too much) about slam dunks. The whole Flagrant Mag team is brilliant, and I am always so flattered and delighted to get to collaborate with them on anything! Then I went on back on WNYC to give pep talks to listeners! Thanks so much to Kate Hind who invited me back on the show and was such a gracious host! Also thanks to the listeners for being so open and sincere with their pep talk requests!
I also wrote a little guest post about NY Governor Kathy Hochul for my friend ’s always-excellent newsletter! Embedded in it is this silly video I made about Gov. Hochul’s proposed hotline for CEO’s to call in when they fail threatened. I’ll also embed it here for ease of viewership! (Also hi! Welcome, everyone who came here from and WNYC!)
If you don’t like it, take it up with Santa Claus.
P-Stick! Sticky P! Pep Cream! (Wow those ALL sound gross!) It’s time for a little Pep for Pepp! Because frankly, you deserve it!
It is, for so many reasons, ridiculous that peppermint ice cream is a seasonal food. First of all: WHY DO WE HAVE A WINTER-ONLY ICE CREAM FLAVOR? WHAT THE HELL IS THAT ABOUT? Mint ice cream served exclusively in the winter makes about as much sense as a piping hot mug of egg nog at a Fourth of July BBQ. It’s the most dissociative seasonal food our culture has. There’s no way you (peppermint ice cream) are going to catch on in any kind of broader sense while you’re being served in a such a bizarre context.
As I’ve said before in this newsletter (briefly, and two years ago) peppermint stick ice cream should be a year-round treat. Why would it not be? What other ice cream flavors go out of fashion when the weather changes? And yes, we have another mint flavor that perseveres in the warmer months, but if butter pecan and maple walnut and pistachio can endure throughout the full calendar, we can have two different mints!!!
Haters will (and do) say that mint ice cream tastes like toothpaste. Good point. NOT. Every person in America uses toothpaste two to three times a day without complaint! It is one of the most successful and widely-enjoyed flavors in the world. “Mint ice cream tastes like toothpaste?” No, you fools! We are lucky to live in an era when we have an oral hygiene product THAT TASTES LIKE ICE CREAM. (Note: I do not want to erase the small but significant minority of people who use Tom’s of Maine toothpaste, a product that is created, as far as I can tell, by mixing strawberry jam with sand.)
A few brave ice cream brands sell their peppermint stick varietal all year long. And yes, that is heroic. But we can’t stop there! Any company that makes stick cream (eww!) in the winter should make it all four seasons. THERE ARE HUNDREDS IF NOT…A FEW MORE HUNDREDS OF US WHO FEEL THIS WAY.
Peppermint stick ice cream, you are underrated. And in time, you will be vindicated.
PEP TALK FOR A READER
I did just a little tweaking of this pep talk request. Don’t worry about it.
Hi!! I would love a pep talk! I got laid off the week before Thanksgiving (media) and feel like I was the person cut on my team because the big boss didn’t like me. I haven’t even had time to start seriously looking for something new yet because I’ve had a lot going on (Thanksgiving cooking, destination wedding, MOVING) and am worried that there won’t even be anything to apply for over the holidays. Basically I’m overwhelmed and even though I’m incredibly privileged and can look for a job I actually want, I’m scared no one will want me back! THANKS! - Looking Towards a Hire Power
Let’s start here, and it’s going to sound a little flippant, but: Imagine doing all this BIGS LIFE STUFF while also having a job!!! That sounds way worse than your current situation! Obviously you’re going to need some money coming in eventually, but you sound financially stable in this moment, and most employers don’t let you take a ton of time off to smush your belongings into cardboard boxes or brine a turkey, especially if you are also planning to take a few vacation days for a honeymoon coming up. So, while the holidays and a wedding are stressful occasions to go through without income, they are positively delightful times to not have to go to work.
I will for sure grant you that it’s a rough time to be looking for work, especially in media. The people in charge of most outlets seem to have published their “Best of the Year” coverage the first week in December, laid off a chunk of their staff, and then thrown up a couple of middle fingers to the world until at least New Year’s Day. I have a few of things I’m working on (ideally) for television, and I was told the week of Thanksgiving that nobody on the network/platform/studio side of things was going to do any work until mid-January. So I guess in that sense it’s a great time to have one of the seven or eight (rough estimate) remaining jobs in media, because you don’t actually have to do anything for the final 10% of the year. I’m all for work/life balance, but I would love if the people with the money would show up for work so the rest of us could get on with our lives!
Across industries, it seems like working people are employed by fewer and fewer (bigger and bigger) companies who give less and less of a shit about both the products they sell and the people who create and distribute them. And the bigger the company, the harder every boss’s nipples seem to be at the prospect of replacing their workforce with computer programs that haven’t even proven they can do the jobs yet. Merry Christmas!
Wait! Please do not delete this newsletter yet! I wasn’t finished! I have more pep to offer!
While the richest people on earth are using their literal and political capital to try to burn holes in the social safety net, way, way more people are working collectively to secure sustainable and dignified working conditions. Last week, the Writers Guild of America called on television and film studios to take up the fight against generative AI and its theft of intellectual property. Even more encouragingly, unionized Amazon and Starbucks workers are on strike leading up to Christmas. (Two nice things you can do during that time are avoiding going to Starbucks while the strike is in effect, and donating to the unions’ strike funds if you have a couple of bucks to spare. Here’s Amazon’s! Here’s the one for Starbucks employees in the Pacific Northwest!)
This information probably isn’t of any material help to you in this moment, reader. But seeing how many working people across the country have begun to seize the power of collective action has been really encouraging to me. I know a lot of recent events suggest otherwise, but we can make things better with effort and solidarity. But in this moment, as you said, you have the privilege to look for work you want. Exercise it! That’s what it’s there for! Happy holidays!
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: Julien Baker & Torres - “Sugar in the Tank”
As long-time newsletter readers know, my favorite Christmas song is this one by Charly Bliss and Pup (with an honorable mention for this Sufjan Stevens classic that feels about as much about Jesus as his non-Christmas music is). And we’re still in kind of a Hanukkah song dry spell since Adam Sandler dropped our last holiday classic THIRTY YEARS AGO(??!?!?!?). Since getting back from Aimee and Ted’s holiday tour, I haven’t been listening to any seasonal music. And ever since I saw They Might Be Giants live a week and a half ago, my headphones have been a lot of TMBG (and a lot of podcasts, so I guess I could recommend the Here episode of Blank Check or the Trap episode of The Flop House)!
But as counterprogramming to the current barrage of holiday (we know which one) music on the radio and in stores and scoring commercials…I offer you a sweet gay country song. It’s new and it’s good! I’ve missed Julien Baker (my favorite of the boygeniuses) and Torres individually the last few times they’ve come through town, and last week I couldn’t make it to the little pop-up show they did as a duo, but hopefully they’ll be back soon and I can hear them play songs together! Until then, let’s enjoy this one!
UPCOMING SHOWS
It’s a slow time of the year, but I’ve got some more shows to announce soon!
Materially, I have had a totally fine and good week. AND YET, I was in an intensely foul mood for several days, just stomping around, grumbling to myself (and others), and being a general pain in the ass. Nothing catastrophic happened, even though I missed a standup show because the train stopped working (not ideal), and I had trouble focusing on a little work I had to do (got it done eventually, though). But that did not stop me from temporarily ruining my own life with bad vibes!
The dust cloud lifted several times (the Writers Guild holiday party, getting to chat and take pictures with my friend Mindy Tucker…even though I did a bad job preparing for the photos, seeing They Might Be Giants with Maris, eating part of a big sandwich my friend won in a raffle), but as soon as I was done having fun, I hurled myself right back into this little rut. My brain is largely back on its feet now, but yikes I am not used to being so grumpy for such a sustained period, and I’m not good at it!
I’m feel so jealous when I see people who are skilled at being mad, whether they channel it into working out or getting revenge. When I’m in a bad mood I just want to like…flop around until I exhaust myself from flailing and pass out. Do you all have any better ways of handling anger? I would love to hear them!
Circling back (to myself) for just a moment, I want to say how great They Might Be Giants are as a live band. I first knew them from their animated shorts on Tiny Tune Adventures and secondarily from their album Flood which I’d inherited after the death of my uncle Jay. He was a fascinating guy and had a wildly eclectic CD collection that I downloaded into my head little bits at a time. (TMBG, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the rapper Chubb Rock were some memorable inclusions.) Then in the summer of 2005, a bunch of my childhood friends headed down to Lebowskifest in Louisville (for the second time…more on that later, or never!), where TMBG headlined the big opening night concert, and I was kicked in the chest by how powerful they sound with a full band. Some of their arrangements on record sound a little…novelty song, but they are a real-ass band with a big live sound. I imagine that’s a big factor in how they’ve remained a band for forty-plus years.
I also love the way TMBG weaves these intense moments of tenderness and melancholy into such quirky premises. It reminds me of the improv maxim of committing to the stakes of the scene, or the way Charlie Kaufman’s movie scripts take absurd concepts (you can spend fifteen minutes being John Malkovich) and play them out to their emotional conclusions. On Friday night I was struck by the lyric “I want to thank you for putting me back in my snail shell” from the song “Snail Shell” which is ostensibly about a snail that fell out of its shell, but is also poetically about coming across someone who puts you back into alignment with your own sense of purpose and identity. I also got a little choked up by the lyric “leave the nightlight on inside the birdhouse in your soul,” and I’m not even 100% sure what that one means!
I really resist depressing art that is “naturalistic” or “realistic,” but I’m much more willing to engage with weirdo surrealist drags. (Maybe that means I’m a baby who can’t handle the real world. But also maybe it means that I know war is bad and I get bored when that’s what a movie is all about.) This also points back to my eye rolls at so many awards-y movie performances. Oh, he acted sad because in the movie his son died? WE ALL KNOW THAT DEATH MAKES YOU FEEL SAD. I’m way more interested in a coherent portrayal of a guy who learns that he is appearing in the dreams of everyone in the world. (Even though that specific movie was a little uneven!)
I’ve been on a bunch of recent podcasts that I forgot to mention, so here goes!
I was deeply flattered to try on my native accent for a Dead Pilots Society reading of a dormant script for a show called Massholes. My personal accent kind of faded in and out, to be honest! But I gave it my all!
I showed up on some recent episodes of Sound Heap with the great John-Luke Roberts!
I have recently been obsessed with my friends’ extremely chaotic new podcast Welcome to Talk Town, and I was lucky enough to appear as a guest on the last two episodes. It was some of the most fun I’ve had in months!!!
Did I mention that I chatted with my old friend Gabe Dunn about IronMan, which I’d never seen before and did NOT like?
Oh and also here’s a little topical standup joke that didn’t do great, but I still like so I shared it on the internet anyway.
They call him Eminem (the Ms stand for “Martial Mistake”) now. I mean, they don’t, but they could.
Mr. President, you really stepped in it. You declared martial law about a week ago, which people did not like (people rarely enjoy martial law, I’ve found). And then your declaration of military rule was voted down, which must have been so humiliating. In America, our (once and future, ugh) president’s attempt at seizing power through force was executed by a bunch of off-duty police officers and wine moms who think ordering furniture online is the same as sex trafficking. Obviously they weren’t going to succeed. But you declared the military was in charge of South Korea, and you got voted down. Not to engage in toxic masculinity, but you got cucked by democracy, dude. Strongman leaders all over the world are probably cooking you in your group chats, and even female Fox News anchor types who LOVE when men take their rights away most likely got an incurable case of “the ick.”
Now you’ve been impeached by parliament, which, unlike in our government here, means that you are prohibited from exercising presidential power until the whole situation is resolved. Even worse, your own party turned against you because you refused to resign. And honestly, as an American, it’s kind of beautiful to see that some political parties in some parts of the world still have a sense of shame. If a Republican politician in America failed to implement marital law, their supporters around the country would rush out into the streets and BEG the military to suppress their rights out of fealty to their leader. Matt Gaetz would stage a photo op with his leg pinned underneath a tank tread while he gave the thumbs up straight to camera. It’s lightly encouraging to know that in South Korea, some politicians still view embarrassment as embarrassing.
You’ve got a little time on your hands now, it seems. And that’s a chance for you to figure out what’s next because, unless you were really good at martial law, there was always going to be a next thing. If you don’t die in office, you’ve got to have a third act. It seems unlikely you can take after the recent American tradition and become elected president again after exhibiting wildly disqualifying behavior. But maybe you can do the slightly less recent American ex-president things of taking up painting or turning yourself into an entertainment executive or becoming vegan and just continuing to stick around while people grow more and more aware of your flaws over time.
Your options are limitless (well, except for being president still). You’re done with public service; now you’re ready for a little Yoon-time.
(DISCLAIMER: I know very little about Korean politics and hopefully learned just enough for this pep talk to make a little sense and not sound culturally monstrous!)
PEP TALK FOR A READER
I’ve done just a little editing of this request for brevity!
Not sure if this is relatable but we're halfway through December and I am struggling to get into the holiday spirit. I'm not at all depressed, everything is going great. I just feel tired after this past year, and like my head has been elsewhere (particularly the recent news cycle). Would love a pep talk on how to restore some holiday spirit and maybe get my groove back in time for Christmas. - Holidazed and Holiconfused
This writer has captured maybe the most prevalent mood I’ve ever seen someone describe as potentially unrelatable. Nearly everyone I know is feeling burnt out, wrung out, and a third out of your choosing. Our presidential election ended in a true worst case scenario for many people (although if you’re a billionaire who owns a racist bumper sticker factory, all your dreams are coming true). Everything feels like a scam lately. I am currently being hounded to pay two months of membership dues for a gym I’ve never been to in a city I haven’t lived in for over a decade. There are maybe some unexplained drones hovering over New Jersey, but also a bunch of dummies are getting freaked out while accidentally stargazing or spotting regular-ass airplanes. We’ve been living in “unprecedented times” for so long, I think it’s safe to say we’ve established a new precedent.
(Okay so maybe I am still wallowing in a little residual crankiness.)
Because you asked, and because I believe I have something to offer here, I will dip my toes briefly in to the advice-giving pool. Outside of the general year-end malaise, I deeply relate to the feeling of looking at a calendar and seeing a solid block of stuffI’vegottado. It’s a daunting position to be in, considering two or more weeks as a single unit of BUSY. But even if your holidays (Hanukkah and the other ones) are packed with obligations, I want to offer a few ways to reframe that experience and make it less dreadful.
How you’re feeling right now.
Break this period down into its component parts. Not for productivity reasons. I don’t think a to-do list is going to eradicate your doldrums. But even just considering the individual things that are keeping you busy is a nice way to focus on the events and experiences themselves rather than the fact that you are constantly occupied. You’ve got to go to the mall and pick up a couple of gifts? That’s not just an hour and a half of Being Annoyed (although it’s maybe also that); it’s a chance to bring joy into the lives of your loved ones. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t be doing it. Throw a podcast or audiobook on in your headphones and hurl yourself into the fray of commerce.
UGHHH you have to make an appearance at an office Christmas party? Sure, that’s a demand on your time. But what will you be doing there? Probably making some stilted smalltalk but probably also catching up with someone who you enjoy chatting with and mostly only see in the context of work. Get psyched for gossip instead of viewing the event as a period of your life you’re handing over to the whims of fate. Is there an hour you can reclaim for yourself in the middle of the day or after everyone else is asleep? SEIZE IT! It’s yours now! No one can make you not do that!
What will make this fun? Now that you’ve considered what you Have To Do, is there a way to make it more enjoyable? Can you bring a friend? Will there be a dog you can pet at this event, or a group of kids building a Lego structure you can ingratiate yourself with instead of talking about How Work Is with older cousins you never see? Can you talk with the older cousins about how annoying (or adorable) the kids are? Will there be food you’re excited to eat? This can be a fraught and frazzling time of year if you have difficult relationships with family members or holiday celebrations themselves. So…how can you build or observe traditions in ways that are as joyous as possible (AJAP).
This is something I used to tell friends who were trudging through first date after first date with dud after dud: It’s supposed to be fun. If it’s not fun, you don’t have to do it. And while that’s absolutely true with dating, it’s not always the case with family. You don’t always get the chance to opt out. But still, a party, a gathering, a family dinner is supposed to be fun, and treating it as such is a helpful way to start. But also…
How can you indulge the feeling of Don’t Wanna? Sometimes things have to get done, which is sad but true. There’s cleaning, cooking, gift buying, orchestrating travel, wrangling childcare, pretending Santa is real, making excuses for things you can’t do, and so much more. Obviously a disproportionate amount of stuff on average falls to moms under the auspices of “having it all.” But sometimes moms and others simply Don’t Wanna. In those cases, it might help to consider what can you…not do?
Do you have the ability to throw a few dollars at a problem? Make it rain, and buy some nice cookies instead of baking them! Are you expected to travel an inconvenient distance to see people who make you feel bad? Stay home! Are you overwhelmed with tasks? Ask for help! Or, quietly delete a few low-priority chores from your itinerary. If nobody but you is expected to pay attention to them anyway, chances are other people might not even notice they didn’t get done. Don’t wrap gifts! Put them in little bags! Or leave them in the bags they came in! Who gives a shit?
This is not failproof methodology. Sometimes you just have to do things you don’t want to. Or even a deluge of good things can leave you underwater. But instead of considering The Holidays as an mountain to be scaled, that you can make life easier by driving a car up the path instead of walking, or remembering that you’re climbing this mountain because you want to, or if you actually are not interested in scaling the peak, you’re free to go around. Everest is optional. And so is making egg nog from scratch.
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: Bob Sapp - “Sapp Time”
Kind of a curveball this week, I know. This video feels like a very early aughts “can you believe this silly thing is on the internet?” cultural element, but I never hear it brought up as such. Maybe “Sapp Time” never achieved the heights of virality required to coast smoothly into the future. Perhaps there was just not a specific cultural stickiness that kept it around.
In any case, this music video that my college hallmates and I stumbled upon during out first year in school popped into my head this week, and the song is still surprisingly catchy in its clunkiness. I think at one point I knew what some of the Japanese words meant, but I do not remember any of the translations. The phonetic pronunciations are still rolling around along the wrinkles in my brain though.
(For reference, Bob Sapp played in one NFL game and then at some point moved to Japan to pursue combat sports, which he was not very good at, comparative to other professional fighters. But do they have a theme song like this? I don’t think so!)
SOME OTHER STUFF I ENJOYED
My friend Yassir Lester wrote (and co-directed along with his brother Isaiah) an extremely silly movie starring Shameik Moore and D’Arcy Carden (Janet from The Good Place), and Maris and I had a blast watching it. It was the most/hardest I’ve laughed at a movie this year!
Also my friend Martin Urbano put out a new standup special in character as a general creep who is making his return from being “cancelled.” He’s an excellent writer and performer, and he’s always turning the premises of his own jokes in on themselves over and over in a way that really asks the audience to examine what they’re laughing at. It’s a real tightrope walk!
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’ve got a bunch of NYC dates coming up, and then a few back on the road! See you there?!?!
I got back last night (technically today) from the little week-long tour I got to be a part of for Ted Leo and Aimee Mann’s Christmas Shows. The shows themselves and the attendant driving around were, to borrow an old phrase, just what I needed (JUST WHAT I NEEDED!). A week of performing with some of my favorite artists, in front of warm and enthusiastic crowds. I got to do all the fun parts of touring (writing jokes, goofing around with friends, performing for nice people) without the bad parts (posting videos on Instagram begging people to come to the shows, waking up at 5am to catch a flight). My parents were able to come see me tell jokes in person for the first time in several years (not counting when I visit them and won’t stop talking), and that was wonderful too!
I’m so grateful to Aimee and Ted (so cool and nice in addition to being treat musicians) for having me along for this run of shows. The whole squad (including special guests Paul F. Tompkins and Nellie McKay, the band, and the crew) has known each other and worked together for years, and as the newest guy, I was focused on:
a. Doing a good job onstage. b. Not being annoying.
Hopefully I pulled off both! I’m so used to touring by myself or in a car with one other person, and it was really fun to have a big part of the day in a van full of people, listening to music and podcasts and riffing silly bits (while also personally being mindful of goal “b,” not being annoying; sometimes a little bit of bit goes a long way when you’re the new guy). Ultimately, the pressure to achieve goal “a” was relieved by the fact that even if I realllly blew it, the audience was going to get to see Ted and Aimee play a bunch of the best songs of this (and the end of last) century, and no one would remember I existed. Pretty good for a worst case scenario! But I think I did a nice job with the job part and also with the not being annoying part.
It means a lot to me to see artists who are in the midst of long and varied careers, who work hard at cultivating a sense of community and collaboration, and who like watching each other perform from the side of the stage. And, not to sound like the oldest guy in history, I also love the magic of a show that is meant to be seen by a live audience and not chopped up into tiny pieces and sprinkled across the internet. (Although I do think the world deserves to witness PFT’s stirring musical number performed as Krampus.) The whole endeavor took the hard work of a whole bunch of people onstage and offstage, and the end result was really special and memorable, and I’m so glad I got to be a little part of it.
Between this and the writing project I’m working on with my friend Alison Leiby, I’m feeling energized by teamwork. That’s the spirit I’m going to try and take with me into 2025. For now, I am home in Brooklyn doing shows around NYC and hanging out with Maris and noodling around with some writing stuff and doing karaoke and watching movies and eating Chinese food. It’s cozyin’ time.
(Oh also, if you are not already a Paul F. Tompkins fan, you just have to listen to his bit about canned peanut brittle. He’s one of the greats! Also so nice!)
PEP TALK FOR HEALTH INSURANCE CEOs
Why does the guy on the right look like he’s tied down waiting to be bitten by the snake on the left?
Last week, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot dead in the street, and a prevailing response even among many pacifists was: “Oh, so that’s why guns.”
All I’ll say here is: It’s never too late to quit your job and give all or most of your money away! There are plenty of other things to be in charge of. Nobody’s mad at the guy who runs the factory that makes twist ties. (Or at least, nobody’s that mad.)
Also, nobody’s making you be the CEO of anything! There are few skills I trust less than “good at business” for its own sake (even “suspiciously proficient at tying knots” could be a Cub Scout thing or a sex thing, not a murder thing). You could still learn to build furniture or play the violin! The world is your oyster!
Everyone’s doing gift guides in their newsletters lately, and I don’t have especially good taste, and I also don’t know what you, readers, like! So, in keeping with the Best Compliment I Ever Received feature this newsletter sometimes runs, I asked (on BlueSky) for the best gifts people have ever given, and maybe this will be some inspiration!
(I will say, tickets to a live event is a fun one, and I don’t just say that in a self-serving way as someone who performs regularly at live events! Similarly…merch or other tangible work sold by a favorite independent artist!)
I’ve divided the responses up into loose categories and shared them with you all!
Handmade Gifts!
[My partner] asked me “what kind of advent calendar would you want” and I, thinking this was hypothetical (I’m Jewish!), said “I dunno, probably rocks, bones, and bugs?” He sourced enough weird little things & chocolates for a cool nine-drawer cabinet (he forgot how many days in Chanukah)
Normally I would not consider “rocks, bones, and bugs” a good gift (unless the gift-recipient is a scientist or the gift-giver is an eight-year-old), but this is great!
I loaned my mother a comic book, Digger by Ursula Vernon. Months later she's down for Christmas and gives me the book back but then gives me a four-to-five inch tall felted figure of the main character, including a working button and backpack and a detachable pickaxe.
My husband built me a little Raspberry Pi computer that contains the classic Simpsons seasons (as defined by me). It plugs into the tv and you can choose an episode or let it shuffle. This may not sound romantic but it's some of the hardest I've ever swooned!
My sister took an existing book about sisterhood and affixed pictures of us throughout the entire book. Pictures of us as little children all the way up through adulthood. It is my most cherished object.
My sister made me a beautiful quilt, and I filled her freezer with healthy, homemade post-partum recipes I researched from around the world.
I lived in a house of 6 people for about 6 years and I moved out a few years ago but stay close to them. We see each other as family. Last Christmas one of them designed and had made a set of rings for all of us to wear. It was incredibly touching.
I love this one because it is thoughtful and generous and also custom rings make it feel like you’re part of a secret society or won a Super Bowl together.
My grandma knit me an afghan and said that I'd be getting a big hug from her whenever I wrapped myself up in it
That’s some top shelf grandma shit!!!
A patient once made needlepoint pot holders for me. They were beautiful, but what warmed me even more was she had low vision and was in her 90s but took the time to make them for me. I was so touched. Still am.
Also grandma-style even though it’s not technically from your grandma!
Stuff!(Because sometimes the best things in life…are things!)
I'm only saying this due to recency bias, but a very soft and cozy heated blanket. But actually the same person (my spouse) once found all the extant episodes of my favorite old time radio show and made me a CD of them ❤️ and before that made me actual mix tapes for my car with a tape deck!
My (adult!) child gifted me a Scrooge-style nightcap and a nice bottle of whiskey - for nightcaps!
Nothing better than a cozy situation. And very little worse than a fake-cozy situation. Like when you see a couch that looks nice and soft and you kind of slump down into it and it’s basically a park bench covered in fabric. Kiss my bruised ass, deceptively firm couches!
My bestie stayed with me for a few weeks after a breakup, and was horrified to learn I had no good knives (I was ~30). He bought me my first really good knife. It’s still going strong 20+ years later.
Damn this is the sweetest story I can imagine about acquiring a knife right after a breakup. Normally those don’t turn out this well!
I mentioned to my best friend that when I was around 10 my mom gave away my plush Fievel doll and I had been super sad about it, and months later she found one on ebay and gave it to me for Christmas.
Through the internet, all things are possible, both for better (here) and for worse (50% of other examples).
I don’t think this is what you’re looking for, but a friend (back in the day) gave us an ounce of pot when we were going thru some tough times. Much appreciated!
This is absolutely the kind of thing I was looking for! What a nice friend!
My husband got me an eye mask, kind of as a bit, because he stays up later than I do. It turned out to be the most useful thing he's ever gotten me (and in fact when that one was kind of getting ratty, he bought me a newer, nicer one that I still use).
Sometimes bits become real life!
A few years ago a friend got me a full tea set because I love to throw teas but had a hard time finding a set that had a cream pitcher and a sugar bowl that didn’t wasn’t ugly. Once I opened the box and realized what it was [a cream pitcher and sugar bowl that were not ugly, of course] I cried. It was so thoughtful.
I gave my best friend’s daughter a random stuffed animal for her first birthday that she is still obsessed with at 6 (the gift is making me feel like I totally nailed Cool Aunt early).
Tickets to my favorite baseball team!! I would never have spent the money. But oh, what a treat!!
My wife got custom Lego figures of the two of us.
I was moving to MI from CA, and wistful about leaving. My sister got me a necklace with a California Poppy that matched hers, and said I'd always be welcome to stay with her when I missed home. I think we're as close now as when we lived 30m apart.
The lesson here is listen to people and know what they like and just hammer it. Although you can go too hard. I think I’ve got to put an end to the run of buying Maris olive-themed jewelry before she has enough of it to open her own Etsy store and start flipping pieces I’ve given her.
After my dad died a friend with a lot of airline miles gave me enough of them for a round-trip flight so I could have a break from all the grief etc. It was incredibly kind and helpful!
Airline miles! The gold bars of the sky!
I offhand mentioned once to a friend that I always cringed using a can opener because I envisioned cutting myself on the lid and a few days later I received a beautifully giftwrapped OXO good grips safety can opener. I have felt warm with friendship every time I open a can for over ten years now.
I was embarking on an exciting new chapter professionally and my then-girlfriend bought me a wonderful backpack upgrade for everyday carry. Reader, I married her.
There is something so gratifying about having just the right tool for a job. I can only imagine how good it felt for someone to use dental floss for the first time instead of cleaning the spaces between their teeth with a twig or some twine.
for my birthday in october my bestie called my local fancy butcher and put two very nice steaks on hold for me, knowing i love cooking, rarely eat meat, and money was tight. i had a lovely birthday dinner!!!! (when i picked it up the staff cheered and said it was a first)
Celebrating my birthday - at the end of August - has always been a challenge because I was always moving or starting school. One year, my best friend baked me a birthday cake and froze it in my mom's freezer so I could have a home-baked cake on my actual birthday.
A loved one died on Thanksgiving day in 2002. My whole family had been in the hospital with her all week. When we got home that night, we found an entire thanksgiving feast had been prepared & set up in my parents’ house by their friends. It was the best and sweetest gift I’ve ever experienced.
A tub of sunshine-yellow carrot ginger soup from a distant friend when I was upside down headfirst in a snake pit of grief.
Once when we lived in California, the first time it had rained in months my husband drove to my office parking lot and replaced my windshield wipers so that I could drive home with new ones.
One of my exes bought me a set of tires when I was a broke grad student and had a tire blow out and couldn’t afford it, and it was just such an immense relief to have them instantly solve a huge problem for me.
When going through an especially busy & difficult time in my life a neighbor walked over and washed my car (during The Pollening here in the South). Asked for my keys & cleaned the inside too. Small thing, but something I lacked time to do and was very needed. Will never forget that small kindness.
As someone who has no idea how to take care of a car, this sounds incredible. My usual thing as a car owner is to drive until one of the parts starts making too loud a noise for me to hear the radio, or too acrid a smell for me to think thoughts, and then I take it into a mechanic who goes “You would have died if you’d driven ten more miles!” and then charges me my net worth to replace a piece of metal the size of my left thumb.
Cold Hard Cash
When I was 18, I asked my mom for money, which she thought was boring (she likes wrapping presents). So my mom gave me a Kleenex box with a dollar bill sticking out. When I pulled it out, I found it was an entire roll of dollar bills taped together that came out like tickets from a skee-ball machine
Was studying abroad in college & our classroom had a random piano. I’d arrive early to play. Showed up one morning & was told to stop: heartbroken. A few days later a classmate told me to keep playing & not to worry. I found out later he’d paid the place to make sure I could continue. Incredible.
I was getting divorced & struggling financially. I mentioned to a friend that I hadn’t filed yet because I had to come up with the court fee first. Soon after a stranger walked up to me and handed me an envelope with the money I needed. Several friends had taken up a collection, I found out later.
Someone once left me an envelope of cash for a few drinks at my local bar. Handwritten note and all. The thought and gesture were so kind.
There’s an old Simpsons joke where Homer describes alcohol as “the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems,” and that’s kind of how I feel about money. Capitalist exploitation, bad. Giving someone a wad of bills to make a problem go away, good.
Sometimes people treat money or gift certificates like a tacky or thoughtless gift and to that I say NO. Obviously you don’t want to give a dusty re-enveloped Borders gift card for your tenth wedding anniversary. But giving someone a green light to splurge at a restaurant (big recent trend in my family) or on a nice pair of sneakers without assuming what they want to eat/wear is often more thoughtful than going: “I bet you’d like this thing that’s maybe not your style or even your size!” That level of taste is so hard to nail! You don’t have to try it if you have any doubts!
Well, Harper Lee’s friends once gave her a year’s wages so she could have a year off to write. I think we have different friends, but it would be nice!
If anyone knows any patrons of the arts, I too would like to befriend one!
Acts Of Service
When I was very depressed once, my pal drove to my house, coaxed me into her car, and brought me to eat soup dumplings. It was the nicest thing.
My roommate and I were in the process of repainting basically the entire house that we were renting from my parents and we were burnt out. A friend was over and saw the supplies. He said "I have tomorrow off, I'll come paint it for you" and he DID. Painted until he was out of paint. A hero.
okay best gift ever was, after years of loneliness, a group of new friends all showed up for my birthday, did karaoke with me, and were their weird and wonderful selves. couldn't have asked for anything better than silliness and feeling loved
This is my kind of gift! I may not be a skilled house painter (traditional) or “guy who paints houses” (mob), but I can certainly take you out for soup or show up to your birthday party!
My dad died over the winter holidays in 2021. My fam all went back home for several weeks, mid-Dec to mid-Jan. I came back in Jan to find my SIL & friends had taken down all of our Christmas decorations for us & put them away, & had my house professionally cleaned. I will never forget that kindness.
My dad passed away unexpectedly and I had to leave town in a rush. When I got back my friends had cleaned my whole house. Which was….no small feat. It was totally unexpected and was the best thing EVER.
I was really sick one December, and very sad about it. When I came home one day, my husband had put up the tree and lights and just decorated the shit out of the house, and it cheered me up so much.
my mom stayed with us after our baby was born and did all the laundry, cooked, and organized my living room, it was the best gift anyone has ever given me
The week after my kid was born, my husband’s boss came over to help around the house. She ended up spending about an hour shredding old documents, repeatedly emptying the shredder, and vacuuming around it. I think of her every time I have to empty the shredder myself, an odious task.
These are all such generous uses of time and energy. As an aside, I am so relieved to not be a Christmas celebrator, because I’d absolutely be the slob with a tree up until March and lights up until May. I would probably try to cheat it by finding lights with what I’d consider a “year-round” color scheme (a thing that doesn’t actually exist) and then become the subject of gossip across the neighborhood. (I mean, assuming I ever live in a house again.)
Sentimental Value
My sister gave her daughter (my niece) my name as her middle name.
A beautiful and high-stakes gift.
I was carded at my 33rd birthday party. That was a gift from the universe!
On one hand, we shouldn’t put such a cultural premium on youth. On the other hand, it’s sometimes nice to have someone mistake you for a youth. What better day than your birthday?
This is revealing but, as an autistic, the best gifts are when I actually get what I asked for and not someone’s interpretation of it. I know it sounds ~not great, but again the autism demands specificity and particularity
Unclear what if anything this says about me, but I do relate to this. I was a VERY bad gift recipient as a child! As an adult I learned that if I never ask for anything specific, I don’t put any pressure on receiving anything specific, and I can just be delighted that someone thought to give me a gift at all. (Your mileage may vary, of course.)
Definitely up there, my first birthday after my dad passed a friend got me a Cameo from my favourite Jewish jobber, Barry Horowitz. Who also offered me very genuine condolences which was as lovely as it was unexpected.
Best friend in college got me a notebook filled with messages from my closest friends about why I was so special to them. Still keep it by my bedside to read on tough days.
I have one of these that my co-teachers made filled with pictures by my last group of students when I was a pre-school teacher. It’s so special to me!
My husband made me a compilation of videos from my family and friends, but they were all in the style of Cameos. Very funny!!!
A partner lovingly applying lipstick to me for the first time which helped me realize I was trans.
This is so tender, and I don’t know if it’s the right gift for everyone, this sounds like such a beautiful experience someone gave you, and I’m so glad you shared it here!
What about you, readers? Do you have a best gift you’ve ever received that you’d like to share? Please do!!!
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: Emilyn Brodsky - “Hands off the Stove”
I recently met Emilyn through the excellent DC Pierson (whose “architect who designed New York ” videos are my favorite running internet comedy bit right now), and I realized that I’d seen her perform live probably…15 years ago opening for the World Inferno Friendship Society in Rhode Island. Wild!
I went back to listen to Emilyn’s studio albums, which are great, and her most recent one was self-produced, and it’s just so light and breezy-sounding, but also full of poignant lyrics and catchy hooks. There’s an emotional muscle behind the gentleness of the music. And a melodic punch behind the tenderness of the vocals. The horns! Really good stuff! I couldn’t stop listening to it! And now I’m sharing it with you!
Also, the recently shouted-out Doechii’s Tiny Desk Concert is great!
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’ve got a bunch of NYC dates coming up, and then a few back on the road! See you there?!?!
I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving with people you love, or at least some nice food, or at whatever is slightly less than least (penleast?) a moment to rest near the end of a long year, which all years are unless you’re a tortoise or a mountain.
Maris graciously agreed to sneak out of New York City with me for a quick visit to see my family. The travel included an early Wednesday wake-up and a late Thursday arrival back in Brooklyn, and I am thankful that she was amenable to shuttling up and down the northeast corridor via Amtrak to hang out with my folks. I have a very chatty family (with me being arguably and argumentatively the yappiest among us), so we packed a lot of great conversing and catching up into two-ish days. We also tried a new-to-us Dunkin’ seasonal alcoholic beverage (the Spiked Peppermint Mocha Iced Latte) which may be their all-time best boozy offering (not a strong field, but still). It had an egg nog quality, not in its flavor, but in the fact that I could drink one glass of it a year and feel totally content. It tasted like some novelty drink that a friend would whip up in a large batch for a holiday party, and you wouldn’t say no, but you also wouldn’t ask for the recipe. That’s more than I can say for their spiked iced teas.
A four-pack of this was more than my entire family drank, cumulatively.
Starting Friday, my time has mostly been devoted to the Aimee Mann and Ted Leo Christmas Show tour. I’m part of a little company of performers for this run of shows, and I do like…three minutes of standup plus a bunch of little songs and sketches with Aimee, Ted, Paul F. Tompkins, and Nellie McKay. Over the weekend, we had several hours of rehearsal (I was generously exempted from Thanksgiving day) and four excellent shows at City Winery in Manhattan. When I was in college, my roommates and I put on a weekly sketch show called Friends Like These, that always came together at the last minute, and this reminds me a little of that. I love the Little Rascalsy feeling of “we’re putting on a show!” Although it helps that in this case I’m tagging along with some of the best singers/songwriters/comedians in the world, and that the band is full of RIDICULOUSLY talented and accomplished musicians as well. I’ll probably write more about the specifics next week, but I don’t want to spoil anything for the folks who are going to see the tour in Alexandria, VA; Collingswood, NJ; Beverly, MA; and Norwalk, CT!
Between the family visit and the shows and the staying out late with friends after the shows and the pie, I’m feeling sleepy but satisfied, which I think is a good way to feel as the year comes to a close!
(Oh also we got the final version of my standup special edited, and hopefully we’ll figure out soon where it will live and when people can see it!!!)
PEP TALK FOR VITO THE PUG
A champion.
Vito, you little goblin, you’ve done it. Even though your face is as wrinkly as a 95-year-old man’s elbow skin. And your nasal passages are crazy straws made of flesh. And even at top speed, you run about as fast as a toddler can chuck a bowling ball. If Air Bud had been about a pug, he’d have been cut from the team in the first act of the film. And yet, Vito, you persevered. You showed them all! You won Best In Show at the National Dog Show!
Take that, dogs who can breathe normally! Shove it, canines with the disposition to perform tasks or the musculature to undertake impressive athletic feats! There’s trouble down at the old mill? Well, call a border collie! Vito the Pug is too busy posing with THE TROPHY HE WON FOR BEING THE GREATEST DOG.
Vito, you are an inspiration to everyone who’s ever been told that they’re too short, too round, too clingy, too out of breath. You’ve proven that there is no human-bred quality one might possess that can stop them from achieving their dreams. In a field of expertly groomed standard poodles and impeccably well-adjusted golden retrievers, a crumpled up little gremlin stood (metaphorically) tall and won the day.
We are all a little Vito at times, and little Vito, you’ve shown us what we’re capable of.
UNEXPECTED GOOD NEWS!
Over on BlueSky, I asked for people to share some unexpected pieces of news, big or small, that they’ve received lately. I received such lovely responses, and here they are! I’ve done some light editing for grammar, but that’s about it!
I got a chance to audition for my dream theater role (Carlotta in The Phantom of the Opera), which I never thought I'd get to even try for.
Oh hell yeah that’s great news! Sometimes almost getting the thing you want can feel discouraging, but what it really means, most of the time (as you know), is that you’re going in the right direction. When people say it’s an honor just to be nominated, they always sound slightly full of shit (which they sort of are) but they’re also telling the truth! I can say this honestly, as someone who has attended the Emmys as a nominee a year I did not win an Emmy.
I had such a nice time hiking with my nieces over Thanksgiving. The Bay Area delivered on great weather & views, and they are such interesting & funny people! Also, the Wicked movie really rocked, and we had a Secret Breakfast sundae afterward.
Incredible day. Great times with family. Perfect moviegoing experience (Wicked seems especially great for nieces; it’s niece-core, basically). And Breakfast Sundae? Game changer! I think that’s what the movie Game Change starring Julianne Moore was about. Just kidding. She played Sarah Palin in a film about the 2008 election. That’s still a movie you can probably watch somewhere if you want! Weird!
One of my union members needed sick time donations and our members got them 80% there and the campus president is going to waive the rest.
Our healthcare system in America sucks shit through a hose (and you have to pay out of pocket for the hose) but organized labor and mutual aid always warm my heart! It’s so beautiful when people care for each other! When people even temporarily band together to stave off the brutality of unchecked capitalism, it feels the same to me as when a pug wins a dog show. Against all odds, it happened!!!
Earthjustice continues to notch hard won essential wins. One of the organization’s attorneys blocked a handout for coal in an energy case and we just settled two cases in Colorado making electricity more affordable and less reliant on the climate destabilizing gas industry. This follows a slew of other recent big wins including protecting one of the worlds most endangered whales from the oil development that also threatens small scale fishers and tourist operators in the Gulf of Mexico.
Earth: 2 Climate Criminals: Well, a lot, but at least Earth is on the board.
A roof replacement that my mother was warning me about and that I should claim on my insurance came in at less than half of what I’d saved up for it.
Isn’t it a relief when some kind of financial misfortune isn’t as severe as you’d anticipated? It feels like a real big jerk threatening to kick your ass and then letting you off with a wedgie. You feel briefly invincible even though in reality you’ve merely been not-vinced.
Unbeknownst to me, the payroll office that just gave me a raise was supposed to give me an even better raise. They have corrected the error with back pay.
Okay, actually, upon further reflection, it is better when someone actually gives you more money than you thought they were going to. I hope you spend a small portion of it on something frivolous. Like a painting of a turtle waving “go around” to a faster animal. Maybe not that but something like that.
on thanksgiving my downstairs neighbor left me a mini-thanksgiving feast on my doorknob. good news as in an act of kindness still counts.
Neigh-bors! Neigh-bors!
I’ve lived in the same apartment for seven years, and our building has a really friendly energy to it. One time our neighbor’s smoke alarm was going off, and we had to call the fire department and let them into their place through our little adjoining balcony and it turned out they were just very deeply asleep, and they bought us a big bottle of wine as a thank you, even though we should have bought THEM a big bottle of wine as an apology for letting the fire department into their apartment when they were just doing a Snow White type slumber. Our upstairs neighbors play “City Of Stars” (from La La Land) on their piano several times a week, and they have a toddler who stomps around at weird hours, but they’re so so nice, and those sounds are just the cost of doing business of living in a community, and it’s really pretty cute if I’m being honest.
I do not extend the same goodwill to the next door neighbors who put one of those Ring doorbells that says “Hi! You’re being recorded!” on their brownstone. Boo that doorbell! It is my enemy.
In June 2024 , my photograph was chosen and made into a USPS stamp.
Can’t stop singing the name of this stamp in a Bob Seger voice.
I am so impressed by this!!! You get to be a stamp? Your work is now on par with icons like the Grand Canyon and Bugs Bunny! Stamps are forever! It says it right there on the thing! This is a legendary accomplishment and you should feel proud!
Have you received any unexpected good news lately? Leave! A! Comment!
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: Nellie McKay - “David”
Nellie is very good at writing and singing songs. She’s on this little tour I’m a part of all week, and on Friday afternoon she asked if I’d come onstage with her and sing the Chipmunk Christmas song (the one where Alvin wants a hula hoop, which is such a 1950s-ass present to request, but that’s not the point), and I said sure, and it turns out I can do a fairly credible chipmunk voice, so that’s been fun. (Spoiler!)
“David” belongs to a favorite That’s Marvelous genre, which I call “jaunty bummers” (upbeat but depressing songs, not whatever gross sex thing British people might use that phrase to signify). Wikipedia told me that the title of Nellie’s debut album Get Away From Me was a play on Norah Jones’s Come Away With Me, and it made me wonder if kids these days know what powerful sway Norah Jones and her jazz whispers held over American culture in the early aughts. Perhaps with a newly elected second-term Republican president, jazz whispers will return.
UPCOMING SHOWS
Not a TON on the calendar right now, but I bet that’ll change soon! Maybe a couple of spots in Los Angeles early next year?
I don’t know if it’s just this time of year or if things in the entertainment industry are actually perking up, but I feel like there’s been more fun stuff to watch lately? Maris and I have been on the edges of our seat (same couch) with Season 2 Bad Sisters on Apple’s original tv platform that they seemingly forget to tell anyone exists. Season 1 was GREAT and Season 2 has kind of the same thing going as the second season of Search Party (an all-time favorite show) where these characters had a fun time solving/committing crimes for a while, and now they/we have to sit in the reality of what they just did. We also started Interior Chinatown which rules so far. (I don’t love the voiceover, but I am really into all the other meta-genre stuff!) Huge shout out to Ronny Chieng and Jimmy O. Yang who are really great as cousins/friends! We’re also excited to start the new Mike Shur/Ted Danson show on Netflix. I think it’s called Man on the Inside, but I will not look it up, so that might just be a grandfatherly recollection of the name of a heist movie Spike Lee made.
On Sunday, Maris and I went to a For Your Consideration screening of Wicked in Manhattan, and I was kind of blown away how much I enjoyed it. I read the book a realllly long time ago, and I’ve forgotten basically everything about it, and I never saw the stage show. The movie really got me though! Ariana Grande is super funny, and Cynthia Erivo gives such a good performance that you almost forget she’s not actually a magic green lady who lives in the world. Peter Dinklage is very good as a talking goat, which I mostly mention because one time we crossed paths while walking our dogs, and his sweet puppy jumped up on Bizzy (R.I.P.), and he responded by gently chiding: “Hey…respect your elders.” And Bowen Yang is good in everything, obviously!
The thing that kicked my ass about Wicked is how earnest the whole endeavor is. So much entertainment lately feels so burdened by the weight of iterating within genres that have existed for so long, but Wicked, despite it being a prequel to an existing play/movie, kind of (to use IMMEDIATELY dated language) fell out of a coconut tree. There’s one tiny little winking joke towards the end, but other than that this movie is SO SINCERE about Oz and magic and this mythical high school for youthful 30-somethings. Nothing against Deadpool, but it’s very un-Deadpool, if that makes sense.
That, plus getting a BUNCH of advance copies of friends’ books (brag!!!), finishing a script I co-wrote with a friend (that no one is asking for), and reading this short essay by my buddy , I’m feeling pretty energized about creative stuff! That’s all despite my feeling of dread that in the wake of the election, rich execs in LA are going to greenlight mostly things that some hypothetical poor (white) people that they imagine will want to watch, and the results will be really misguided and unpleasant.
I was in SUCH a bad mood all day on Saturday, but between a fun show on Saturday night and all this other stuff, I’m back to feeling good heading into the holiday.
Okay also! THIS WEEK I am going on a little tour with Ted Leo and Aimee Mann which I am so excited for! I’ll be probably doing a teensy little bit of standup and a few goofy bits as part of their Christmas shows along with the rest of the traveling party, Paul F. Tompkins and Nellie McKay!
My pal Alison Leiby an I are hosting our (extremely sporadic, borderline premise-less) show Sup, Bro? at SF Sketchfest on January 25th!!! Alison and I have so much fun co-hosting a live show, and the lineup is straight up BANANAS. So far we’ve got Aparna Nancherla, Dulcé Sloan, and the aforementioned Paul F. Tompkins on the bill! Bay Area: Come through and have a good time with us!!!
Simon & Garfunkel-ass photo by Arin Sang-urai.
PEP TALK FOR MATT GAETZ
Rep. Matt Gaetz, presumably spotting a high school in the distance. Mario Tama/Getty Images
Congratulations to this big ol’ creep on his greatest accomplishment! When I posted this little joke on Twitter (where the lights have come on and the floor is visibly sticky), several people with user names such as TrumpLovr1776 sent me replies like: “He should and will SUE YOU for SLANDER for this!” (and then tagged Matt Gaetz, like he’s gonna kiss them on the forehead for being such a good little guy).
First of all: You mean libel, idiots. Slander is spoken out loud!
Second of all: I’ll admit I was a little cavalier on social media. For the sake of humor, I used some inaccurate and possibly reckless language. So I want to say, for anyone reading…I’m sorry that I implied that Matt Gaetz ever was or will be the Attorney General of the United States. That was wrong of me, and I won’t let it happen again.
PEP TALK FOR A READER
This was an especially nicely written pep talk request!
Dear Josh,
You’re a sports guy (no Bill Simmons) and I’ll put my pep talk request in those terms. Blowouts feel bad but it’s the close calls that really kill you. Like I imagine Malcolm Butler jumping Russell Wilson’s pass sticks with Russ forever. (Am I kissing enough Boston sports ass? LOL.)
Rejection is one thing. But getting so close to an opportunity, and then it being snatched away, is really hurting me of late. I dealt with a layoff a few years ago, it took me several years to get back into my field, then my company folded in less than 3 months.
Now, professional near misses happen for many reasons. Lack of funding, changes in priorities, something else to complete the rule of 3s. That said: it’s still tough.
People tend to encourage me to start my own company as a response to this frustration. And I get that. Hell, in my heart it feels like the best way. But man. I need money for these Wale tickets NOW.
Love, Close But No Cuban
My comedian friends and I talk all the time about how there was this brief window where the internet felt like a place where artists and other creative folks had the opportunity to make and share good work and maybe get some recognition for it. Now it can sometimes seem like garnering that kind of acclaim is a prerequisite for working in creative fields. Industry tastemakers are more like tasterecognizers, seeing whose name has a big number next to it and throwing opportunities at that person. When a gig ends, artists are encouraged to start a Substack or a Patreon or an OnlyFans. And I appreciate the acumen of folks who can balance creative work with the hustle it takes to make it as a freestanding entity. But sometimes you just want to have a job, not start a company. With respect to Jay-Z, not every businessman needs to be a business, man.
As much as I admire any artist who finds ways to make ends meet, I do also think you can see the #grindset of certain creative types coming off of them like cartoon stink lines. You can feel it when a comic’s hour set is just an infomercial for their merch table. You can tell when a podcast host puts a little too much mustard on their ad reads, and you’re like…are you, like a casual Super Bowl viewer, mostly here for the commercials? I think we can all intuit when a writer/director/artist/actor/influencer is honing a craft and when they are making “content.”
Maybe I’m being naive here! I don’t begrudge anyone (wellllll, I don’t begrudge most people) an opportunity to make a living from a job well done. And unless you’re one of a very select group of people, that does take a little bit of elbow grease outside of your creative output. As I get older and gain experience, I start to notice how often the people who fade out of creative fields are the ones who can’t stomach sending a “just following up” email. And with deregulation allowing multimedia conglomerates to form like Voltron, there are fewer and fewer independent outlets (or, even legacy outlets) where you can just do art. The vampires who run these companies would gladly replace us with a single computer program that raises Earth’s surface temperature and never has an original thought if they could. So there’s some water-treading required just to stay afloat unless you’re Ryan Murphy. But again, with all due respect to Oscar winners Three 6 Mafia, I get a little itchy when I see people who are all hustle and no flow. Just go work at a hedge fund, then, weirdo!
Obviously I’m working out some of my own shit here! But what I mean to say to you, reader, is that you don’t have to be an LLC to stay in the game. You’re allowed to turn your own “COMMERCE” dial as far up or down as you feel good about, and figure the rest of it out from there. Not everyone has the luxury of making art for art’s sake and letting the chips fall where they may (then asking their parents for more chips if their old ones fall wrong). There’s no shame in paying for concert tickets with money you earn elsewhere. But it’s a drag how much of this is business, man.
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: The Both - “Milwaukee”
Ted and Aimee’s collaborative album The Both came out ten years ago, and Maris and I went to see them live at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. I bought a t-shirt, which was one of my favorites until it mysteriously disappeared. Now I’m doing a little tour with them, and I’m very excited. To paraphrase the guy from the beginning of that one Weezer song: Sometimes life’s so rad.
And, while we’re here “tv off” from the new Kendrick Lamar album makes me want to jump up in the air and break bricks with my bare fist like a Mario Bro. I’d listen to an entire Kendrick/Mustard album that just flips nearly identical string samples like this and “Not Like Us.”
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’ve got a bunch of NYC dates coming up, and then a few back on the road! See you there?!?!
To paraphrase the Foo Fighters: I’ve got a little confession to make. Don’t worry. This is not about me having an affair that resulted in a baby (which is now what that lyric reminds everyone of when Dave Grohl sings it, I assume). With all the very serious news lately, I haven’t really had the chance to admit this, but here goes: I am only (at best) a casual baseball fan, but I watched four out of the five World Series games just to root for the Yankees to lose. I don’t particularly care about the exploits of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I felt only slightly happy for their fans when their team won, but I experienced a rush of endorphins when they beat the Yankees that was about 95% as powerful as the one that hit when my beloved Red Sox defeated the Dodgers to win the Fall Classic in 2018.
The morning after the Red Sox clinched that championship, I had my final interview for a job at Desus & Mero on Showtime. I will never forget what Desus, a lifelong Yankees fan who knew I was from the Boston area, said to me as we sat down to talk business: “I bet you’re pretty fuckin’ happy today.” That’s how the interview started. I replied: “Yeah, it feels amazing [to win the World Series]. You guys should try it sometime.” I got the job anyway. I appreciate Desus’s open-mindedness to this day.
This season, the Sox finished a beautifully mediocre 81-81 came within a few breaks of scoring exactly as many runs as they allowed. Completely neutral. But I feel amazing. Because the Yankees imploded in crushing fashion on the biggest possible stage. Watching the 2024 World Series, and the joy it brought me, was an incredible commitment to good old fashioned New England spite, and it made me think that maybe, just maybe I should be in therapy after all.
Last week I was on a bunch of podcasts (and radio shows) making jokes about the news, if you can believe it. I flew to Detroit for a Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me live recording at the Fox Theater, which was gorgeous! The guest was Governor Gretchen Whitmer. I sometimes have trouble figuring out how to thoughtfully engage with politicians for the sake of entertainment, but I will say Gov. Whitmer was extremely funny and charismatic. Hari Kondabolu and Roxanne Roberts (the other panelists) were so much fun to joke around with. And, as always, it was a joy to see the whole Wait Wait team and work with them!
Then I flew home and plunked myself down in front of the computer to record an episode of The Bugle with the great Andy Zaltzman and Tiff Stevenson where I joked more about the news, but with swearing!
I also linked back up with Mile and Jack (of Mad Boosties fame, in this newsletter) on The Daily Zeitgeist to talk about the news after having talked about the news with John Fugelsang on his Sirius XM radio show. You get it!!!
Pep talks that fit in your pocket!
And, in other pep talk related news, the very nice and charming Paula Skaggs and Josh Linden have written a book of tiny pep talks that comes out TOMORROW (but is available for preorder now). My friend Jess Zimmerman sent me a copy, and it’s awfully sweet and charming and thoughtful! Check it out if you need a little more pep in your life! Seems like a swell holiday gift to me!
PEP TALK FOR ALEX JONES
So long, sucker! AP Photo: David J. Phillip
Congratulations, dickhead. For years you engaged in biblical levels of Fucking Around, and you’ve finally been hit with ten plagues worth of Finding Out.
For anyone who isn’t sure what I’m talking about: Alex Jones, the proprietor of intellectual superfund site InfoWars had to sell off his media empire to pay restitution to the families of Sandy Hook victims who he repeatedly slandered during his broadcasts. The site ended up being bought by The Onion (with support from the Sandy Hook families), meaning that the website best known for spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation is now owned by a way better website known for incisive social commentary that is also not literally true.
At a moment when the stupidest and cruelest people are ascending to the highest ranks of global political power, there is so much beauty in any affirmation that some misdeeds do not go unpunished. Bad things can, in fact, happen to bad people too. When I saw the news, I legitimately teared up, not even from laughing, but from the triple distilled platonic purity of the bit. Walter White himself would look at the chemical construction of The Onion’s decision to purchase one of the world’s most vile swamps of malicious conspiracy-mongering, adjust his stupid hat, and smile.
Would I prefer to live in a world where a screeching pimple of a man never impugns the names of grieving families in the wake of a tragedy they’ve suffered? Of course. But in the world we live in, one where there is profit to be made from chewing up poison and feeding it directly into the faces of your eager audience members like so many baby birds, it is a visceral relief to see this mother duck of misinformation get pulped by a helicopter blade of consequences.
AlJo, you are on the business end of an all time bit. This tops anything People Magazine’s Sexiest Guy Jim Halpert ever did to Dwight Schrute. It beats the time 50 Cent bought two hundred tickets to a Ja Rule show so the whole front would be empty. We’re approaching the prank territory occupied by the serpent who tricked Eve into eating the forbidden fruit that damned all of humanity.
Thank you for getting so thoroughly got, Alex Jones. I can only hope that you continue to spread goodness and inspire optimism across the nation by enduring more legal and karmic punishment in the future.
PEP TALK FOR A READER
This pep talk was concise and well-punctuated, and I didn’t really change it at all although I did make up the pseudonym at the end!
I’ve had tension with a friend, tension with one of my partners, and my anxiety has been generally through the roof lately. - Present, Tense
Historically, I am very bad at handling interpersonal tension. Especially with people that I care about. I don’t love being on the bad side of a stranger or a (do we still say…) frenemy, but when a real friend or loved one tells me: “Hey, we need to talk…later…” my brain goes into a spiral so tight it may as well have been thrown by Patrick Mahomes. WHAT do we have to talk about later? Do you secretly hate me and plan to come clean over dinner? Did you sell my social security number on the dark web? Is the conversation itself a ploy to distract me while ninjas riddle me with throwing stars? There is no end to the catastrophizing I can do between now and this mythical “later.” The practice would be impressive if there were any use to it at all.
In romantic relationships as a younger person, I was a chronic “Are you mad at me?” asker, which is, if you don’t know the kind of guy who takes someone who may or may not be mad at him (me) already and gets them annoyed at the very least.
All of those situations ended fine, or they ended and now it’s fine! There are so many ways interpersonal conflict can be resolved. Through talking openly about the issues at hand. Through time healing some wounds. (Not all woulds, though! Whoever came up with that expression must never have had the kind of wound that bleeds a lot.) Through the situation becoming untenable to the point that someone calls the whole thing off. These outcomes have various levels of attendant stress, but if you’re looking to get out, the only way, as they say, is through. You can’t stay…in. I mean, I guess you could also allow relations to deteriorate without taking any action to improve or disengage, but that one I don’t recommend! It turns out you can keep going through forever without making your way out, like a never ending pasta bowl of duress. But you don’t have to. No one can make you do that!
The other anxiety is a tough thing to disentangle from your concrete situation. It’s a real chicken and egg problem? You’re like: “Where the hell did that chicken come from? AND why won’t it stop laying eggs? I’m stressed out!” (I think that’s what that expression means.) There are so many options for attacking a you-vs-you conflict, and in some ways it’s harder because you are ultimately stuck with yourself no matter which you choose, but in many ways it’s a little less fraught because you don’t have to rely on someone else’s honesty or good faith to fix things. (Although you SHOULD trust those intentions from the people you care about, even when you’re in conflict.)
It’s hard to believe that you’ll ever be out when you’re so deep in the through part of it. But all oceans have shores and all buildings have doors and even every corn maze has a…corn path(???) out into the…broader…corn field(?). You can make it out the other side or back out the same side if that’s what you want, but the point is you can make it through one way or another or another or another.
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: Ben Folds Five - “Kate”
On Tuesday night, Maris was a little under the weather, so her seat at the Ben Folds solo show at the Paramount in Brooklyn became a little table for my drink and the drink of the guy sitting on the other side of the empty chair. Attending this show closed the loop on my choice to do my first open mic in Boston in July 2004 instead of seeing Ben Folds (along with…I believe…Guster and Rufus Wainwright?) across town with my sister. Twenty years later, I have also seen him in concert. Now I think she has to be a professional comedian?
The show was part of Folds’s Paper Airplane Request Tour during which he plays one set of songs he chooses in advance and then plays a second set selected by audience requests made with paper airplanes thrown from the crowd onto the stage. The all-request set, through coincidence or a shared communal mood, was full of very gentle down-tempo songs. Folds himself remarked that he would never have structured a set that way, but he was respectful of the direction set forth by the room at large. Once again, democracy proves imperfect.
“Kate” provided a counterpoint to those requests. It’s a sweet, bouncy number, and when played solo it reminds you that a piano is a percussion instrument. Some of the slower tunes felt a little slight in the spacious concert hall without drums or bass or harmony to anchor them, but “Kate” filled the room with sound and energy.
Also, while Ben Folds (and his Five, which is of course is actually only him and two other guys), can be a little lyrically venomous, there’s a sweetness to “Kate.” The subject of the song is just a cool lady he wants to be more like. She plays drums and has cool taste in music and wears the same clothes day after day and smokes weed. And sure, the singer is probably projecting many of her appealing qualities onto her, but I find it endearing that he just wants to say “hey!” to her jack her style a little bit. Kate!
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’ve got a bunch of NYC dates coming up, and then a few back on the road! See you there?!?!
I’m not going to get too deep into it here, but obviously last week’s presidential election went about as badly as it could have. Donald Trump not only won the electoral college (possibly America’s worst college now that the actual Trump University shut down) but he also won the popular vote; third time’s a harm, I guess!
Thanks for reading That's Marvelous!! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
There were some glimmers of hope further down the ballot. Seven out of ten states with abortion protections on the ballot passed those protections (which is good news unless there’s a national ban), with Florida’s amendment failing to meet the predetermined threshold to take effect, despite an overwhelming majority of voters approving of it. Missouri voted to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. People want healthcare and economic protections from corporate greed.
I am still crossing my fingers that President Biden uses his remaining time in office for helpful, progressive purposes: push to confirm judges who will preserve civil rights and democracy, maybe forgive some student debt, stop sending a zillion dollars worth of weapons to Israel every forty-five minutes. Part of me fears that he will simply use this time to dig up Strom Thurmond’s skeleton so he can shake his hand across the aisle one last and then pardon himself for the crime of grave robbing. SORRY FOR THE CYNICISM! I THINK I GET TO DO A LITTLE BIT OF THAT THIS WEEK!
I’ve been thinking a lot about what my friend Scaachi wrote about how this election wasn’t going to save us, and it’s not going to doom us. But there’s also going to be a real onslaught against a bunch of the broad “us.” By that I mean: immigrants and refugees, the unhoused, people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, women, and inclusive of/beyond those groups, anyone who’s not super rich and has to work for a living.
A lot of people have been sharing George Carlin’s words lately, and aside from the incisiveness of the jokes themselves, I think something really beautiful he did was ending his shows by saying “Take care of yourself…and take care of somebody else.” It’s the a call to the best impulses and abilities we have, as people.
A few little pieces of business before we move along…
This Thursday I’m sadly unable to perform at the Comedy Gives Back benefit show at Gotham in NYC. If you’re in town, it’s still a great show for a great cause. But I’ve been called away to record an episode of Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me at the Fox Theater in Detroit!
On Tuesday before results came in, I chatted NBA stuff with the excellent Miles and Jack on Mad Boosties.
I talked about entertainment and creativity and business and podcast guesting on Attach Your Résumé! (This was from a couple of weeks ago, but I forgot to mention it then.)
And, in very exciting news, I got to return to Normal Gossipwith geniuses Kelsey and Alex and the whole wonderful team (hi, Jae)!
Night Burger…deserves a quiet niiiiight.
This episode came out on Wednesday, and people were so kind about it being a nice little distraction from feeling political despair for an hour. Maybe you’ll like it too!
PEP TALK FOR DJs
I usually preface pictures of the Kowloon with: “This building LOOKS racist but…”
“Is this going to end up in your newsletter?” my friend Dan asked me on Saturday night at the surprise birthday party his mom and girlfriend threw for him at the Kowloon restaurant in Saugus, MA. The Kowloon (technically just “Kowloon” but not if you’ve ever been there, it’s not) is a giant Chinese restaurant on Route 1. It’s known for its tiki drinks as well as for being a go-to after prom/drama club cast party venue for a wide swath of Boston’s suburbs. One room in the vast culinary labyrinth has a boat in it, and there are tables inside the boat. On weekends they have comedy shows upstairs in the function rooms. I haven’t performed there since 2009. I’ve never had a good set or a bad spare rib in this building.
I wasn’t going to write a lot about the party even though, as Dan pointed out, it was the most North Shore thing of all time. Meaning: It took place at the Kowloon (check), and the guest of honor almost didn’t come because he had previous plans to watch the Bruins game on tv (double check). I was pushed to chronicle the event when the DJ demanded all sixty-ish guests flood the dance floor to perform choreography he taught us in real time to the song “Sweet Caroline” (infinity checks). At that point, the sheer Massachusettsness of the night became too much to ignore. The only thing that could have ratcheted the quotient up higher is if a Kennedy had drunk driven a car into the side of the venue, indicating the party’s end (or beginning, I guess).
To the DJ, I just want to say: You did your best under delicate circumstances. I can only imagine the sensitivity required to navigate being an interloper, plunked dead center into a room full of literally centuries of combined shared history. Even as someone who knew a lot of the other partygoers, I felt the gravity caused by such density of interpersonal history. I saw friends I’m in a group text with that’s active most days. I caught up with childhood pals I hadn’t seen in 15+ years. I met someone who had gone to the same school as a bunch of my friends and knew them at the time but wasn’t close with them and has since been folded into the friend group because she started dating one of the core members while everyone was in their 30s. Also, I sat with Dan’s cousins from Ohio who I’d heard about for…30ish years but never met before. There were layers here!
So for all those reasons, I understand your decision, DJ, to hammer us with Gen X and millennial party standards. You can’t take a ton of risks when you’re a stranger in a room like this. I cannot blame you for playing “Jump Around” by House of Pain (IMPORTANTLY: NOT FROM BOSTON) twice in a span of two hours. Or doing the same with “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang.” I was a little perplexed by how much of Billy Joel’s Storm Front album you played. But hey, you’ve got to put your own spin on the evening. And everyone seemed to have a wonderful time.
This is the DJ’s gift: Teasing out the threads that can take an occasion where disparate corners of a life converge—a wedding, a bar mitzvah, an anniversary—and weaving those strands into a shared communal energy. In the days after the election, a lot of people have talked about aspiring to a national sense of unity, as if it is possible or even desirable for a nation of nearly 400 million people to form a meaningful consensus on most issues. But maybe a DJ’s type of unity is something to strive for. Bringing an existing community closer together by sensing the group’s needs and providing for them. Making people on the outskirts of that community feel safe and welcome by caring for even the skeptics and the newcomers, while keeping an eye out for the safety of everyone around.
Like all good organizers, a DJ has the power to galvanize a group by harnessing the shared energy of a moment. Even if, in some moments, that energy is: “Wait is this guy playing 2 Live Crew? There are children and old people here!”
PEP TALK FOR A READER
I nicknamed this reader and cut out some preamble and…postamble (?) from their request that they indicated I could!
I made the very silly (but correct, I think) decision of breaking up with my sweet, wonderful boyfriend of 2 years right before the dark grim election-winter. It was an amicable, we-want-different-things breakup which uniquely sucks because I have a lot of love for him and our relationship never got the chance to be bad. I feel horrible for hurting him and also myself, and I am struggling to find fun things to do while I prepare for the holidays with a bunch of my happily-partnered family and friends. I know there will be goodness on the other side, but that other side feels impossible to visualize right now. Could really use a pep talk for this difficult time. - Single, Not Yet Ready To Mingle
Not to be reductive, but feeling bad is the worst. There are obviously caveats about having your health and there being bigger, worse things happening in the world, but hearing that has never, in the history of heartbreak, accelerated the healing process. Oh there are orphaned children in the world, so I should suck it up about missing out on a professional opportunity? WHY DIDN’T YOU SAY SO IN THE FIRST PLACE? Hearing about someone else’s misfortune rarely cheers me up, unless the misfortune is happening to a preexisting enemy. Very few of my enemies are orphans. And even most of those are adults by now.
That said: You are allowed to let other people’s joy be your joy as well. Your friends and family members are not happily romantically partnered to spite you. When you leave the room, they don’t scream “In her FACE!” and start making out. These relationships are (among other things) proof that abundant opportunities love and companionship exist in the world. Your own past suggests this as well!!! The end of a mostly-pleasant relationship is sad, but in the way that the end of a good movie is sad. I’d say “nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain” but it’s the middle of November now, and last week it was 73 degrees in New York, and we’re basically experiencing a drought. We should get Guns n Roses back together to record a song about that. Nothing lasts forever, even hot November drought. (Because, at the very least, November ends eventually.) Wow. Even by my usual standards, that was a lengthy and irrelevant digression.
Happiness can look like a lot of different things. It can mean being single and investing extra time and energy in your friendships. Or being single and investing extra time in binging Monk (engaging in a binge of, not using the search engine Bing to look it up) until you’re ready to be around other people. It can constitute sex with several strangers or a couple of friends! It could be finding one partner that makes you happy. Or, in some instances, it can mean non-monogamy. ALTHOUGH, MY HOTTEST RELATIONSHIP TAKE IS THAT MOST PEOPLE WHO ARE BAD AT MONOGAMY ARE BAD AT POLYAMORY FOR SIMILAR REASONS.
Maybe you’ll find your person. Or a parade of your people. The idea of a soul mate is romantic, sure, but it kind of trivializes relationships from your past as being “wrong.” Sometimes that’s true. But often things are right until they’re not. And you’ll find more right in the future, whether it’s one right or a series of several rights in a row like you’re circling the block looking for parking. But maybe you didn’t need to park right away after all. Maybe you were just out for a ride. I am really letting these metaphors get away from me this week.
Even an amicable breakup is still a breakup, and like you said, it’s a uniquely stressful kind. I’ve never seen anyone exuberantly Nicole-Kidman-divorce-walk away from a polite mutually agreed upon separation. There are many bad kinds of breakups (and many, many worse kinds of relationships than the “wants different things” kind) but this is one of them! It’s okay to feel bad. And, fewer people tell you this, but it’s also okay, if you can crack a window to a warm November breeze of joy, to feel good too.
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: Doechii - “NISSAN ALTIMA”
I realized that maybe I should tag stuff I post that’s (lyrically) NSFW, but I assume most readers aren’t bumping these songs on their office computer desktop speakers. But in case you are: This week’s song is NSFW. The beat and the general vibe remind me of Missy Elliott’s (UNDERRATED!) “She’s a Bitch” which I think I’ve written about here before. My buddy Sean Sullivan put me onto this Doechii album (Alligator Bites Never Heal), and it’s great and just got nominated for a bunch of Grammy awards.
Good luck to Doechii at the Grammys! She seems cool and is really good at rapping in a bunch of different modes and moods. Her flow on “Nissan Altima” is relentless. Spiritually, a great headspace to put yourself in for ~these times~.
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’ve got a bunch of NYC dates coming up, and then a few back on the road! See you there?!?!
Please excuse the lateness of today’s newsletter (which marks TWO FULL YEARS of weekly editions of That’s Marvelous). Last month, Maris (who is my wife, for any new readers) stated a desire to, quote, “do some fall shit” and so this weekend some fall shit…we did. We rented a car and drove upstate for a couple of days somewhere quaint and picturesque, which was just what we needed to de-stress from our rigorous freelance writing and general anxiety lifestyles. The whole ride up, I made sure to point out anything I saw that qualified as “foliage,” which I’m sure did not get annoying at all.
On Sunday, we went to Dia Beacon, an art museum that doubles as a classic fifth date location for NYC couples. Maybe not always ~fifth~ date, but it’s a place you go sometime between staying the night at someone’s place and meeting their parents. Maris and I had never been before, despite having gone on a fifth date of our somewhere in the neighborhood of ten and a half years ago.
Something I loved about Dia Beacon is how much of the artwork is rooted in ideas. Each artist’s work seems to really be wrestling with something big. One entire room was devoted to paintings that depicted the date (in the grammar/language of the country of their creation) on which they were painted. The artist (On Kawara), over decades, was obsessed with the passage of time and tried to paint one of these a day. Sometimes he made two. If he couldn’t finish a painting by the end of the day, he threw it out. Another room, which appeared empty, contained a small placard by each exit affirming that the gallery, like every space on earth, is full of cosmic rays and was therefore not empty at all. You can’t get much higher concept than that. (I mean, I assume you have to be high when coming up with that concept.)
Good bit, Stanley Brouwn. Seems a little like you hadn’t realized you had a piece of conceptual art due that day. But good bit.
Very little of the art was aesthetically “beautiful” in the sense that you’d want it hanging in your living room. But it evoked so many different thoughts and responses in me. Overall, I was struck by the beauty of devoting a giant space to showcasing so many unique visions of the world. Specifically, visions that took time and resources to communicate (although there’s always a question of who benefits from this kind of allocation of resources and who doesn’t). Amidst a media landscape that demands constant, often thoughtless, production of culture, it’s a real joy to witness art that results from meticulous construction, and isn’t intended for rapid absorption.
Still, I did poke fun at an exhibit by Robert Ryman that used exclusively white paint spread with different techniques over various surfaces. As we walked by a sort of choppy white wave painting (as opposed to a completely covered canvas) I leaned over to Maris and whispered: “You’re crazy for this one, Ryman.” Got him.
We also watched two movies:
Weird the Weird Al parody biopic starring Danielle Radcliffe, was excellent. It captured the extremely difficult but delightful tone that Jerry Seinfeld’s Pop Tarts movie kind of carelessly gestured towards.
The Sweetest Thing starring Cameron Diaz, which in my mind was a cute rom com, but in reality (which Maris knew from having seen it in theaters) was a female-driven gross out comedy that felt SO “of its time” (2002) that it was a little tough to get through despite its brief duration. Are there any secret huge fans of The Sweetest Thing who read this newsletter? Let me know!
Also, in a huge piece of news for our household, Maris’s book cover and release date have been revealed!!! The cover is (in my humble opinion) excellent, and the roughly 40% of the book I’ve been allowed to read so far is ALSO excellent! You can preorder the whole book HERE now.
I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but preorders are really important to authors for convincing their publishers that there’s excitement around the book! So if you’re at all interested…I humbly request (both as a fan of Maris’s and as someone whose finances are entwined with hers) that you consider preordering.
Sick-ass book cover, right?
On the way home today we stopped at a Cheesecake Factory in a New Jersey mall because Maris and I are both children of the suburbs and cannot resist a giant salad (even when it’s declared a “lunch portion”) and a spring roll full of vaguely tex-mex chicken from time to time. It tasted incredible. And now we’re all caught up!
OH WAIT ALSO
I dressed up as Colin Robinson from What We Do in the Shadows for Halloween because I needed a costume that I didn’t have to shop for, and I already look what I’d call a humiliating amount like this character. Although I did miss an opportunity to go as Tim Walz’s mug shot, as long as I was shaving already.
I’m always just some light stubble away from looking like an energy vampire.
PEP TALK FOR ELECTION NIGHT FRETTERS
There’s arguably too much of my face in this week’s newsletter.
I try not to give advice in this newsletter, but here’s some anyway: Go to bed.
You’re not going to change the results of the election by staying up late while Steve Kornacki sweats through his button-down and paces his khakis to rags. Or by watching whatever they do on Fox News on election night. I assume they start with a bright red map captioned: “ANY RESULT OTHER THAN THIS IS FRAUD” and then kind of vamp sexistly and racistly after that.
In late 2016, Maris invented a technique called “defensive sleeping” in which she goes to bed before the tv coverage of election news even really starts trickling in. If you’re nervous about this election, why not give that a shot? There’s not going to be a buzzer-beating three-pointer or field goal that sends the vote to a thrilling conclusion. Even in the unlikely event that they call it on Tuesday night, it’ll just look like a guy who has seen enough declaring that he’s seen enough. Snoooooze. (Which is what you should be doing instead of watching along.)
The election itself (and not just the presidential category) has real outcomes for people. You staying up to watch all the results does not. You are not a better citizen for viewing live election coverage. You can learn all the relevant information on Wednesday morning from a newspaper or the internet or maybe even the general vibe of pedestrians in your neighborhood. (If there are no pedestrians in your neighborhood, peer through the window of a passing truck and try to ascertain the mood that way.)
There are lots of ways to make a difference in the world. Organizing your workplace is one. Participating in a door-knocking campaign for a political candidate is another. Giving money to an abortion fund or attending a political protest are two other things to do. Even voting is a teensy tiny avenue to make your voice heard and influence the democratic process except where the electoral college renders millions of votes practically meaningless but that’s not what we’re here to talk about. Watching CNN while stress-pounding Pepperidge Farms cookies is not such an avenue for change.
If you are still deciding whether to vote (or if a third party/protest vote is worthwhile), my friend wrote about this choice in a more forceful and eloquent way than I could. I suggest, as always, that you subscribe to his newsletter and even pay money for it if you have a few bucks to spare.
I will also say: Tony Hinchcliffe ending up in history books for swinging an election away from the candidate he supported by bombing harder than has ever been bombed in the history of comedy would be the funniest thing he’s ever done. So, please consider that as well when you cast your ballot.
So…do what you can, and then spend Tuesday night watching a movie you’ve been meaning to see, or talking to an old friend on the phone, or, I don’t know, creating a mnemonic device for remembering the difference between an alligator and a crocodile. You'll find out who won on Wednesday…or Sunday…or after Donald Trump gets bored from inciting a fortnight of January 6th-style attempted coups and flees to a non-extradition country.
You did all you could. Or you didn’t. But it’s too late to change that now. Regardless, your Election Night is your own.
PEP TALK FOR A READER
I nicknamed this reader but otherwise kept the request intact.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year: trying to juggle family time around the holidays, now with a new wrinkle…we have a newborn. All families in question will be in Texas, but it’s still a hassle. Every year we try to split the time evenly as possible and it always seems to result in making no one happy, so a pep talk for navigating the “WE WANNA SEE THE BABY” waters would be much appreciated! - Kiddin’ Around
The holidays, even when they’re wonderful, are inconvenient. If you’re hosting, there’s sooooo much to be done from cooking to cleaning to cataloging your resentments towards those who don’t chip in. And if you’re visiting, you’ve got to execute a travel itinerary while fifty percent of America is also traveling. Our infrastructure is not built for this!
I love visiting my family! I do also wish we could enjoy a secret Thanksgiving a week earlier or later when no one else is taking an urgent Amtrak from New York to Boston.
Here’s the pep talk: It’s an ENORMOUS privilege to have a new baby and the ability to travel and a whole bunch of family members you want to visit for the purposes of them spending time with your tiny new person who will not remember a moment of any of these visits, and who will complicate the whole process by orders of magnitude their little brain hasn’t yet downloaded the software to comprehend.
Taking on some major pain-in-the-ass logistics to see so many people you love is life’s best case scenario for the time being. You get to experience the joy of experiencing the misery of effort and annoyance. This is what we do all the rest of it for. (At least until the baby is old enough that you can start dictating your own holiday agenda a little more assertively.)
Consider it this way: Do you think Taylor Swift (and her entire band and stage crew) want to make EVERY STOP on the Eras Tour, which I believe started during the Bronze Age and is set to wrap up a week before our sun burns out? I would guess they do not. But T-Swift in demand everywhere, so that’s where she goes. Your baby is the Taylor Swift of the family. You are (for now) the baby’s stage crew. It’s not ideal, but in many respects, it’s the greatest thing in the world, even though it absolutely bites.
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: Tyler, the Creator - “Sticky”
Tyler, the Creator’s last two albums are two of my favorite hip hop albums of the last few years, which is a surprise to me because they’re so sprawling and ambitious and confrontational, and I usually prefer records where people just rap as hard as they can over wicked loud drums.
“Sticky” features Lil Wayne and GloRilla and Sexy Redd (who recently un-endorsed Donald Trump…people can change). The beat builds and shifts and stomps and blurts. It’s nasty. The “chorus” sounds like an invitation to an ass-kicking. When the horns come in it feels like a marching band crashed through the walls. It makes me want to walk worse, all woozy and aggressive. It makes me want to knock things over. It makes me want to uppercut through my ceiling into my neighbor’s apartment. It’s on repeat in my headphones.
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’ve got a bunch of NYC dates coming up, and then a few back on the road! See you there?!?!
Other than seeing footage of a white supremacist rally at Madison Square Garden all over the news, I’ve had a pretty nice last few days!
Over the weekend I attended a birthday party for a toddler and confirmed that despite having retired from early childhood education over a decade ago, my ability to entertain a baby remains strong. I always offer to babysit for nearby friends when they have kids, and I think they think I’m joking because I am a nearly 40-year-old guy with no children of my own (and none that I share with anyone else). Also, the more someone of my demographic insists they are a good babysitter, the more of a red flag it is. But I am extremely qualified, and I have what might be described as “a dizzying amount” of time on my hands lately when I’m not on the road. Yesterday I held my friend Steph’s baby so she could eat a breakfast taco, so I’m basically a first responder in terms of my level of heroism. (I also held my friend Jason’s baby, but I think that was mostly for him to watch me experience the joy of hanging out with his very cool baby. And you know what, that was great too!)
Speaking of babies: Last week’s Frankenstein’s Baby show at Union Hall was so much fun! Next Monday (11/4) I’m co-hosting again with Tyrone Thornhill and also special visiting guest host Aparna Nancherla!!!! See you there, Brooklyn?!?!!?
Aftermath of a fun show! Photo credit: Sam Brooks
PEP TALK FOR OBSCURE COSTUME WEARERS
“Get it? I’m Freddie Kreug-HER!”
If this pep talk seems harsh, I want you to know, Obscure Halloween Costume Wearer, that it’s because I see myself in you. Obsessed with seeming cultured. Too clever by half. Often using wordplay to paper over a near-total lack of foresight and effort on a given endeavor. If anything I say strikes a nerve with you, please trust that I am practically smashing myself in the knee with one of those little little rubber knee-hammers that doctors use.
I will say, in basically every instance of an obscure costume, I love your ingenuity. You got your face all wet and put on a red t-shirt with no pants to attend a party as “Pooh Deng?” Beautiful. Tremendous stuff. You showed up in a dress and heels, holding a Skinny Girl Margarita in one hand and a fishing rod in the other because you’re a Reel Housewife of New York? Good bit. I’d never suggest otherwise. And who am I to argue if you want to dress exactly like Donnie Wahlberg in that one scene at the beginning of The Sixth Sense? (Honestly, in 1999, that guy turning out to be a former New Kid all along was as big a twist as the ending.)
However, and not to drool in your chowder bowl (trying a new saying out here), I do think you might encounter a little friction when you make people guess who you’re supposed to be and nobody notices that you have one hand in your pocket and the other one is giving a high five because you are Alanis Morissette as described in the lyrics of the song “Hand In My Pocket.” It is, of course, not a great tragedy if you have to explain to one friend after another that you are being beaten over the head with a cane while wearing neon green because you are dressed as Senator Charles “Brat” Sumner. But the more delighted you are by a costume’s thematic opacity, the greater a strain it is likely to place on your social interactions while you’re wearing it.
As our media environment continues to fracture, there’s less and less monoculture, which means almost everycostume is a little less legible than it once was. But still, you have to realize what you’re doing to people when you and two friends enter a costume contest as Bel Biv Betsy DeVos.
This does not make you a bad person. And there are so many Halloween costumes you can wear that do make you a bad person. But a threadbare pun or an indecipherable reference is not that. (As long as your outfit doesn’t include blackface.) Halloween is like karaoke. You can choose a deep cut if you want, but at a certain depth, there ceases to be enough oxygen for the entire room. It’s okay to eschew a crowd pleaser if that’s your priority. But you’ve got to accept that when you play for an audience of one you lose everyone but yourself. (And, if you can figure out how to visually represent “losing everyone but yourself” you’ve got yourself a costume I’d call “Reverse Eminem,” which I would find delightful, personally.)
BONUS PEP TALK FOR THE NEW DWYANE WADE STATUE
The Miami Heat, a basketball franchise known for its players’ rigorous conditioning and its fans’ late arrival to the stadium, unveiled a statue that allegedly honors retired star Dwyane Wade. I say allegedly because without the Heat jersey, the statue looks more like it was erected in memory of the man Mr. Clean is modeled after, or like you’re supposed to see it and think: “Did I miss the news that Kelsey Grammer died?”
People have really been roasting the statue because it has struggled to achieve, let’s say, even wax sculpture levels of verisimilitude. But we don’t know the circumstances! Maybe it was the artist’s first time making a statue. You’d feel pretty bad in that case, right? For a first statue, it’s got all the right parts for looking like a person, if not the right person. Or maybe Dwyane Wade refused to sign away his likeness rights to the sculpture, so the final product had to evoke Dwyane Wade without actually depicting his physical features. In that case, it’s a great statue, because it avoids a lawsuit, stupid.
Statues are probably really hard to make. Especially statues that look like specific handsome celebrities and not slightly melty versions of them. There’s no reason to believe that this statue-maker didn’t do their best, except for the fact that the end result is not very good. But think of it this way: Somewhere out there, Michael Chiklis is looking at pictures of this sculpture, and thinking…somebody really loves me.
PEP TALK FOR A READER
I edited out a little compliment (for me, not the reader’s friend) at the end of this request because I feel uncouth republishing it, but not so uncouth that I won’t allude to it. Like Walt Whitman, I’ve got multitudes out the butt!
My best buddy Luis just started culinary school which was a life long dream of his! He’s doing really well and I’ve enjoyed all his food. - Friends With Confits (don’t try to say this one out loud it’s more of a visual pun)
A pep talk request to hype up someone who is already thriving? If this isn’t a That’s Marvelous first, it’s the first in a while! Receiving this request kind of blew my mind. Like looking in the rulebook and realizing there actually is no regulation that says a dog can’t play basketball. (Although it was pretty messed up of that family to make their dog play youth sports.) While I appreciate the vulnerability of everyone who writes in with difficult personal issues and trusts me to handle them carefully, I’m pretty psyched to take a week and write a newsletter that’s like: Hell yeah, brother!
Luis! You did it! Well, you are doing it which is the only path having done it! There are many good reasons (time, money, health) to put off pursuing your dreams as well as many bad ones (fear of success, fear of failure, fear of sharks which is really only relevant if you dream of being a marine biologist, Katy Perry Super Bowl backup dancer, or children’s music performer), and you have surmounted them all. I was so inspired that I used “surmount” as a verb, which it technically is even though you normally only see it as part of an adjective (insurmountable, obviously). Surmount, you are a weird little freak, and you deserve so attention for your solo work. You’re the George Harrison of verbs. But I digress.
There are many cruel truths in the world but there are many beautiful truths too. Here’s one: They’ve gotten dairy-free ice cream basically as good as the kind made from milk. The first time I tried Halo Top, which tastes like if someone froze a wet cardboard box, I didn’t even think they’d get close. But science persevered. Our world is full of wonders. And when we get to experience them, it’s our job to help distribute them to others as well. Sometimes that means political activism and organizing or donating to a fundraiser. Sometimes you’ve got to wipe oil off a duck. Other times it entails making dinner for a friend.
Here’s another beautiful truth: It’s a real gift to yourself to imagine what would happen if you worked really hard at something and it all went right. We think of the worst case scenario so often, but it’s equally if not more helpful to consider: What’s the best thing that could happen? Not to be all “aim for the moon something something you’ll land among the stars” (completely spatially inaccurate, by the way), but it’s easy to make excuses for not trying. And unlike popping a batch of Toll House cookies (wildly underrated dessert) in the oven, easy doesn’t mean good. Luis, you gave yourself the best shot at happiness, and it’s paying off, and that’s about as good as it gets.
(Tangentially: My grandmother once watched the movie As Good As It Gets and then excitedly told me she loved seeing the film “As Good as Things Have Been or The Best Things Ever Were” which I found very sweet!)
Rap World, a feature film starring Conner O’Malley, Jack Bensinger, and Eric Rahill, had a few live screenings in New York, and I missed them all like a clown, so I’m psyched that the whole movie is up for free on YouTube now. It’s about three losers trying to make a rap album while one of their moms is out of town, leaving the house available to record in. The whole film is less than an hour long, and it’s got a bunch of super funny, super dumb jokes in it. It looks like it was shot for a total of $500, which I mean as a compliment. It’s kind of touching to watch a bunch of silly friends make a fun piece of low budget art about a bunch of goobers trying to make a brutally misguided piece of low budget art.
The milieu is also like…uncomfortably and viscerally recognizable to people who grew up in the suburbs at a certain time (the early 2000s). At the end (no spoilers) O’Malley’s character says: “Some of the best nights of my life were being had in parking lots.” And if that resonates with you in any way, you should watch this movie.
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’ve got a bunch of NYC dates coming up, and then a few back on the road! See you there?!?!
Huge week for me over here. First of all, it was full of social gatherings, and at one of them someone even offered me hard drugs, which I notably do not do, but it’s nice to be thought of. A few weeks ago, in the same vein, a friendly acquaintance asked me if I had any Diddy stories, which no one ever asked me before he became a famously accused sex criminal, so that one was slightly hurtful actually. I will say I am rarely offered nose drugs, but I am (I think?) never invited to parties that are mostly (alleged) sex crimes, which makes me feel like I’m living life right in one respect at least.
In bigger (bigger than going to a party, Josh?) news, I’m working on a new little writing project with a friend, and my brain feels all crackly and synaptic for the first time in a while. Nobody has asked us to write this thing. And there’s certainly no guaranteed money at the end of it, but that’s kind of what makes it great in this moment. Nobody can tell us what to do. Well, wait. We’d gladly allow people to tell us what to do if they wrote a check, but until then we get to write as silly a thing as we want, and this thing is going to be very silly. I love collaborating! I love a little nudge to actually do something! But also I love to make something without having to go to an office in an inconvenient part of town! So we’re really crushing it on all fronts so far.
The BIG news in our household this week was that our toilet tank lid, through a series of small choices and accidents that’s too boring to get into, fell to the ground and shattered. It is, apparently, not an easy process to purchase just the lid to a toilet tank. Big Toilet would really prefer that you just bought a whole new unit. If I were a father of two, this is where I’d say “that’s how they get ya.” Fortunately, our landlord found a website that made its entire business model capitalizing on this hole in the market at , and he ordered a new toilet tank from them. You will not believe how perfect the name of this establishment is. Get ready…
Incredible, right?
God bless you, cheaptoilettanklids.com. I truly can’t believe you are a real website and not a phishing scam designed to rip off grandpas who are doing home renovation projects on their own.
In smaller news (smaller than replacing a busted toilet part, Josh?) I did some fun shows last week. Thanks to Negin Farsad for inviting me out to Pennsylvania to perform on her “The Muslims Are Coming” live show despite what I would call my reckless lack of fidelity to the Five Pillars of Islam. And thanks to Joe Zimmerman for including me on his benefit for hurricane relief in North Carolina. You, readers, can donate to BeLoved Asheville HERE if you’d like.
In other Josh Gondelman updates: I returned to Ana Marie Cox’s podcast to talk about election pessimism. I was booked for Ayman on MSNBC Saturday night but then bumped from the show because the news got too newsy. But, never fear, I did write a little blurb for GQ’s feature on how to watch tv!
Great lineup! Great venue! Alison Leiby and I will be real goofy as hosts!
Now let’s get to the heart of the matter. I think I accidentally succeeded in keeping this whole endeavor a little tighter than usual, but let’s see!
PEP TALK FOR UNDECIDED VOTERS
Green checkmark for president!!!
I am going to try and be as straightforward and enthusiastic as I can, here, despite my general belief that if you are registered to vote and currently vacillating between the two major party candidates, your brain is as unknowable to me as an amoeba trapped under ice in the shadow of a cliff on the far side of Mars.
And that is not to say that I think everyone in America sees their exact belief system represented in these two candidates. Maybe you were hoping the Democrats would nominate someone more progressive on issues of criminal justice reform and foreign policy. Maybe you were planning to vote for RFK Jr. and you’ve been left without a candidate who will advocate for your key issue: Allowing your pet falcon to drink unpasteurized whale blood that you foraged with your own two hands and a bucket. Maybe you are one of Ron DeSantis’s few dozen supporters, and you think that adults should be able to look down teenagers’ underpants whenever they want, but it should be a crime for a gay person to say hello to their seven-year-old-child. If you are one of those freaks, I understand the feeling of being left behind by the Republican party, who merely wants to cut taxes on the wealthy and be wicked racist and sexist and still disgustingly transphobic but in a less horny way.
Some people have decided to vote third party or not at all. And I’m not talking about those people, because those are both decisions. I don’t know that they’re always gooddecisions, but it’s not the same as being undecided. Neither one of those choices is the same as looking at Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and feeling like you’re going to vote for one of them, but you just haven’t figured out which yet because both are appealing to you in their own way. Like one is a walk on the beach and the other is a drive through the mountains. There are many complicated facets to politics. There are many reasons to feel demoralized or disillusioned by our government. There is no logical reason to feel hung up between these two choices, even if you are a person who hates Democrats but always does what Dick Cheney says.
Anecdotally, a friend told me that she’d recently met a bunch of undecided voters who are small business owners and haven’t done enough research to know which candidate is better for their small business, the thing they care most about. I submit that if you are < three weeks from an election, and you only care about one issues, but you don’t know which candidate is better on that issue, you don’t actually care about that issue very much, and you should make a choice or find a different thing to tell people. And this comes from me, a person so logistics-averse I routinely book myself hotel rooms on business trips as I’m traveling from the airport into the city.
If that’s where you are, I do believe, pretty firmly, that if you really sit down and reflect on your vision for the world, you will be able to decide who to vote for. Make a list of pros and cons. If your list of positive attributes doesn’t include “cares deeply about which dead golfers have the biggest penises” you probably have your answer right there.
PEP TALK FOR A READER
I’ve fiddled with this request just a little but kept the intent the same!
I’ve been unemployed for a whole year, and I’m trying to keep hope alive while the world is crumbling & my husband’s people are being genocided. - Optimism’s Optimissin’
When I started writing this newsletter, I’d hoped to keep things light. Even when I started taking reader requests for pep talks, I’d imagined that most people would reach out with relatively low stakes dilemmas. “I’m worried I can’t pull off this expensive hat I purchased!” or “I have so many friends’ weddings coming up, and a wizard cursed me to hate the song ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)’ and I’m afraid this might drive me to the breaking point.” You know, trivial hiccups that you’ll get through fine even if they go as badly as you could imagine. (Having worked for a famous wearer of elaborate hats, I can tell you that a lot of “pulling it off” is about merely choosing a hat you like a lot and having the confidence to sport it in public!)
Unexpectedly, two things happened:
People’s hearts were more open and sincere than I’d expected! That’s so beautiful!
The world continued to be bad in many precedented but agonizing ways, which frankly I should have seen coming! I don’t love it though!
Unemployment can create a brutal financial and mental strain. But, probably, you will get a job again at some point. People need jobs done. And, until the .00001% of the wealthiest people successfully automate the rest of us out of employment, leaving us to rummage around in nature for food and fashion weapons out of tree branches in order to foment a revolution, someone will eventually pay you to do a thing. It’s just impossible to know what the next thing is until it appears. You can’t turn on the high beams for foresight and see further into the future. (Unless you are Nic Cage starring as Frank Cadillac, an actually psychic Las Vegas magician in the movie Next, but I don’t think that’s who wrote to me this week.)
Addressing the second part of your message, I don’t have any easy words of comfort to counteract the sorrow of mass murder. It certainly doesn’t help that I read the original text and thought: “To which current genocide are you referring?” The Jewish (and also Islamic, I’m learning) concept of “every life, a universe” has felt especially relevant lately in terms of both the boundless tragedy we’re seeing across the globe, and the imperative to stand up for the survivors.
Sincerely, I don’t know if this is helpful at all, but if every life lost is cause for infinite grief, every life saved is a limitless miracle. The horror we’ve witnessed doesn’t absolve us from the responsibility to fight against future horror. I know this sounds a little all lives matter-y, but with every life being precious, there is so much good we can still do even in the face of so much cruelty. Things can (must????) be better than they are. People are working really hard at it. You can help. That’s the best I’ve got for you. I hope it gives you at least a small jolt of perseverance.
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: Catherine Cohen - “Blame it on the Moon”
My friend Cat Cohen has a new comedy special out now called Come For Meon a platform called Veeps, which literally no one in America has ever heard of, but that’s not the point. If you liked Cat’s previous special (The Twist…? She’s Gorgeous on Netflix, which is excellent) I think this one is EVEN BETTER. Her songs are always full of extremely funny and sharply-observed details, and they’re so catchy. This one is about how nothing is ever your fault (relevant!).
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’ve got a bunch of NYC dates coming up, and then a few back on the road! See you there?!?!
First of all: A quick apology for the lateness of today’s newsletter! It’s been a busy couple of days, and then this morning I met a baby (great!) and went to the dentist (not to brag). So I’m a little bit behind!
Second of all, I want to thank all the That’s Marvelous readers for the kind words about our late great pug Bizzy. I have been overwhelmed by the dozens of thoughtful messages in the comments here, as well as the literally hundreds across social media. I haven’t been able to respond to everyone individually yet. My hope is that I will make time to express one-on-one gratitude before too long. But there is also an ENORMOUS chance that I will instead decide to never ever do it because the self-imposed pressure is driving me to the precipice of madness. Stay tuned to see which way this breaks.
It’s been a pretty melancholy week over here, and the grief has hit at unexpected moments. I find myself missing Bizzy at times when I used to be annoyed by her. Late at night, when I’d have to wake her up to take one last walk before I went to bed. Coordinating plans with Maris so there would be someone home to put out a dish of food at her usual mealtimes. When I realize I don’t have to make those accommodations, I feel pangs of sadness, little tugs of feeling where my life had grown in twists and loops to cater to the needs of an adorable twenty-pound tyrant with the brain of a garbage disposal.
We’ve also been really well taken care of by friends checking in and sending care packages. Our apartment, at present, is home to more flowers than it had ever contained cumulatively over the previous seven years. We also received a ton of delicious food deliveries from friends. And because carb-rich meals mess with Maris’s blood sugar, I have consumed (basically) an entire chocolate babka, a half dozen bagels, and a half-pound of smoked salmon over the past seven days. It is the diet of a cartoon Jewish person. (Not one of the Nazi caricatures, a more benevolent one. Like Donatello from the Ninja Turtles, who I just decided we claim.)
It also became (or was destined to be) a very Jewy week here in Brooklyn overall. After taking too long a nap to make it there in person, Maris and I watched the Rabbis for Ceasefire Yizkor service on Saturday/Yom Kippur afternoon. The robust attendance (again, not us, but other people) and the unwavering commitment to both future peace and allowing present grief to transcend geopolitics affirmed so much of what connects me to the Jewish faith. I also started reading Yiddishe Kop, a short Kabbalah-adjacent treatise on Jewish folklore and philosophy, on my friend Amy’s recommendation, and despite the intricate theory and theology much of which I’m too pudding-brained to understand, it’s really resonating with me. It’s kind of like if Aesop’s Fables were also about Game Theory and they all took place in Eastern Europe instead of Ancient Greece But With Talking Frogs.
In (literally) other news, I am once again popping up in several periodicals this week. Here I am in the Washington Postrecommending Hell Gate after doing so in this very newsletter a week ago. Thanks to Laura Wagner for chatting with me about one of my favorite news outlets. I also talked with Rachel Sugar from the New York Times about restaurants that don’t have websites (fine for a smaller place that can’t afford upkeep, infuriating when it’s a trendy place with a glossy Instagram page with no actual information on it). I made an unexpected appearance in the recent ABC News piece about Taskmaster that they shot back when I interviewed the hosts of the show in late March. And, finally, I appeared on a recent live episode of The Grawlix Saves the World giving competitive advice, and twoliveepisodesThis Day in Esoteric Political History talking about the idea of an “October Surprise” (despite what your parents may have told you, it’s not about Halloween candy filled with razor blades).
Yesterday, Maris and I saw The Big Gay Jamboreeoff-Broadway, and I very much recommend it if you are in town. It’s funny and inventive and full of great performances. Our friend Natalie Walker, who is amazing, has a large role, and I am always extra-thrilled to see a talented friend really crush a big professional opportunity. So many things in creative fields are so bad, and I feel even more attached than ever to cheer for great people doing a great job in a great thing. (Former SNL cast member Alex Moffat played the least singing-intensive role, and between that and Bad Monkey, which we’ll get to later, I’ve been enjoying his recent work!)
AND Sunday’s get together was so good!!! I missed the game itself, but I got to come by and see lots of friends and meet so many cool people I’d known of but never encountered in person! Flagrant forever! Go Liberty!
Plus I had several restorative friendship coffees and a GREAT time hosting the 826 Brooklyn Trivia For Cheaters event with my pal Emmy Blotnick on Tuesday night. Thanks for having us, 826. I’m sorry I refused to marry your daughter on account of already being married, older lady who kept trying to get me to marry your daughter. And thanks to Jake and Holden for letting me rank bagels with them on their Tiers of a Clown livestream on Wednesday!
I think the pigeon’s name is “Tony Pepperoni?”
Sorry I didn’t make it to Frankenstein’s Baby at Union Hall on Monday! I was a little ragged still from dog stuff. But I’ll be co-hosting with Alison Leiby next Monday! Killer lineup! Great venue! Early show! Grab your tickets, and I’ll see you there!
I don’t mean to make this part such a long chronicle of my week, but I find it very helpful while I’m still gently bobbing in the professional breeze to note that I actually am Doing Stuff kind of all the time.
PEP TALK FOR THE FLOWERS IN OUR APARTMENT
Hey there, flowers. I see you withering away on the counter, and I just wanted to say…it’s not you, it’s us. Neither my wife nor I have any aptitude for keeping plants alive. It is not out of any animosity towards you or your kind. Yes, Maris has some light allergies and has banished a few of you to the office where I will absolutely no doubt in my mind forget to water you. But that doesn’t mean we appreciate you any less. Your arrival meant so much to us. Sadly (for you), your departure will feel like nothing.
Still, you are beautiful, and you are rich in sentimental value if not in soil, nutrients, or adequately sized vases. Soon, all we will have left of you will be pictures of flowers, which on one hand do not brighten up the room in the same way, but on the other hand do not make my wife’s eyes itchy.
(TRULY thank you to everyone who sent all these gorgeous flowers, and I am sorry to be the H.H. Holmes of horticulture. Is that what the H stood for? Was that serial killer with the murder castle named Horticulture Horticulture Holmes? Anyway, you get it.)
PEP TALK FOR A READER
Okay, this request I have condensed substantially, but I promise I am taking all the words into account as I respond.
Hey Josh! I am in desperate need of a pep talk (although some may say I need a psychiatrist more, but whatevs)! I've been an aspiring TV comedy writer for way too long, and I'm about ready to give up. And yet, I know if I do, I'll regret it. So I've been writing specs and pilots for years, and a few of my scripts have advanced in competitions I've submitted to. This has given me the push to keep going. But nevertheless, I've never been able to get any representation, and as a plan B, I've tried to score production jobs in order to get my foot in the door, but even that has been elusive. I feel like I've been treading water for far too long. On top of this, my entire support system/family is in Chicago while I'm living in LA (a city I liked at one point but now have grown to actually hate). My parents are elderly and starting to deal with serious health issues. Luckily, I have siblings and other relatives living close to them in Chicago, but here I am, chasing what seems to have become a pipe dream, and I feel terribly guilty for not being there for them. - I Love L.A. (In The Randy Newman Way)
When I moved from Boston to New York in 2011, I was 26 years old, and I felt nervous that I wouldn’t “make it” in the big(ger) city. Before I could bring myself to take the leap, I really had to commit to the idea that returning to New England after a year or two would not represent failure. It would just mean I tried something new, and it wasn’t what I wanted. Which is, in some respects, what failure is. But in other respects…who cares? It doesn’t go on some kind of scorecard or permanent record. It’s not embarrassing to make choices that improve your life unless that choice is going to the hospital to remove a croquet wicket from your butt because you got drunk and sat on one at a friend’s child’s baptism or bris.
The thing I said to me thirteen years ago, is true for you now, except it’s MORE true today than it was then. Thanks to Zoom, nobody has any idea where you live. And if people like your writing and want to meet with you to talk about it, you probably exist primarily in a 3x5 inch digital rectangle, just like everyone else. It doesn’t matter if you literally live inside the Hollywood sign or if you are subletting a corn crib in rural Kentucky. As long as you have wifi and a dream, you are within reach of the ~industry~, or whatever is left of it now that every media mogul is moving closer and closer to the strategy: “What if we made one movie every year that cost one billion dollars and earned us five billion dollars? We could buy back so many of our own stocks with that money!”
Your life, in its current configuration, sounds…miserable. You are far from your family with few professional prospects. You hate (your words not mine) the city you live in. It doesn’t have to be like this. Your support system is in Chicago, not like…Moose Ass, Alberta (no offense to any Canadian or moose readers of this newsletter). There is, famously, so much comedy in Chicago. I can’t promise you can “have it all” if you move back home, but it sounds like right now you have very little of it in Los Angeles.
I don’t say that to be cruel!!! I just mean, you don’t have to live like this!!! Hard work and some level of sacrifice are generally necessary to cultivate a creative career. But you don’t have to deprive yourself of valuable time with your family or stay in a place that doesn’t suit you…unless they’re paying you a lot of money to do those things. The good part about the toiling-in-obscurity phase of a career is that obscurity is everywhere. You are allowed to toil in cozier environs! Take ownership of it and put the YOUR in obsc-YOUR-ity!!!! You will probably make better and more interesting art if your brain is less consumed by guilt and resentment.
Again, I’m not trying to make fun of you here. I’m just pointing out that you know what is making you unhappy and how to change those conditions. As long as no one is begging you to be in a writers room or on a film set, you can live wherever you want. And then, if they implore you to return, you can go be unhappy personally while thriving professionally, like generations of writers before you. It’s not a failure to make healthy choices. Or maybe it is. But who cares! It’s your life, not Hollywood’s.
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: Marcus King - “The Waiting” (Tom Petty cover, of course)
Maris and I just finished watching the AppleTV series Bad Monkey which you might be shocked to learn…exists. Vince Vaughn plays a disgraced detective in the Florida Keys trying to solve a mystery and then trying to prove that he solved it. I thought I was over Vince Vaughn’s whole thing, but it’s fun to see him playing into the fact that he’s kind of haggard now. It adds some charm to the smarm. We had a great time watching! Meredith Hagner (Search Party) is VERY good in it!
The show’s soundtrack is largely (exclusively?) made up of Tom Petty covers, which are are variously successful. This one is one of the few that offer a take on the source material that is both a. distinctive and b. good. (Some of the other more faithful covers are strong too!) It’s a bluesy/gospely version of the Tom Petty song whose chorus I often facetiously pretend I made up. “The waiting is the hardest part. Do you like that? I just came up with it.”
OTHER PICK-ME-UP STUFF OF THE WEEK: ”Relationship To Patient” (Short Film)
My friend Caroline Creaghead wrote and directed an extremely tender short film that I’ve been waiting to see for (possibly) years, and it’s now online! It’s all based in a small uncomfortable moment that feels so real, and the two central performances by Eleanore Pienta (Cocoon Central Dance Team) and H. Jon Benjamin (you know who this guy is) are very subtle and charming. It’s thirteen minutes long, and I loved it! Caroline was also one of the first people who booked me on cool shows when I was new to New York, and she was always so encouraging and generous even when I had (let’s say, charitably) not much going on. I do not know if I have even said this to her, but I have appreciated her kindness for years and years, and I really encourage people to support a nice friend and great artist!
And ALSO! My friend Chris Duffy did a fun and funny TED Talk!!! Chris’s work is always rooted in curiosity for his subject matter and generosity towards the audience. This talk is about creativity and keeping your mind open to surprises and delight.
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’ve got a bunch of NYC dates coming up, and then a few back on the road! See you there?!?!
It’s been a pretty heavy week here, for reasons I’ll get into later. There were definite highlights though: I ate some apple with a little blob of honey on it to celebrate Rosh Hashanah. Performing on the super fun Late Stage Live and Friends standup show was a bright spot during the week for sure. Late Stage Live is a late night-style show that airs on public access and then YouTube. It’s made by a group of young queer Gen Z comedians and is very cool. On the most recent episode, host Ella Yurman interviewed NYC city councilperson Chi Ossé! I am always delighted to get to do shows with young hip comedians, like I am the (or, a) fun uncle of Brooklyn standup.
Also delightful: Maris and I saw our friend Jennifer Mills’s Tiny Play Festival, in which actors (mostly first-time performers) put on a series of very, very short plays that Mills herself wrote. Then I hung out at a live Hey Riddle Riddle podcast show. HRR is a podcast about…solving riddles (as one might expect from the name), and I was on an episode early this year! It was one of the most fun podcasts I’ve ever been a part of and the live show made me laugh a ton.
On Saturday night, we wanted to watch something stupid that would not make us feel any feelings (for reasons I promise I will reveal), so we threw on The Beekeeper, Jason Statham’s recent morality play (action movie) about the evils of defrauding the elderly. The film contains, as my dad would say, “a lot of good beating up” and it doesn’t make a ton of sense, but it doesn’t feel like the movie is calling the audience stupid; it’s more like the movie invites us to be stupid.
When I was a kid, there was a robust tradition of mid-premise movies that were mostly setups for the aforementioned style of beating up. The mob comes to town to turn the recycling plant into a casino, but SORRY, DICKWEEDS, the town’s recycleman is Steven Seagal, and he’s going to beat the shit out of you all one at a time. Or, like, Nicolas Cage in a tank top plays a haberdasher in a remote Polish village whose training as a Navy WALRUS (bigger, more dangerous version of a Navy SEAL) kicks in after a warlord tries to enslave the local elementary school children at his heroin factory. Now we get a bunch of superhero movies, the occasional Fast v. Furious sequel, and the even more occasional movie that WOULD be fun if there wasn’t such a lengthy digression to explore childhood trauma. Statham is all we have left of this tradition. Thank you for your service, you classic bald angel of death.
Also, I think I have the newsletter’s first ad today? I am saying that in case the good people of give me money for this, but my cool basketball magazine friends are throwing a Finals Watch Party this Sunday (10/13) afternoon in Brooklyn!
Which Finals? Legally I’m not sure I’m allowed to say. But use your noodle, folks! It’s a free, all-ages event, and you can RSVP right here!!! (I, a Beekeeper-watching doofus have theater tickets and won’t be able to make it, which is BREAKING MY HEART!) Even if YOU can’t make it, you should subscribe to the Substack and buy their print issues and merch and listen to their podcast!!! That part is NOT a paid ad. It’s just something I believe deep down!!!
Tonight I’ll be kicking around at the second ever Frankenstein’s Baby show at Union Hall! And tomorrow Emmy Blotnick and I are co-hosting Trivia For Cheaters at Brooklyn Brewery to benefit 826 Brooklyn!
Sorry to be so New York-centric with these events, but it is where I live! (Go Liberty!)
A FEW WORDS ABOUT BIZZY, OUR BELOVED PUG
Content warning: I am so sad!
R.I.P. Bizzy the Pug (2007-2024)
Here’s the bad news I alluded to earlier.
This afternoon, Maris and I will say goodbye to Bizzy, our pug. She lived a long and wonderful life (she was born during the Bush administration, mere months after top college basketball prospect Cooper Flagg, who is now 6’9”). She was already eight years old when she came to live with us, though the other biographical details from that era of her life are murky on account of the person who gave her to us being a compulsive liar. (I wrote about this in my book.) She’s become increasingly eccentric in her habits and infant-like in her old age, which I wrote about in Luke O’Neil’s excellent newsletter.
Maris and I adopted Bizzy almost immediately after moving in together. It’s been nearly a decade since I’ve slept at home without her snores and mururs firmly within earshot, if not in bed with us. Her regular walks and irregular digestive system dictated the rhythms of our days. Bizzy’s increasing neediness (3am walks, being spoon-fed her wet food) made me love her more with time, not less. We accepted her into our lives, an anxious senior dog. It felt beautiful, just even, to care for her in her even older age. Maris (an angel!) bore more of Bizzy’s wriggly, unwieldy weight than I did, tending to her solo while I traveled a ton for work the past couple of years. We gave Bizzy the best life we could until the vet, not-as-gently-as-I-might-have-preferred, told us a few days ago that there wasn’t really a best life for her anymore.
In her nearly two decades on Earth, Bizzy shared so many apples with Maris and devoured enough slices of deli turkey to comprise dozens of Thanksgiving meals. She received so many compliments from strangers. She accepted so many hugs and squeezes and scratches behind the ears. We saw her learn to deal with the clatter and buzz of living in an apartment building with neighbors she could hear coming and going. She outlasted the set of couches Maris and I had in our first apartment together. She trotted countless times to be barber shop down the block, where her presence delighted the employees (who lavished her with treats) and inconvenienced the patrons. She got up early to keep Maris company while she wrote. She stayed up late to watch basketball with me when I got home from shows. She was a sweet little bunny and a wild little goblin. She was a joyful companion and a perfect little pain in the ass.
Bizzy rarely accepted the obligations of a lap dog. She never kissed or licked people (unless she noticed peanut butter on their fingers). She used to snuggle with us in the morning, and would occasionally hump Maris’s leg after dinner. But those habits faded away years ago. The customary canine affections were replaced by new tendencies. The way she allowed me to scoop her up and carry her outside when her legs were too frail to clamber up and down the steps to and from our second floor apartment. The way she dozed beside Maris after they shared a piece of fruit. Her contented grunfs and grumbles. Her demands for me to hang out NEAR her on the couch in the middle of the night even when she refused to sleep in bed with us. I will miss her anxious specificities despite how many times they left me bleary-eyed in the morning, and how many dog sitters she went through on account of her being an absolute maniac. What shape will my days and nights have without her weirdness filling every empty moment?
She physically fills the place too. Pug-related ephemera juts out of every corner of our apartment. Art bearing Bizzy’s image. The slippers in her likeness that I got Maris as a gift. So many pug oven mitts and dish towels and pairs of socks we’ve received from friends and family. Without the fuzzy little goblin around, it will feel bizarre to have these artifacts on display. But I can’t imagine getting rid of them.
Even when we do, when the potholders get too grimy to keep and the prints we ordered from Etsy are displaced by other art, we will never forget Bizzy. No one who has met her could ever do that. She’s too cute and weird and stubborn and funny.
Over the past few days, a handful of friends have popped in to say goodbye, and Bizzy submitted to pats and squeezes and doting. We visited the barber shop for the last time this morning, Bizzy in her stroller, her legs can’t carry her anymore.
I’ve been crying a lot thinking about all these last times. But then I remember the thousands of walks, the hundreds of naps, the millions of moments of quiet company (and loud frantic company too). How sad it is to lose a tiny old friend. How beautiful it is to carry so much of her with us still.
Okay thanks for indulging me. Back to our regular newsletter format.
PEP TALK FOR A READER
I’ve done just a little futzing around with this request! And I added the nickname!
I work in animal rescue, a field I love but that is incredibly taxing both physically and mentally. I’m in a very “what’s my purpose?” or rather “is there a purpose?” type of spiral even in the midst of working with vulnerable dog populations everyday. I left the film industry after feeling disillusioned and a need to do something that felt more personal and immediately rewarding but now I feel I’ve come to a dead end due to burn out. In the midst of this I’ve also lost touch with all the things I once enjoyed (crocheting, movies, reading, record collecting, etc.). So the entirety of my life is split between work 6 and often 7 days a week and then catching up on Bravo shows. I feel selfish but I’m tired. - Must I Love Dogs (This Much)?
Hello, MILD (TM). You’ve been really burning the candle, well…not at both ends, exactly, but at one end all the time. That doesn’t seem sustainable! You’re going to run out of candle at some point even if you are burning it on someone else’s behalf and for a very good reason.
I get that you left your previous professional field in search of something that felt impactful, and it seems like the problem isn’t that you’re still searching for a way to make a difference; it’s that doing only that is nearly as stressful as working in an industry that doesn’t offer the same satisfaction at all. Anything’s going to burn you out if you do it 6-7 days a week for years. Rescuing vulnerable dogs. Jumping off a trampoline and dunking basketballs. Hot dog eating contests. It’s good to be mindful of not living a selfish life, but your self deserves a little ish. It’s the only self you have!
Maybe it’s because we’re right in the midst of the High Holidays, or maybe it’s just the symmetry of your questions, but this quote from Rabbi Hillel (the only quote from any rabbi I know by heart, as far as I know) comes to mind: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?” (The third part of the quote “And if not now, when?” is also a classic, but in this case “a little later” can be the answer too.) Obviously there’s a bigger “how to be a person in the world” thrust to these rhetorical questions. But their magnitude seems to match the immensity of the way you posed your concerns about life and work. If you’d said “should I quit my job?” or “is any job going to feel fulfilling?” I probably would have quoted Office Space or The Big Lebowski and left it at that.
A job will never give you a holistic sense of meaning, even when you’re doing good and important work. And you won’t find out what else is important to you while you are All Job All The Time, like you’re Charli XCX but for going to work instead of dancing and singing about nose drugs. (Not that I recommend a 365 Party Girl lifestyle as an antidote for professional burnout.) But I don’t think cutting out your hobbies and restorative practices will help you find a purpose and especially not your purpose. No offense to Bravo, but there’s only so long you can sustain yourself on Real Housewives franchises alone. You can get back to being the whole you! And maybe even find new you deep down inside!
To paraphrase Rabbi Hillel: “You do so much for those dogs. But what are you doing for you, dog?”
PICK-ME-UP THING OF THE WEEK: Welcome To Talk Town (which is a podcast!!!)
My friends Alison, Anthony, and Greg started a new podcast. It is fully deranged. The idea is that every episode they talk about some features of a hypothetical town (the titular Talk Town) that would correct the problems with modern society. Sometimes they come up with great ideas (Expert Lines, Erotic Duels) and other times they argue about whether the question Anthony asked was actually a ripoff of a game Greg had made up but hadn’t told anyone about yet.
It is…so stupid, which I mean as a compliment but also an accurate description. I laugh a LOT listening to this goofy show. It’s nonsense. I love it. Check it out!
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’ve got a bunch of NYC dates coming up, and then a few back on the road! See you there?!?!
This might be a rambly one! (Welcome new readers who heard me on Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! last weekend! Usually I’m not quite so longwinded.)
Last week I struck a pretty terrific balance between hanging out and doing work, which is honestly my biggest goal of late. Maris and I had brunch with our friends Jason and Emily and their itty bitty baby who is so cute. I enjoyed Mad Men Lunch Pt. II (which is just drinking on a weekday) with my friend Tanya. Did some fun standup sets. Had offee with my friend Caroline. Participated in New York Climate Summit comedy panel show. Reached out to one of my favorite musicians about licensing one of their songs for the opening/closing of my standup special. Ate dinner with Dionne Warwick (more on that below!?!!?!?). One drink at my friend Merritt’s birthday, and another at my friend Meredith’s birthday party, while sadly missing Dave’s birthday party. A little call about future work projects. Two podcasts. Saw Bad Moves play live. Met Joel McHale (super nice!) at the Comedy Cellar. A great talk after the show with my friend Matt Koff about comedy and They Might Be Giants (Are they a top ten all time American rock band? Sound off in the comments!) That was most of it I think.
My great friend Sarah was in town from London, and I hadn’t seen her in five or six years, so we had breakfast on Wednesday morning and then went to this immersive art installation in the financial district (she works in that field and has a google alert set for such things). We spent an hour meandering through fourteen of the fifteen exhibits (one was closed) and talking about them. At their best, they were technically impeccable and visually engrossing. Lots of mirrors (“This is the Instagram room,” Sarah quipped, not knowing there would be several more similar Instagram rooms to come.). At worst, I would describe the aesthetic of a few pieces as “NFT-core.” A few of the exhibits seemed like the work of someone who’d heard of Banksy and just kind of ran with that idea.
Sarah is so smart about considering intentionality in art, and considering what things could mean, and how they could be executed more successfully. And those qualities make her extremely fun to talk trash with. She basically has a post-graduate degree in it (as well as teasing out and explaining what’s interesting about art). So even though the thing itself was hit or miss, the conversation had no skips.
Thursday I flew to Kansas City for the aforementioned Wait Wait taping with the also aforementioned Dionne Warwick. The actual music legend and her very friendly associate came and ate dinner with me and Paula Poundstone and Shantira Jackson, and even Peter Sagal, esteemed host of the program decided to be a fan and ask for a picture, which gave the rest of us the green light to do the same. We mostly talked about astronauts and outer space at dinner. Ms. Warwick said she plans to stay on earth rather than ever going to Mars, and she chuckled politely when I said that the food there seems terrible. A huge win for me!
On Saturday I ran into my friend Shaina who literally moved to New York this week and doesn’t live anywhere near me! And then when I got home from that walk I had received an email from someone I’d never met but who I’d been corresponding with about a work thing, and he’d driven past me on the street around the same time. I was really struck by how beautiful small moments of synchronicity can be. I was recently talking to a friend who’s also not super spiritual, but who finds meaning in unexpected connection. I don’t mind the smallness of being one person out of eight billion on one planet out of ??? planets. But when the world feels small too, it’s a little bit of a comfort. Not only are we not alone, we’re all neighbors.
Rosh Hashanah starts on Wednesday night, and I’m (I think!) slightly more religious (a little) than I am spiritual (again, not really at all). What can I say, I like a once-a-year ceremony-adjacent snack and a feeling of being rooted in history. Plus I appreciate the concepts of renewal and forgiveness that the High Holidays bring into focus. I’ve been feeling a lot of closeness with a Jewish community lately attached to the ideas of protest and compassion. And I’ve been feeling kind of estranged from Jewish institutions that have taken up the cause of mercilessness. I imagine this next week will be full of heaviness and mourning, which is understandable. I also hope that as people grieve the losses of October 7th, they allow their grief to also encompass the tens of thousands of Palestinian lives (and now hundreds in Lebanon) that were taken in the wake of that tragedy.
I talked a little about these things on Francesca Fiorentini’s show last week. We also had a great chat about climate science with extremely smart journalist Kate Aronoff! And, in other news, I talked about very silly and frivolous stories on the great Alice Fraser’s show The Gargle.
It was a real week of a week. And I haven’t even touched the big local news yet, so…let’s get to it!
PEP TALK FOR ERIC ADAMS
Last summer, Mayor Eric Adams showed up on the WGA/SAG-AFTRA picket line (several months into the strikes, but who’s counting) and I was pulled into some photos with him. Knowing in advance this might happen, and being a naturally smiley person, I practiced several dead-behind-the-eyes expressions before leaving my apartment in the morning so as not to seem happy to be standing next to our mayor. No pictures of me have ever aged better. (Other people redacted because I didn’t ask their permission to post these.)
Mayor (still???) Adams, it has not been your best week in office. Last Wednesday you were indicted on several counts of fraud and bribery and lots of other things that mayors should not be caught doing. The (alleged) pattern of behavior dates back long before your tenure as mayor began, because you play like you practice and practice how you play. The full indictment includes a whole bunch of text messages between you and your staff that say things like “Please delete this text message because it was super illegal of me to send!” and “It’s crime time, big man! And I’ve got a passion for graftin’.” (I’m paraphrasing, but barely.)
Some of the smaller, more hilarious (alleged, but…) crimes include taking consistently discounted travel on Turkish Airlines in exchange for doing favors for the nation of Turkey, which raised red flags in your personal life because your routing always took you through Istanbul when you left the country. Look, I will sometimes go a little out of my way to earn points on my preferred airline but not fly-to-a-country-with-an-authoritarian-leader out of the way. I’m talking a layover in Atlanta, here. You allegedly tried to fly go Chile via Istanbul, starting out in New York, which is an act of cartographical malpractice that can only be described as Columbian.
The less hilarious, more infuriating allegations include falsifying campaign records to access New York City’s matching funds, which both boosted your campaign and siphoned away $10 million of the public’s money. Many have already pointed out the absolute gall to steal millions of dollars from the city and the slash budgets for local services like the library. Not to mention positioning yourself a a “law and order” mayor when you were more like a Law and Order: Criminal Intent mayor.
On Twitter I expressed some embarrassment that our city’s mayor was getting indicted like we live in Providence or something. And several people from Providence responded that the difference is that they actually LOVED their corrupt mayor, who did many good things for the city. (R.I.P. Buddy Cianci.) Fair point, Rhode Islanders!
Mayor (still?!!?!?!) Adams, you have to this point refused to resign, like a captain going down the the ship that he intentionally drove into a rock formation near the Turkish port city of Antalya (which was nowhere NEAR your ultimate destination, and not on the way either). As more and more of your political employees and appointees resign in disgrace, you persevere (also in disgrace). You are (politically) like Tony Montana going down in a hail of (metaphorical) gunfire, if Tony Montana had pretended to be a vegan for some reason. (“Where'd you get the beauty scar, tough guy? Eating tempeh?”)
So congratulations to do what even (walking criminal confession, recently disbarred in Washington D.C.) Rudy Giuliani couldn’t do: Getting indicted as a sitting New York City mayor. You will (fortunately for you) be remembered more for your brazen (ALLEGED lol) criminality than for your cruelty to migrants, lethal increases of police presence in our subways, and almost definite actual home address in New Jersey. And thank you for committing scams so flamboyant they basically assure that you will not be elected again. (Although if disgraced governor Andrew Cuomo ends up as our next mayor, I will get a membership to Zero Bond to yell at you in person when you get out of jail.)
You vowed to bring the swagger back to New York City, but you swaggered too close to the sun. And while I don’t quite respect that about you, I am grateful that your unflappable cop confidence led to your own political implosion.
You truly were here for a good time, and hopefully not a much longer time.
(Also, if you live in New York and are looking for incisive and entertaining coverage of the ongoing Eric Adams saga and other local news, I cannot recommend subscribing to Hell Gate highly enough!!!)
A READER’S PEP TALK FOR HERSELF
I recently (well, a few weeks ago) received a pep talk request from a reader, who before I could respond, had a big shift in attitude following a small shift in material circumstances. This reader has given me permission to publish their messages to me as a little extra pep talk this week!
I’d love a pep talk on getting back into dating. The last time I was actively dating was 2016, then broke up with my boyfriend in late 2019. Since then I haven’t been interested in romantic relationships at all, but at the beginning of the year I started to feel ready - and put the work in on myself. Went back to therapy, started journaling again, quit smoking weed…good things! So I’ve been on Hinge for almost a month now, and while I’ve gotten lots of interest and had some good chats, I’m nervous about committing to actual dates. The process of getting to know someone and letting someone get to know me feels exhausting - and doing it again and again until I find the right person? Yikes. I’m also a very different person than I was eight years ago, and I don’t want to date the same way I did back then, so I feel like I can’t fall back on experience for fear of repeating old bad patterns. At the same time, I’m excited to finally feel ready to open myself up to romantic connection again, and I’ve never felt more on top of my shit. Can you help get me pumped up enough to finally let someone take me out - even if I don’t find the right person right away? - (Re)new Romantic
That was an extremely thoughtful message to receive, and one that I bet a lot of people can related to in part or in full! But, before I could respond, I received this message from the same person!
Hi Josh - no longer in need of a pep talk. Went on a singular Hinge date and met an amazing person and things are going great. It only takes one, I guess!! Just want to add that I’m dating differently than I ever have before - taking it slow and really getting to know him at a measured pace and vice versa, with the aim of building something meaningful and long-lasting. And I think laying out that I wanted to do things differently in my note to you really helped me recognize that and build on it. So your pep talk system absolutely did help in its own way - (Re)new Romantic
I felt so good reading this message, not just because the Gondelman Pep Talk Method (tm) was given credit, maybe more than it/I deserve. But it just felt so nice to see the general premise of the newsletter (Things can be okay! Often you’re in a temporary funk that you can fix or ride out!) in effect in the real world! So, let that be a lesson to you readers…just because I am absolutely not on top of my emails (or more accurately I really only respond per week) doesn’t mean things in your life won’t improve!
Congratulations on your excellent news, (Re)new!
PEP TALK FOR A READER
I might be a little late with this pep talk too! If so, I apologize!
Hi Josh, I could use a pep talk. I'm (41F) headed on vacation with my parents (77M/77F) to San Francisco for a week soon. And while I'm blessed and happy to spend time with them like this, after a few days together, it's hard not to revert to kid attitudes when I'm in their company for this long. I'm a functional, grown adult and yet I can feel teenage me taking over by day three. What do I do? How do I fight this? - All Play And No Work Makes Jack A Dull Girl
Okay, Jack (sorry to start this off sounding so much like Joe Biden), I know that you know that I know that you’re in a pretty swell position. There’s no need for me to stress to you the joy of getting to spend time with older relatives in a vacational context. You said it yourself! This is not a you-should-be-grateful pep talk. You seem to be tapped into the concept of gratitude enough that we can deal with the other part of this situation: Petty annoyances (which are really my wheelhouse here anyway)!
I, too, find myself becoming Teenage Me when I visit my folks. My mom (a wonderful person whom I love, and famously a reader of this newsletter) will offer me yogurt, and I will politely decline, knowing that she doesn’t know I have not eaten yogurt under any circumstances in like…ten years. And yet, there is still an adolescent twinge of Come on, MOM! that is not her fault at all. She’s being nice! And I never communicated to her that I don’t even think about yogurt at any point in my adult life. I just moved out of my parents’ house 17ish years ago (and then again 15ish years ago after a brief moving-back-in period) and developed a bunch of new habits that I didn’t tell my parents about. Anyway! Enough about me and my nonsense…
As usual, I will try to avoid giving advice here even in defiance of your specific request, but I will say this: You are allowed to return to Adult You at any moment, like a werewolf when the sun comes up, but if the werewolf could cause the sun to rise simply by taking a deep breath and saying: “Hey, I’m going to take a little walk and get a coffee? Do you two want anything?” As long as you are otherwise a good faith vacation participant (showing up for the tentpole events, hanging out with your parents in between when not otherwise occupied), you can even take a nap or read a book or meet up with a friend for a stroll (in my San Francisco experience, you will end up way more winded than expected at the end of that stroll because the terrain is like if SimCity and Rollercoaster Tycoon merged into one game and that game was a real life topographical map). You’ve got a week to spend with them, and I bet most weeks of your life are not spent in immediate proximity to the same two people 24/7. Even Run-D.M.C. probably planned a few solo hours when they were on tour (do not forget to include the late Jam Master Jay when you picture Run-D.M.C. in your mind). Even the most romantically invested throuples probably de-throup to go to work or Pilates or book club from time to time. You are allowed to introduce a little of your normal solitude/socializing rhythm into that half-fortnight (septnight?) with your folks.
Despite your Paul Rudd in Wet Hot American Summer-stylesighing, you’ll probably have a very nice time and wind up thinking fondly this trip with your parents, especially if you are able to intersperse your time together with a little time apart.
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: Dionne Warwick - “I Say A Little Prayer”
On my trip to Kansas City last week, I listened to the Apple Music “Dionne Warwick Essentials,” which made for a great flight. There were so many classic hits, and then deeper cuts (or big hits that had maybe just faded out of rotation before my time) and then other songs that I’d heard more frequently as covers. (I really wanted to ask Dionne Warwick what she thought of the White Stripes version of “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself” but I did not have the opportunity or moxie to do so.) I probably heard an a cappella group on campus cover “I Say A Little Prayer” a zillion times while I was at Brandeis, and no offense to (I think) Company B, but this version is superior. It’s not my place to pass judgement on the relative merits of the Aretha Franklin take on the tune.
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’ve got a bunch of NYC dates coming up, and then a few back on the road! See you there?!?!
10/2: Sleepwalk and then also Rodeo (Both Brooklyn)
10/4: Late Stage Live and Friends at Union Hall (Brooklyn)
10/7: Hanging out at Frankenstein’s Baby at Union Hall (Brooklyn)
10/8: Co-hosting Trivia For Cheaters 826 Fundraiser at Brooklyn Brewery
10/18: The Muslims are Coming: Swing State Invasion (Reading, PA)
10/21: Co-hosting Frankenstein’s Baby at Union Hall (Brooklyn)
I am…so sleepy after an excellent weekend in Denver (more on that later), but I’m back at sea level and breathing air that feels as thick as clam chowder.
Two weeks ago, I threw my body into the wood chipper of three concerts in six nights. Last week I did the same thing, but for comedy. I regret nothing!!!! Well, nothing about the last two weeks. Going back further, in the words of noted drama queen Frank Sinatra, regrets…I have a few. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about!
Monday night was the first ever Frankenstein’s Baby show at Union Hall! It was great! A woman in the crowd called out to ask where my sweater was from (Mifland) and it turned out she was…Stacy London of What Not To Wear?!?!?! Anything is possible! Our next two shows are 10/7 (I’ll be there hanging out) and 10/21 (I’ll be co-hosting)!
Joyelle Alison Jordan Me Tyrone and Donwill // Photo: Sam Brooks
On Tuesday I got to do a show on Long Island with friend and J.D. Vance impression-master Dan Wilbur! On Wednesday, I opened for Aparna Nancherla whose new hour really shot me into space! On Thursday evening (flight timing on account of recording a new episode of Normal Gossip in the afternoon…but you didn’t hear it from me), I flew to Denver for the High Plains Comedy Festival, landing just in time to make it to my first show!
High Plains was an ideal comedy festival experience. The volunteers and staff members were so helpful and kind. The crowds were warm and enthusiastic. I got to hang out with a million old friends (Rob Haze! The All Fantasy Everything guys! Hannah Jones! Grawlix!) and see them crush shows! I met a few people (Chris Estrada! Laura Peek!) whose work I love but who I’d never encountered in person before! It’s just wild to see how many different ways there are to be good at standup comedy, even in front of the same audience! (Shouts out also to Rory Scovel, Kyle Kinane, Jaye McBride, Milly Tamarez, and Django Gold!) It’s been a weird time in the industry/country/world, but at least in terms of professional optimism, very little is more restorative to me than seeing how many people are working so hard on creating art that is special and personal and weird and serious and silly!!!
I had an especially fun time on The Grawlix Saves the World podcast with the aforementioned Grawlix and Laura Peek. It is a competitive advice show judged by a live audience, and it was total chaos. Several times during the recording, the entire audience chanted “Evil Josh! Evil Josh!” at me, which warmed my heart.
I think in terms of vegetables, I ate…a few jalapeños, so I’m planning on a week straight of intravenous salad consumption to get my efforts to continue being alive back on track. Thanks so much to festival founder Adam Cayton-Holland for inviting me out, and to Karen and the whole staff for running such an incredible weekend! I was so glad to finally make it to Denver! (Reminder: If you subscribe to this newsletter you’ll always be on top of my tour schedule so you can come see me or stay away from me according to your preference!)
Speaking of not dying (sort of) I’ve been trying to make the use of New York City’s few perfect weeks of cool morning/hot afternoon/cool evening weather to get out of my apartment early to shoot some jump shots at my local court. It’s the perfect time of year both weather-wise and in terms of teenagers being back at school and unable to remark on my technique or (even worse) invite me to play with/against them.
I am trying to break the vicious cycle of being out of practice, so I don’t play pickup, so my skills continue to erode, making me even more avoidant of letting other people see me shoot a basketball. I’m like the phantom of the three point line. Speaking of the three point line, the one at my court is NBA-distance, and I’m finding myself coming up short on my jumper. So I downloaded my brilliant pal Casey Johnston aka ’s beginner weight lifting program to build strength and take my rightful place as Brooklyn’s male Sabrina Ionescu. Let’s see if I follow through on this (both the training program and the release on my jumper).
Also, speaking of basketball (again, 1:1 here), let’s go Liberty! I’d love to see them complete feat of both the NBA and WNBA teams I root for reigning as league champions!!!
Oh and!!! I’ve been sitting on this news until the official announcement, but just after Thanksgiving, I’m doing a bunch of shows around the northeast as part of Aimee Mann and Ted Leo’s Christmas Show! I am part of a little touring company (also including Nelly McKay and Paul F. Tompkins!!!) doing a bunch of dates in New York, Virginia, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut as part of their semi-regular variety show, and I can’t wait! Please do not blow up my spot by telling them I said this, but Ted and Aimee and Paul are so cool, and I’m extremely thrilled and intimidated to get to be a part of these shows!!! (Nelly I’m sure is also cool but I don’t know her as well yet!)
Ted and Aimee *clap clap clapclapclap*
PEP TALK FOR MARK ROBINSON
Smiling through it all, can’t believe this is his life, presumably. (Gerry Broome/AP)
For readers who don’t know, Mark Robinson is the Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina as well as the Republican candidate for Governor in the upcoming election. His continued rise to power would be bad for the people of North Carolina. Which is important, but not the issue at hand. Robinson was also, several years ago, allegedly, a prolific commenter on a porn site called Nude Africa, a name I will refrain from mocking because I do not know if it’s an important fixture in the Black community. This is what we’re here to discuss. The comments in question were made through a username that Robinson employs across several other websites, and the account was linked to his email address (as was a recently-uncovered Ashley Madison account). So far this is weird, but it is not a crime to be horny while holding or aspiring to political office. At least two of our last four presidents would easily have qualified as criminally horny, for sure, if that was the case.
The problem with LieuGo (short for Lieutenant Governor, probably) Robinson is the specific nature of his libidinous comments. Some of them (referring to himself as a “black NAZI!” for example) were off-putting, if not disqualifying to his base of people who think the first word of that descriptor is more problematic than the second one. (And when I say “he,” I know this isn’t proven; I simply mean the commenter who uses Mark Robinson’s email address and social media handle. It could be anyone.) He (whoever he may be) also expressed his enthusiasm for pornography featuring transgender performers, which seems to contradict his bigoted position on which bathrooms transgender people should be forced to use. And, he (Who could it have been? But to clarify it’s the Nude Africa message board poster who uses Mark Robinson’s email address) said he doesn’t care whether a celebrity gets an abortion as long as he can see their sex tape. As you might imagine, Robinson is not nearly that pro-choice when he is flaccid and making statements under his own name.
Look, Mark Robinson, we all say things during sex that aren’t our actual opinions, and sometimes that’s a good thing. If our sexual utterances had to be 1:1 with reality, a disturbing amount of brains would wind up…out, through a process that it is not family-friendly to mention. Although it is a process that can be friendly to expanding families. On the other hand, I don’t think you get the same leeway with stuff you type with one hand while embarking on a sensual tour through Nude Africa with the other.
But, for your sake, at least you only contradicted a few of your (horrific and dangerous) conservative principles in your porn comments. You never commented something like: “Wow that guy has more than enough meat to satisfy everyone, if you know what I’m saying, and by that I mean America’s 1% has hoarded too much wealth, and they should be taxed at a sufficiently high rate to fund social programs that ensure no one goes hungry at night.” Or: “Look at how many people are inside her…it’s so beautiful, which makes me think that maybe our immigration system should be less focused on keeping people out at all costs.” That would really have torpedoed your support among conservatives. (Sorry this is a little explicit! Sometimes, in a newsletter, you’ve gotta play the news you’re dealt!)
Sure, you have so many bad opinions. But at least your insatiable appetite for pornography and shoddy understanding of anonymity only showed you to be a hypocrite regarding a few of them (allegedly). And yes, your top aides quit when this initial report came out. But you want a staff who knows and respects the real you. Even if the real you is someone whose horniness supersedes all his other values, which, I should reiterate, are bad.
PEP TALK FOR A READER
I made a teensy tweak to this pep talk for the sake of anonymizing the writer!
May I please have a pep talk? I’m moving tomorrow, I just started school, I’m going through a messy breakup and I just met someone new! My world is changing so much! - Scare Change
Wow you really are in the middle of a ton of huge life changes, which can be challenging but also very rewarding. The trouble is, that situation stands in contrast to stasis, which is easy and can also be rewarding.
But it certainly doesn’t sound like you wanted the easy, breezy (Am I the first person to rhyme those two words? Probably!) pleasures of continuity. You were ready for some dynamism. You were ready for the status quo to be, well, quover. You didn’t accidentally apply to school, select courses, and begin to attend them in a fugue state. You chose this for reasons, which you didn’t mention, so I will assume they are none of my business!
And sometimes breakups happen against your will, but certainly finding a new partner isn’t something that was foisted upon you as you kicked and screamed. I mean, maybe kicking and screaming is part of it! I don’t know your life. But if it was, it sounds like consensual kicking and screaming between grownups.
That’s not to say there aren’t issues even when you’re forging your own path forward with intent. But these are growth problem (like needing new pants or boredom with defeating your smaller peers at sports) rather than inertia problems (feet falling asleep, inability to experience new things unless someone brings them to you or drags you towards them).
Ultimately, you’re in a position of experiencing joys and struggles of your own choosing. Which in this world is a beautiful privilege to get to experience, even for a short time. And if it’s great, you can go back to gliding for a while. And if it doesn’t stay satisfying, you can shuffle the deck again and deal with the new deal.
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: St. Vincent - “New York”
It was more relevant to my life two weeks ago when I saw St. Vincent live, but this song has been bubbling up in my head for a little bit now. It’s not really peppy, but it’s propulsive and wistful, which qualifies it for this section of the newsletter. I think it’s sweet to refer to someone as “the only motherfucker in the city who can handle me.” Who wouldn’t want to be a singularly qualified motherfucker? Full disclosure: Maris and I left the St. Vincent show before she performed this song, but we did see Lorde play a cover of it a few years ago, and that was good too!
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’ve got a bunch of NYC dates coming up, and then a few back on the road! See you there?!?!
I’m going to TRY to be brief this week because I’m kind of in the thick of a bunch of little professional things converging, and also admittedly a couple of lunch dates with friends that I don’t want to cancel. So newsletter, you’re getting squeezed this week.
I had a terrific and always-too-brief trip to Boston last weekend for the live This Week In Esoteric Political History live podcast, which will be released online in October. It was a blast being onstage with the show’s brilliant hosts! Plus I had an incredible speed run of fortuitous Bostonian experiences: A visit with my family, a cannoli from Mike’s Pastry, an incredible parking spot, and a WILDLY botched Dunkin’ order. As often, I felt emotionally overwhelmed by personal history while zipping down Storrow Drive in my mom’s Prius by myself late at night.
I also successfully saw St. Vincent, the Old 97s (at long last!), and Charly Bliss play live, which I mentioned last week, but was not 100% confident I’d be up for. All the shows were very good, but it was especially wonderful seeing my pals in Charly Bliss tear through their new songs live. There’s a texture and dimension to their recent album that’s even more vibrant in person. And the band members’ love for each other is so evident onstage. I got to talk to them all a little bit about it when I was writing the bio for Forever, but their mutual affection radiates through the room and makes their shows feel so joyful. I especially loved seeing singer/guitarist Eva Hendricks and guitar player Spencer Fox playfully head butt each other during instrumental sequences in a way that I’m not sure baby rhinos actually do, but you can picture it, right? I think Eva’s mom might read this newsletter, and if so: Hi, Eva’s mom! It was so nice to see you there!
On Sunday I hosted a panel for this big day of conversations and performances put on by lefty magazine Jewish Currents. I felt lucky to sit onstage and talk with a group of people who work so hard at living their principles despite working in entertainment.
While I was at the event, a bunch of friends AND SEVERAL ENEMIES (jkjkjkjk) and many strangers won Emmy Awards! And many friends (and strangers) lost their categories too. Speaking from experience: It is an honor just to be nominated, but it’s more fun to win. (This year I did neither, which was also fun but not particularly notable!)
Tonight at Union Hall (in Brooklyn) is the first ever Frankenstein’s Baby live show! It’s a great and bimonthly standup show hosted by me, Alison Leiby, Joyelle Nicole Johnson, and Tyrone Thornhill in rotating combinations. Donwill is going to DJ the show (thank goodness) and the wonderful Jordan Ashleigh is producing it!! Tonight the lineup includes Sabrina Wu, Shalewa Sharpe, and Alex English! Ridiculous!
On Wednesday I’m opening for my friend (who is a genius) at the Bell House! I think a few of my new jokes are finally shaping up to the point where I can trot them out at a show like this. Get ready to hear about my parents’ email address (singular), audience!!!
I’m so psyched to go to Denver this weekend for the High Plains festival! Here are the shows I’m doing, if you’re curious. And I’m going to try and hang out and see a bunch of pals do their shows as well (hi, All Fantasy Everything)! See you there, Denver?
PEP TALK FOR INDOOR VAPERS
No one notices you’re holding one of these at all!
Cigarette smoking has been on the decline for years, which is great for public health but difficult for people who want to leave their job for fifteen minutes every two hours. Maybe we’ll see “having IBS” take over as a new trend, but I’m not holding my breath. Speaking of breathing out…
The dip in people ripping butts (what they actually call it where I’m from) has occurred hand in hand with a rise in vaping. I’m not breaking any news here; by now we’re all familiar with the sweaty little computers that people suck nicotine mist out of. Maybe it’s a healthier habit than inhaling a campfire every day, or maybe sucking up a cloud of chemicals the likes of which you normally see billowing out of an operational paper mill isn’t great either. Who can say?
What I do know is that while vaping has exploded in popularity, it’s still outlawed in many places, especially indoors. And yet, for reasons that are probably totally healthy and not at all signs of a problem, people continue vaping indoors in a way that they might describe as “surreptitious” but in reality is extremely obvious.
We’ve all seen these undercover vapers, cupping their devices in one hand, the way you’d hold a twenty-dollar bill you’re about to slip to a maitre d in hopes of jumping the line. They lean downwards, hand to face, like they’re whispering a secret to their fingers. Then, a few seconds later, they exhale a sweet vapor, as if announcing that they’ve just chosen a new Pope of Candyland.
Indoor vapers, relax. You are fooling literally no one. It is outrageously difficult to hide the fact that you’re emitting steam. That is the whole premise of teapots. It’s not, like, courteous to commit this act of attempted obfuscation the way it’s polite to sneeze into your elbow. So what’s the benefit of this performance?
Stop gaslight (vaporlighting?) us! Just do your thing. No one will be mad at you except flight attendants and waiters, who are already actively ignoring your rule-breaking because conflict is hard and they don’t want the (fake) smoke.
Or simply go outside, the way smokers have for years, since people realized they could avoid their own hair and clothing reeking for days if they just asked people to keep their open flames outdoors.
I didn’t edit this request at all. JUST SO YOU KNOW.
Hi Josh! I would love a pep talk. I just had to defer my entry to my first marathon after months and months of training. I strained a calf muscle and the race date was too soon to heal and continue training in order to run. - Half Calf
Ahh shoot noooo! What a drag! It sounds like you were really excited to run this first marathon, and you aren’t doing it because someone is chasing you 26.2 miles while wielding a chainsaw, which is what it would take for me to participate in this kind of athletic event. (I would be chainsawed to pulp and splinters before I hit mile five.) If I were giving this pep talk to me, it would go: Hey, at least now you don’t have to run a marathon, which I assume you’re doing because you lost some kind of high-stakes bet, me. But I’m not writing to me. That’s a gimmick I try not to go back to all that often. I’m writing to you. So to you I say…
You got so close this time!!! And it sounds like you will recover and be able to run again, even if it won’t be in time to compete in this particular marathon. That’s already a lucky break on the scale of injuries that can happen to human legs. Honestly, I know it doesn’t feel like it now, but that’s so much more important than running a specific marathon. My grandmother used to always say “Wear it in good health!” when she gave me or my sister a garment, and I never understood it when I was a kid (who had the good luck to be in good health most of the time). But as an adult I’m like…yeah, the good health part is probably a bigger deal than the sweater. If you could give someone good health itself as a birthday present, they’d take it every time.
There will be other marathons, and you’ll get back into fighting shape. (I know you are running, not fighting, but I still imagine you have to fight the urge to just…stop running.) People love running marathons. They hate when I point out that for a group of people obsessed with athletic achievement, it is the ultimate participation trophy culture. I know dozens of people who have run marathons, not a soul who’s won the fuckin’ thing. You don’t wear a medal for finishing a pickup basketball game or a flag football tournament.
Still, I understand the celebration (and am pro-trophy in general). Completing a marathon is a triumph of a human being over their own body, which even though I’m not a runner, I understand as someone who routinely does things that make me feel horrible, seemingly to spite my own corporeal form. And so, with that in mind, finishing the marathon you sign up for when you’re finally recovered and ready will be an even more wonderful victory. You will have overcome MORE adversity and persevered through even FORMIDABLE-ER conditions. Your body doesn’t want you to do this AT ALL, but your brain is like “fuck you, body” and I think that’s beautiful, and it’s going to feel (emotionally) amazing (AND physically horrendous). You can do this, for some reason, or for no reason at all!
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: The Old 97s - “Rollerskate Skinny”
The Old 97s are maaaaybe Maris and my #1 car trip listening band. They have so many perfect songs. The records contain so much specificity, but they never sacrifice emotional impact or sonic impact. He sings bridge at the end (“I believe in love/But it don’t believe in me”) with such wistfulness that it’s impossible to doubt that someday love will find him. It reminds me of the line from the (roughly contemporary) movie Adaptation about how it’s more important to focus on what you love than what loves you! I think that’s so beautiful and heartbreaking, to believe that putting love into the world is more important than having it reflected back at you in a specific way. I listened to this song five times in a row on repeat on the Amtrak on Saturday. Now you try!
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’ve got a bunch of NYC dates coming up, and then a few back on the road! See you there?!?!
The post-August return to action, both personal and cultural, seems to be in full swing. However, while everyone else was getting back into the regular rhythm of their lives after Labor Day, Maris and I got the heck out of town and spent two days in Miami sitting by a pool in celebration of her birthday! Happy birthday, Maris! You are perfect! I am so glad we got to spend a couple of days drinking iced coffee and going swimming together now that you are done writing your book! Out of respect for you, I even watched a crow steal half of my croissant off of a table without saying: “I guess that’s why they call it a crowssant.” AN ENORMOUS SACRIFICE! FOR LOVE!
Miami is full of equal measures of vibrant culture and also guys driving Teslas who seem like they’d give you a million dollars if you wrote “BITCOIN” on a piece of printer paper in some kind of industrial font. It’s a perfect place to visit before we see whether the energy saved by those guys driving electric cars is outweighed by the energy it takes for them to power the blockchain and the whole city ends up underwater.
While we were away, I read Steven Wright’s novel Harold. Steven Wright is one of my favorite comedians, and his wry, poetic insights are strewn throughout the book in the same way that a jazz quintet playing very free and loose occasionally locks into a beautiful groove for a few seconds at a time. There was a lot to like in it, but there was also a lot that was not quite as impeccably crafted as his standup. I wonder if I’d prefer a poetry collection if he ever wanted to write one!
Thanks to the village of Bizzy-sitters required to make a quick jaunt out of town possible. You are all heroes, and I owe each of you my life, which isn’t really feasible, so…whoever claims it first…I guess it’s yours?
Maris flew home from Ft. Lauderdale on Friday, and I continued to zip around Florida and then up to Atlanta on the Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me Standup Tour. We did four theaters in four nights, and it was a blast. I drove all around Florida with Negin Farsad and had great shows with her and Alonzo Bodden and Dulcé Sloan. I started the weekend a little exhausted by my own thoughts since I’ve been telling these jokes for a little bit now (and I’ve watched them a zillion times as I work on editing my special), and the new ones aren’t quite road-ready yet. But it turns out the antidote to being sick of yourself is sharing your thoughts with theaters full of enthusiastic people who have never heard them before.
We didn’t think to take the picture until the audience was already leaving.
I had a lot of fun telling jokes and goofing around backstage with the other comics, plus I saw my cousins John and Frankie, and my friend Kayla, and my former high school Spanish teacher who I managed to call by her first name and not be weird about it. I missed seeing my friend Josie because she had to hustle home to relieve a babysitter so: Hi, Josie!
I’m still a little bedraggled from going out after the show last night in Atlanta, but also because on Friday in Orlando my hotel neighbors engaged in a series of brief but enthusiastic romantic interludes where they seemed to…how to say this delicately…take turns enjoying themselves. I couldn’t quite get a read on whether this was an agreed-upon arrangement where they alternated which one of them was having more fun while the other one toughed it out, or if they just did not communicate well. Obviously I was not in a position to ask them, but I had lots of time to consider the issue while I was not sleeping from 1-2 in the morning and then again from 5-6. (Good for them! Working both of those shifts in bed on the same night is a young person’s game, in my humble, aging opinion.)
Hopefully I’ll sneak in a little nap this week because on account of my not knowing how to use a calendar, I’m going to see three bands play this week? Tonight Maris and I are going to see our buddies in Charly Bliss rip it up at the Music Hall of Williamsburg! Then on Wednesday we’re going to see St. Vincent, purely based on the great review Maddie Connors wrote about her recent LA show. Then on Saturday night it’s the Old 97s, who have been on my Bands To See list for quite some time! Like I said up top: summer is (culturally) OVER! It’s time to DO THINGS INDOORS! (But feel free to enjoy the apocalyptically warm weather to spend a little more time at the beach if that’s your thing. Especially Miami residents. Who knows how long you have left above sea level?)
Otherwise, I’ll be doing a couple of spots this week in New York hashing out some choppy new jokes, which is the best part of telling jokes for comedians, and hopefully audiences like it too! Then I’m up in Boston for a live podcast taping (more info below) and back home hopefully for the Jewish Currents event I mentioned last week. They’re looking for a new location though! Fingers crossed! I really want to talk to Emma Seligman and Tavi Gevinson and James Schamus!
And! After a delightful run co-hosting the last days of Butterboy at Littlefield, Alison Leiby and I are part of a superteam (including the terrific comedians/pals Joyelle Nicole Johnson and Tyron Thornhill, DJ Donwill, and producer Jordan Ashleigh) bringing you the new biweekly show Frankenstein’s Baby!!! It’s going to be every 1st and 3rd Monday of the month at Union Hall in Brooklyn, and we’ll be co-hosting in various fun combinations. The first show will be next Monday (9/16), and the lineup is ridiculous!!! Grab! Those! Tickets!
“Does God have a Plan B?” Photo: Prince Williams/WireImage
When you’re possibly the biggest (solo male) artist of a generation, there’s nowhere to go but down. But wow, nobody expected you to fall so far so fast. Kendrick Lamar, your nemesis, was just announced as the headliner for next year’s Super Bowl halftime show, and normally I’d say that someone else’s success is not a referendum on you. In this case, though, it absolutely is. K.Dot has long been a major artist, but last summer he ascended to dizzying new heights with a suite of songs about how much you, Drake, suck shit. And he’s probably going to perform at least one of those songs in the middle of the most-watched television event of the year. (This thought led me to question whether it would have been possible for 2Pac to have rapped “Hit ‘em Up” amidst an ad break during the Seinfeld finale and the answer is no, the timelines don’t work out.)
You have been beset by (rhyming) allegations of cultural appropriation, inadequate parenting, and sexual misconduct. In May and June, a DJ or even a venue’s pre-show playlist dropping the beat for “Not Like Us” would cause basically any crowd to turn up, from Kamala Harris rallies to sports stadiums to (one must assume) bat mitzvahs. It’s been a complicated year for Jewish people navigating historically Jewish institutions with problematic legacies, but my people have had no problem divesting from Drake in droves. Dude, you are taking more Ls in rapid succession than the word “parallelogram.”
Fortunately for you, while many people have been put off of your music by a J.D. Vance-like barrage of public humiliations, you have ascended to such heights over the past decade and a half that there are still many people in your corner. You have probably maintained a Canadian fan base out of national loyalty. But even if not, you’re definitely still a favored rapper amongst guys who call women “females” and use their Instagram accounts to post pictures of The Joker with captions like: “People say that I am crazy but that is only because a lion’s success cannot be recognized by a cockroach.” I imagine a number of non-English-speaking rap fans who enjoy your music on a rhythmic and/or phonetic basis have remained loyal to you. And for sure no one who pronounces the word “vodka” as if it’s spelled “v-o-k-k-a” has turned on you. So, congratulations on hanging onto the guys who have Entourage quotes in their Hinge profiles.
I don’t know that you’re a good person, Drake. But take comfort in this: There are lots of bad people out there, and they definitely have Spotify accounts.
I’m a little late replying to this request, but hopefully either it’s no longer necessary, but in case it is, here we go!
Hi Josh, I had a (benign!!!) brain tumor removed last month and am in recovery. It has been a lot harder than I thought it would be. But I struggle since I think I should be grateful it was benign and also grateful to the people who are helping me recover. It’s harder and harder the more I “wake up” and get further out from surgery. I almost wish something would happen so I could go back to zombie mode of early post surgery. - In My Head, In My Head (Zombie)
To an extent, we’re all kind of held captive by the narrative that when something dangerous and/or scary happens to us, we come out the other side changed in a good way. We end up with a fresh perspective, a new lease on life, a second chance. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and all of that horseshit. (It is interesting that there are certain animals whose shit we use as a pejorative. Horse. Bull. Dog. But other animals’ shit gets a pass. I’ve never heard anyone say: “What were you looking at, ref? That call was hipposhit!”)
But a lot of the time, tragedies (or even fortunate aversions of tragedy) have long-term negative consequences. This is no secret. Every tv show lately has to take an entire episode to be like: “This person doing bad stuff? It’s because of trauma! And the person who is maniacally driven to stop them? That’s also from trauma. PUT THAT IN YOUR PIPE AND GET OVER IT!”
I imagine receiving treatment for a benign brain tumor is like surviving a plane crash. It’s the luckiest result in a deeply unlucky situation. And more likely than coming out of it going “I should devote my life to a higher cause!” is the aftermath feeling like “Everything is hard and terrifying now!” It makes a lot of sense to me that you feel bad. A bad thing happened to you recently and you haven’t recovered. AND, recovering is its own rigorous process!!! So why would your response be: “Wow I’m on cloud nine! I’ve got to do more volunteer work!”
But! While those feelings are REAL and VALID, they are not like…long-term productive. Especially since you’re in (arguably) the hardest part. You evaded the worst possible outcome, but you haven’t bounced back from it yet. And I think you know this, but regressing can’t really be the answer either. Which sucks! You already “the only way out is through-ed” and now there’s more through to get through before you’re the rest of the way out? Sounds like a load of gecko shit to me.
There is something on the other side of this that’s better than what you’re feeling now. And it’s probably better than being a zombie too. You may not be stronger than before, but at least you’ll be un-undead.
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: André 3000 (feat. Kelis) - “Dracula’s Wedding”
As has been mentioned above, the new show I’m co-hosting is called Frankenstein’s Baby, and I can’t stop singing it to the tune of “Dracula’s Wedding” off of the André 3000 half of Outkast’s 2003 double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, which I listened to this weekend as I bopped around Atlanta waiting for my hotel room to be ready to nap in. (I got into town early; I don’t employ some kind of nap-prep staff on the road to get my rooms optimally sleepy.)
The album overall is a little sprawling and stylistically chaotic in the way that things can get when duos are on the verge of a breakup not that I’d professionally know anything about that! But both André (first name basis presumed) and Big Boi (should I have said “Big”?) stuffed a ton of great music onto their respective CDs.
The album came out just as I started college, and “Hey Ya” in many ways is the first hit song of my adult life. I remember hearing it every time I stepped into a retail store or turned on a car radio or attended a social event from the time I graduated high school through my entire freshman year at Brandeis. It’s kind of fun to hear and feel a new song immediately become canonized as an all-time wedding reception classic in real time.
Anyway, “Dracula’s Wedding” rules and brings me back to a very specific time in my life when songs went from CD to computer hard drive to iPod and Outkast still seemed like they might make it in the long run.
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’ve got a bunch of NYC dates coming up, and then a few back on the road! See you there?!?!
I hope you’re having a relaxing Labor Day Weekend! Shout out, as always, to labor unions.
Until my little trip out of town last week, I’d been wandering around to the gentle beat of a light late August (dol)drum. But the past ten days have been full of all sorts of fun stuff. Pals visiting from out of town! Seeing live music! Fun gigs! Karaoke!
My capacity to make it through the week relatively awake and alert despite several latte-ish nights was drastically aided by a slight miscommunication. On Tuesday night, Maris and I (and a clown car’s worth of friends) went to see Pup and Jeff Rosenstock play a show at Warsaw, which long time readers will recognize as the best music venue in New York City because they have good sight lines and sell pierogi from a window next to the merch table. Maris snuck out a few minutes early because she had an early morning appointment to rest up for. However, when she got home, she realized she hadn’t brought keys with her. So I rushed home to her (okay, I had one more drink and said goodnight to our friends while she waited at a bar near our apartment, but she said I could do that!) and we went to bed at the respectable hour of midnight. The next morning I texted our friend Mattie to apologize for running off into the night, and they said they didn’t get home until three a.m. I think had it not been for the key situation, I too would have been in it to win it (punk show going up…on a Tuesday) and torpedoed my consciousness for days to come. I am NOT being passive aggressive here. I am knowing my limits (after the fact, as long as they are imposed upon me by an external source)!!!
Also, on Friday night, Maris and I watched the movie Trap, the newest M. Night Shyamalan film, and we had a very good time. It is, in its conceit, one of the least believable cinematic works I’ve ever seen, but it compensates by being fun as hell. I think there are probably ways that this movie can be exciting and delightful because it doesn’t make any sense, but it maintains a style and tone throughout that splashes around in the pool of unreality. It’s not a “so bad it’s good” movie, but it’s a movie where the bad and the good exist hand in hand. It kind of operates on the latter day Fast and also Furious logic of: “What’s the next awesome thing that could happen?” It’s not even really gory or especially violent. It’s tense and kind of silly. I recommend it despite (because of?) its numerous obvious flaws.
THIS WEEK I’ll be on the Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me standup tour with Alonzo Bodden, Dulcé Sloan, and Negin Farsad! We’re going to be in Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, Tampa, and Atlanta in that order between Thursday and Sunday! Grab your tickets if you’re nearby!!! I’d love to see you there!
Joyelle and I couldn’t stop talking about Nate’s piercing eye contact!
In loosely related news, I’m on the most recent episode of Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me, which we recorded live in Minneapolis. The guest was interior design mogul Nate Berkus, who was outrageously charming and funny. I was on with Joyelle Nicole Johnson (a crusher!) and Bobcat Goldthwait, who is so funny and so full of wild stories. He had just driven cross-country with his wife and their pet ducks, and at the beginning of the show he shared his connection to the Twin Cities, which is that he was once brought to hang out with Prince as a gift to Prince, who was a fan of his standup. That’s a tough story to top in that venue unless you are literally Maya Moore and have led the Minnesota Lynx to a WNBA championship.
Then, completing my speed run of the biased left-wing media (what I call it any time I do any media appearance), I made my return to Ayman on MSNBC to talk election stuff. I wore a button-down shirt and tie, because I feel like if I am going to be the stupidest person in the room, I might as well look like I belong at least. (This is a close cousin to my principle of dressing up when hungover to fool people.) Ayman himself is always extremely indulgent of me goofing around on his otherwise informative show, and I’m very grateful!
My episode of The Spiel(a Steven Spielberg podcast) where we talk about the movie Men in Black is out now! I realized after it went live that it was my last out-loud conversation with the late, great Scott Wampler. It knocked me a little off-kilter to consider that, not because it’s a frivolous conversation, but because I know that we won’t get to have more frivolous conversations like it in the future. I hope you enjoy me, Scott, and the excellent Eric Vespe talking about a fun movie!
Plus I wrote about a little splurge for the Marketplace newsletter thanks to my friend Alice Wilder.
And I attempted vulnerability in my return to my friend Mike’s podcast Detoxicity!
Oh, and I’m in a new music video!!! (More on that below!) And I will be in Boston on 9/13 as a guest on the This Day in Esoteric Political History podcast live show!
Thanks for letting me ramble! Now…it’s pep time!
PEP TALK FOR MERCURY
If it isn’t the son of a gun who made me drop my coffee and twist my ankle stepping off the curb and catch pneumonia. (Image from Wikipedia)
Of all the planets, Mercury, you’re the only one I see routinely being blamed for people’s problems on Earth. Even Earth, where people are stressed out or unlucky or unhappy doesn’t take the same amount of heat (figurative heat, because obviously you are literally hotter on account of of your proximity to the sun).
Obviously, I am referring to the astrological phenomenon of Mercury Retrograde, which I have heard about for years but didn’t actually look up until just this instant. If you are also recently curious but averse to link-clicking—and goodness knows I often resist being shuttled off to a second digital location—it’s when Mercury passes Earth in its orbit and appears to be going backwards, which astrologically messes up all sorts of stuff (travel and communication especially, which are like…two of the biggies).
I am not here to speak ill of astrology. I don’t understand how it works, but that’s also true of string theory and air fryers. What I am here to do is say that Mercury cannot be the ONLY planet that’s fucking up people’s shit. How come we never hear about what happens when Jupiter is Ascending anymore??? Even though it turned Channing Tatum into a dog person that one time!!! (My understanding of the movie Jupiter Ascending comes almost entirely from my friend Mara describing the plot to me.) You’re telling me Venus is never Regurgitating or some shit? We’re talking about planets getting backed up…what about Uranus? *polishes the two Peabody Awards on top of the dresser in our guest bedroom slash office*
Not everything bad can be Mercury’s fault! It’s just a teensy little guy, planetarily! Even when it’s moonwalking (planetwalking?) across the sky flipping us humans the double birds, we can’t pin ALL of our woes on it. Maybe it’s unrelated bad luck. If you feel sick after eating shrimp it’s not always the shrimp’s fault. Maybe it’s YOU. Maybe you’ve made an enemy? Maybe you screwed up and simply forgot to book your flight to Des Moines? Maybe space didn’t cause your problems with the more nearby sky at all? Ever think of that? Before you go besmirching Mercury’s good name?
Mercury, I don’t know how much bullshit you’re responsible for. Maybe a lot. Possibly none at all. As someone who is neither especially religious nor especially spiritual, I’ll offer the compromise position: Roughly the same amount as God. But you deserve better than to serve as the scapegoat for all of our problems for weeks at a time.
Pluto’s getting off awfully easy here if you ask me. I know it’s not a planet, but it’s still out there making trouble.
PEP TALK FOR TWO READERS
I’m doing two reader pep talks in one, shampoo/conditioner style, because the requests were similar. SO SUE ME WHY DON’T YA??!?!
I would love a pep talk!! I’m leaving my job in September with severance and instead of looking for a new corporate gig right away I’m gonna try my hand at selling my art. Shit is scary!! And fun! - Out Of Office
I’m a lawyer (not well established or anything!! Just been working for about a year) and the hours and pressure are killing me and I’m gonna quit my job soon anyway to pursue a master’s degree, but it’s all just getting super stressful. A little reassurance would be amazing bc I don’t exactly have the most supportive family haha. - (Bob Loblaw’s) Law Blah
Forgive me, but I’m going to address you like one person because you’re in more or less the same position pep-talk wise. Yeah, going to grad school is different than becoming an independent artist, but for the purposes of our conversation…is it? You’re making a financially dubious decision in hopes that it pays off enough to be worth the psychological/spiritual/satisfactional(?) improvements.
This is a thrilling and good gamble if you can afford it! Most gambling is only good if you win, which is rare, so it’s usually bad. I mean, like, gamble on sports or dice or horses (who are kind of doing sports but don’t realize it so it’s maybe worse and I don’t count it) if you want! But the more you like it, the worse it probably is. Most stuff isn’t like that! You can like sleeping or reading or lifting weights a little more than average and be fine. Probably even some drugs are like that. But enjoying games of chance more than “somewhat” is probably a bad sign. (As always, almost nothing I say applies to the independently wealthy, who are free to do whatever and don’t need a lot of encouragement.)
The thing about betting on your own new career (again, as long as you are not putting yourself or more importantly other people around you under undue strain to do it) is that even if it doesn’t pan out, you win. That is not true of roulette where people rarely leave the table thinking: “Well, we played hard out there and we can be proud of that at least.” When you lose at roulette you think FUUUUUCK! In fact, again, the more you feel exhilarated by losing money at roulette, the more quickly you should call one of those 600 gambling addiction hotlines at the end of every podcast ad for FanDuel or SavingsDrain or whichever one is your app of choice. (I will delete this if DraftKings starts its own streaming service and hires me to write a sitcom for them. That’s a PROMISE.)
Taking some time to try and merge into a more fulfilling career lane will pay off even if you don’t accomplish all of your dreams. You’ll learn new skills and probably meet a bunch of interesting people. You’ll drive a stake through the heart of the “what if?” vampire that’s been lurking in the dark corners of your mind. The very worst thing that will happen is eventually you may end up falling back on your old career. So? In between you’ll have done a bunch of cool, stimulating thinking and creating and interacting that etched some new wrinkles into your brain. And yes maybe your friends will tease you if you go back to your old work life. Imagine how you’d treat your friend Stephanie if she told everyone to call her Lady Gaga but didn’t become LADY GAGA. “Should we pregame for the party at your palace, m’lady????” But that gentle roasting is a small price to pay for having grabbed the reins of your own career and guided it into uncharted territories…before eventually guiding it back because charts, it turns out, are important sometimes.
It’s your life, shouldn’t you be enjoying it and doing work that you care about, as much as is possible? You’re going to have to have a job of some kind for quite a while. Unless you strike it rich on classic gambling, in which case congratulations…this newsletter is no longer for you, as we established earlier.
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: Bad Moves - “Outta My Head”
The kind folks in the terrific band Bad Moves asked me to be in their new music video, pretending to be angry at them. It’s a VERY catchy song, and fun to sing along with especially if there are not sensitive ears around. I had such a good time getting fake-furious in the park with Kate Sweeney who directed my segment. It’s cool to be in this video with Margaret Cho and Chris Gethard even though we filmed in separate places on different days. :)
But also there’s lots of good new music that does NOT feature me in a video, which is hard to believe but true.
The new Illuminati Hotties record is very good, and this song scratches a Tegan and Sara itch that I hadn’t realized was there, right behind my knees!
I finally met Elise from Oceanator the other night at the Pup/Jeff show. Elise rules. Oceanator rules. This whole record is heavy and propulsive and thoughtful and great.
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’m back on the road this week! See you there?!?! (I promise I will have some new NYC shows on my calendar soon!)
As you may have noticed, I’m running a little behind on today’s newsletter because I had a very nice weekend away from my computer, and I spent this morning driving back to Brooklyn from the wilds of Long Island. Maris and I went to a lovely party out that way with lots of friends (and way more very nice strangers) and then stuck around to go to the beach and generally spend a night or two away from our very demanding dog. Bizzy the Pug was home with a generous and capable sitter to whom we owe our lives for stepping up last minute!
Everything about the trip was a blast, but I want to highlight two especially nice little moments…
For some reason, my phone’s GPS voice (which is probably the same as many of yours; I don’t have some kind of hip indie cell phone or navigation app) emphasizes the “TURN” in “U-TURN” (instead of the customary emphasis on the “U”), so when it says “Make a U-Turn!” it sounds like someone with an Italian accent saying “Make-a you turn!” So we had a lot of fun with that.
Just before we left the party on Saturday night, Maris and I got to catch up with our friend Alanna who lives very close to us, but for some reason we had an easier time meeting up with nearly 100 miles from home. Alanna is in the midst of an exciting career change, and she talked about it with so much enthusiasm that our conversation stuck in my brain and crowded out a little of the crusty industry pessimism that had taken hold. It is good to remember that our professional futures are our own, and if we don’t like what’s going on, we can shake things up without anyone’s permission! (I’ve gotten to do SO many fun things this year, but I’ve also felt a little creeping pessimism about the state of tv and comedy that maybe I’ll write more about in the future.)
On Sunday night, or as you may call it “last night,” Maris and I sat on our hotel’s little patio and had a drink and enjoyed the mostly-deserted ambiance of a vacation destination after the bulk of visitors had scuttled back to their real lives. Then this morning we enjoyed a low-traffic drive back home, as two people who do not have rigidly structured professional obligations at this moment.
Oh and! Last Thursday I got to see my friend record his new standup special, which was really lovely. So many comedians came to see the show, which is the mark of a beloved member of the community imo, and Myq’s new show, which he co-wrote with his girlfriend Rini, is so warm and sweet and generous and funny and WILDLY intricate in its construction! I’m excited for people to see it when it’s available to be seen! After the show, a very nice newsletter-reader came up to me and my friend Gary and said some nice things, which I will NOT be passing along, but I wanted to say here that it was nice of her to do so!
I’ve got a bunch of standup in Florida and also Atlanta coming up in a couple of weeks on the Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me standup tour! And I’m also doing live radio tapings for Wait Wait THIS THURSDAY in Minneapolis (which might be sold out) and 9/26 in Kansas City, which probably isn’t yet!
I’ve got some fun New York shows percolating that I’ll hopefully be able to say more about next week as well! And I’m realllly psyched to be in Denver 9/19-9/21 for the High Plains Comedy Festival. Oh plus a few dates after Thanksgiving that I’m very excited for but can’t say much about yet where I’ll get to work with very cool people!!! How’s that for a teaser?
If you don’t know who Chappell Roan is, I imagine you don’t know any people under thirty, or lesbians, (or of course lesbians under thirty). Over the past year she has rapidly ascended to the stratosphere of a group I don’t know if I can pull off calling “the pop girlies,” thanks to opening spots on Olivia Rodrigo’s tour, festival bookings, and a very fun album! Taylor Swift is rumored to be on the verge of releasing a collection of audio recordings of times she’s called to order pizza in hopes of bumping …Midwest Princess down the Billboard charts. (Just kidding, Swifties! Taylor doesn’t do things like that, and by that I mean order her own pizza by phone!)
Recently, Ms. Roan (if you’re nasty? does that work?) posted two videos and some text calling out fans for invasive behavior like stalking her family and touching her in public. My friend Kelsey McKinney wrote very thoughtfully about this already!
I am just chiming in to say: Chappell Roan, you are right! Being famous seems bad, and thanks to modern technology, it’s become bad in new and annoying (or evolved and annoying) ways! This is different from being rich, which seems fun as hell and has mostly (as far as I can tell) remained pretty enjoyable continuously throughout history with brief downturns for scattered beheadings or attempts to become culturally beloved and, say, host Saturday Night Live or be the president. (But the second thing is more about fame being bad than about money being not fun to have.)
Granted, fame, at least in terms of lots of people being willing to pay money for your art, gives you the ability to make more art, often in the way you want to make it. But if you don’t need a following to make a lot of money, the dream would be to be wealthy for doing something so boring no one ever wants to talk publicly about it or you. I imagine whoever owns the underground parking structures in New York City rakes in so much cash they could topple the federal reserve on a whim. But I don’t know who those people are. Because they are smart. Or at least lucky enough to have inherited valuable real estate beneath the earth’s surface, and savvy enough to not jeopardize that by letting us know who they are.
Being rich, while not a moral good, is more enjoyable than being broke. But being famous is not necessarily better than only being known by the people who you know back.
All that is to say, Chappell Roan, you make cool art. And people are willing to pay money to hear you perform it. But that doesn’t entitle them to grab you in public or go to your sister’s job and take pictures of her. Anyone who thinks it does has probably never stopped to consider that other people, even famous ones, are people. And they definitely have not had anyone grab them by surprise in an airport.
One spring while I was in high school, Sherman Hemsley and Pat Morita were starring in The Odd Couple at a small theater in my hometown. One of my teachers ran into one of the stars out and about in town and exclaimed: “George Jefferson!” Sherman Hemsley frowned and said: “Right now, I’m Sherman.”
It’s beautiful to connect with art. It’s nice to appreciate the people who make it. But outside of that context, it’s good to let them just be Sherman.
(Importantly, this pep talk is not my sneaky way to complain about being recognized in public, which happens on occasion, but almost never in the kind of scary and stressful way that Chappell Roan talks about. In part because I am, and this is true, not famous.)
PEP TALK FOR A READER
This request has been edited slightly for anonymity and to remove a nice compliment about me that I feel weird sharing as part of it!
My wife could use a pep talk as she heads back to school. This will be her 13th kindergarten class at an East African charter school in Minneapolis. She still loves teaching, and has become close with a lot of the families, but the administrative side of the position has become cumbersome and induces anxiety.
Still can't believe my governor has been Wilson from Home Improvement this whole time.
- Class Ack!
I’m not sure how many readers know this about me, or how many will just say “That makes sense!” when I divulge this piece of information, but I used to teach Pre-K for several years. It was a great job, and I only quit because I moved from Boston to New York to try and do full-time comedy type things! (Spoiler alert: It worked!) I really really appreciate and admire people who are career teachers. It’s such an important thing to do, which I mean in the least self-serving way possible given the previous few sentences, especially given how poorly we fund schools and how many absolute clowns are constantly trying to stop teachers from telling children anything about how the world actually is, and forcing them to pretend it’s the same world their parents pretended to live in 50-100 years ago.
I don’t know how helpful this pep talk will be, because it sounds like the non-classroom side of your wife’s job is a real hike up a muddy mountain, but her work is super, super important. And the fact that she likes half(ish) of the job is a true opportunity to exercise glass-being-roughly-fifty-percent-full optimism. Her job allows her (sometimes) to make meaningful connections and improve people’s lives. Some people never get that! They spend their entire professional existence denying people healthcare or telling kids where not to skateboard.
When I was teaching, our program was year-round, so the fall didn’t QUITE feel like a new beginning, and I did have a little bit of “here we go again” malaise every year, the same as when I was a student. But that feeling always dissipated once I met the new class of kids and got into a groove. Or as much of a groove as you can get into when the kids are still young enough that someone might still poop in the middle of the floor from time to time. There’s a good chance that at least SOME of the administrative stress will burn off when it’s just WORK and isn’t DREAD.
It is a shame that good teachers often get assigned more out-of-classroom work because they’re good with kids. It’s very much like the old Mitch Hedberg joke about “you’re a great cook…but can you farm?” And I don’t want to discount the fact that maybe a change of scenery would be helpful, but it’s not my job to suggest that kind of thing, and you didn’t ask for it! So, just know that I know that other jobs may exist. Cool?
Hopefully your wife’s school year will be more in balance than her work life has felt lately. But MORE than that, I hope that she’s able to cordon off the annoying parts of her work the way you set up a paper towel barrier on the table when there’s a spilled pitcher of juice. Even if the figurative glass is only 40% full (possibly because of some kind of metaphorical spill), that’s better than an Arnold Palmer of lemonade and rat poison, you know? Like, the good parts are good, and maybe she can skate by without the bad parts infecting them with their badness. What you’re she’s is good and important, except the parts that are annoying and important. And she deserves to feel good about it!
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: Stevie Wonder - “Superstition”
A classic, obviously, but last weekend this came on at a party and my friend declared it her favorite song ever, and I thought why not show respect to an all-time groove in this week’s newsletter? So here it is!
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’ve got a bunch of NYC dates coming up, and then a few back on the road! See you there?!?!
So nice to see you here! I had a reasonably productive week, which made me feel satisfied and at ease for reasons I don’t love about myself, but what are you gonna do, you know?
I’m in “Sunrise, Sunset” mode with standup, meaning I'm almost done with an edit of my upcoming special (more news on that hopefully soon, but I’m really psyched about how it’s shaping up!!!) and I’ve been writing some new jokes that have started to click recently. That, to me, is the most fun part of the whole enterprise. Figuring out how to take an idea and squish it into the shape of a joke is such a fun creative challenge that’s different every time. And, in standup, a joke can take any form, which makes the whole project so open-ended and exhilarating (or if you catch me on a different week, lightly demoralizing).
I ended up doing a really fun mix of shows this week between a Saturday night spot at the Comedy Cellar, a set on my friends’ show A Place Upstate that they host in character as “The Cozy Brothers” and give advice about tick safety, and opening for my friend Natasha Vaynblat’s work in progress solo show “Childless Freak.” Oh! Right! I also read a great new short story that my friend Amy Silverberg published, and I took Maris to see (Bridget Everett’s Somebody Somewhere co-star) Jeff Hiller do a solo show at Joe’s Pub, and it was delightful. Speaking to the previously mentioned open-endedness of comedy, I go to see people work in so many different styles and perspectives, and it lit up my brain. (My friend Rose Kelso did an elaborate musical sketch that made me be like…I should try more new things!) Maybe I’ll have new and exciting ideas myself or maybe I’ll just enjoy the bright brain feeling and let that buoy the Regular Me Stuff that I’m doing. (With so many friends taking hour-long shows to the Fringe festival in Edinburgh this month, I did have an idea for something like that. Let’s see if I have the follow-through…or time…to do it!)
On Friday night I got to attend the album release party for my pals in the band Charly Bliss who put out their new record Forever on Friday day. They are such a great band and such sweet, generous people!!! I wrote the press bio for the record, and to get started I had an hour-long Zoom call with the group to talk about their process and what it meant to them to be recording and releasing a new album for the first time since before the pandemic. They talked so much about how special their relationships as bandmates are, and how free and thrilling this creative process was. They wrote the album across the world from each other (Eva, the lead singer, lives mostly in Australia now), and they really took their time to get the songs exactly how they want them. That’s a lesson I’m always trying to teach myself (not about songs, I don’t do those, but about other stuff). The album is full of perfect pop songs (I have described the sound of the record overall as Charly Rae Jepsen, if that means anything to you), and they’re going out on tour this September, so go see them if they’re in your area!!!
“I’ve never done that before and I don’t think I’ll ever do it again!” - Eva
On Sunday, Maris and I went to the Not Another Bomb rally at Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn, and it was heartening to see so many people come together to call for peace. Polling suggests that a Democratic candidate who supports an embargo on sending arms to Israel would do better in several swing states than one who doesn’t, so it’s both a moral and a political good! Just something to think about!
Also this week, I was on several more very fun podcasts!!
I’m on Lady Journey with Sarah Tollemache and Katie Hannigan just goofin’ around.
I return to The Gargle with Alice Fraser and Athena Kugblenu talking about non-election news.
I get into it on Aminatou Sow’s Pop Culture Debate Club, arguing with Maris whether audiobooks or hard copy books are better.
PEP TALK FOR TOMATOES
The devil’s cherries, as I call them.
Tomatoes, it’s your season. You’re ripe, and you’re in demand, like a bunch of little red Glen Powells. That means people are pulling you off of your vines, slicing you into thick, slimy slabs, and eating you on white bread with mayo. I mean, I’m not. I am a lifelong tomato hater. No offense, tomatoes. I love your work in salsa and ketchup and pizza sauce, but I’m just not a fan of your solo stuff. Too raw for me, I guess? Or maybe it’s the fact that at best you taste like someone made a hamburger patty out of a hundred slugs they just pulled out of the ocean. And at worst you taste like an apple that someone dunked in a bucket of poison.
Soon it will no longer be your best time of year. But get this: People will continue slicing you up and putting you on roast beef sandwiches and tuna sandwiches and turkey sandwiches and hamburgers and salads despite there being no good reason for it. Why are tomatoes so frequently mandatory? How are they not an opt-in ingredient more often? You should have to ask for them the way you ask for guacamole. And the server should warn you against your decision, not because tomatoes cost extra, just because they’re bad for so much of the year (including, in my opinion, even when they’re good).
Such is your (inexplicable) allure, tomatoes. People will consume you en masse year round, despite your being extra inedible for 3/4 of the year. That’s not bad.
Despite my constant protestations and complaints, you’re doing great. Congratulations, slug burgers.
I did just a little tweaking of this request for brevity!
Next year I will be marrying the love of my life (no pep-talk required there) but also moving from the US to his home in the UK. It’s all a bit overwhelming with trying to work out getting a visa and moving all my stuff overseas but also just the reality of living in a country where lots of things are just a little bit different. I need some encouragement that I can get all the logistics done and that it will be worth it. - Making A Brentrance
Congratulations on marrying the love of your life! In my experience, that’s the exact right person to marry! (I haven’t tried doing it another way, but I can’t imagine it coming out better.)
Moving is always such a hassle, even when you’re relocating to a place with largely similar customs, like going from Boston (American League Philadelphia) to Philadelphia (National League Boston). But moving across the sea? Oof. Not me. Not after what they did to my boy, The Titanic. Making that move to be with the love of your life, though? That sounds like quite an adventure…or as they spell it over there: adventoure.
You said you’re looking for encouragement about getting logistics done, which I can offer. Encouragement. I am not good at offering practical help with logistics. The last time I traveled out of town on my own, I waited until my opening act was onstage during our 10pm show to book myself a hotel that I checked into at 12am. I do a slightly better job planning ahead when Maris and I travel together, mostly because I do not want to come back from a trip with my wife as a newly single person.
That may seem beside the point, but it actually IS the point. These kinds of big picture plans can be challenging and expensive and frankly annoying to figure out. But figure it out you will. The love of your life will be across the Atlantic Ocean. And while you can no longer run through an airport to catch him before he leaves, you are going to also go to the airport and get on a plane and move into your new home in a new countryside (although I think over there they say cuntry and it’s not a big deal).
You can do it the easy way (working hard to get it done smoothly) or the hard way (taking it easy and doing a sloppy, stressful job). But either way you’re not not going to do it. You’ll make it to your new home whether your belongings arrive neatly packed in shipping containers, or crammed into a trash bag that you gate check at the airport while wearing nine sweaters in order to avoid paying an overweight bag fee.
I can’t say whether this will be “worth it,” but I can say that being with someone you love, even under strange new conditions (like living in a “flat”), is the kind of thing that can be worth it. I don’t really buy into the maxim of “relationships are hard,” but I do think that moving is hard and sometimes moving is relationships, you know? But if you’re talking about this relationship specifically, I can’t speak to it except for how excited you are (hooray!!) about the person if not the place (or the process of getting there).
I believe in your ability to make this as orderly and efficient a process as possible (even as I, myself, generally lack that skill). But the worst case scenario is that you do a terrible job of it, and what they don’t tell you about a terrible job is: It is still a job that you can do.
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: Charly Bliss - “Last First Kiss” (Hey that rhymes!)
“It hurts to try, but it kills to miss/I want you to be my last first kiss” what’s sweeter than that!!! (Also I love the Moonstruck-ass lyric “Let’s fight like Italians.”) This song should be on the radio 100 times an hour! My nice pals! Listen to this song and all of Forever, which isn’t that long, ironically.
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’ve got a bunch of NYC dates coming up, and then a few back on the road! See you there?!?!
Not to brag, but we are currently experiencing one of the 25 days a year when the weather in New York City is beautiful. One week ago it was so hot and humid outside that I rented a Zipcar for two hours just to drive to the beach in the air conditioning and turn around immediately, because that was the only way I could make leaving the house feel bearable. Sorry, the environment. At least it was a Prius.
As many of you know, my wife and I have an extremely cute and elderly pug named Bizzy who dictates our schedules with an iron paw. Last month Bizzy celebrated her 17th birthday, and this week she’s been showing some signs of her age. We think/hope her recent creakiness is just a UTI (yes we have reminded her that she should pee after sex, but no we have not filled her water bowl with cranberry juice), so she’s on some meds now, but she’s been a much pickier eater than usual.
No one is having a brattier brat summer than this brat (who I would die for).
Because she has a (cute but not especially functional) flat face, she sometimes mushes her food against the walls of her bowl by accident. So a couple of nights ago I scooped the (gross, tbh) wallpaper paste she’d made out of her prescription wet food (okay, diva) from around the dish and offered it to her. Big mistake on my behalf because now she basically expects me to sit beside her and spoon-feed her at mealtimes. Our dog has gotten so old she is becoming a human infant. Unclear how we’ll handle it when she regresses further towards needing to be breastfed. Formula I guess?
I also watched both the men’s and women’s Olympic basketball gold medal games (USA vs. France in both instances), and it was pretty extraordinary to see so many legendary talents team up for the sake of such thrilling and benign nationalism. I got to cheer for Steph Curry and A’ja Wilson in championship games when they weren’t tearing my teams’ (2022 Celtics and 2023 Liberty respectively) souls from their bodies.
Maris and I also watched the medal rounds of men’s break(dance)ing, which was a lot of fun, and we guessed the wrong winner basically in basically every match, even after watching their routines. Breakdancing announcers, step your game up and give us some more technical info! I don’t have that much to say about the Australian breaker/professor Raygun, except that for the past three days I’ve been trying to make a joke about how they should call her Ronald Raygun because of the way her breaks turned half of America against her. I wasn’t able to make it clear enough that it was a play on Ronald Reagan’s tax breaks for the wealthy, so I didn’t ever make the joke…until now. That’s right, newsletter readers: You get to read the nearly-formed joke that I never really figured out. You’re welcome!
Last night, Maris and I saw newsletter favorites and pals Rainbow Girls play at City Winery. Their folky Americana-y harmonies sound so good live (which I knew from working on last year’s JoCo Cruise with them, but it’s good to know it translates to the land as well). See them if they’re in your town!!!
Also…I’ve been surprisingly busy with writing and talking recently, and here are some places I’ve been doing that (I’m behind on sharing a couple of these because of general forgetfulness and the relentless pace of the news):
Last Friday, I went onAll Of It on WNYC to give pep talks to the guest host and also several listeners. It was fun and unexpectedly intimate! I got some new subscribers after that, so hello new subscribers! I hope you like me written down as much as out loud!
I returned to the incredibly fun Hello From the Magic Tavernpodcast where I play a socially maladaptive squirrel named Fluff.
I was on the Low Culture Boil podcast with my friends Rax and Amber talking about Ben Affleck. We recorded before his latest round of forlorn looking pictures were released. All I have to say about those is that it’s deeply troubling to me that he’s embraced California culture by wearing a Red Hot Chili Peppers t-shirt. What’s next? A Dodgers hat? JOINING SUBLIME?
I talked about my elderly pug Bizzy’s daily routines (hopefully) in a soothing way for Jon Moe’s Sleeping With Celebritiespodcast.
I did a brief interview about the idea of “attitude” for the newsletter !
COMPLIMENT HALL OF FAME PT. II
Almost exactly a year ago back in That's Marvelous #41, I created the Compliment Hall of Fame, a repository of the greatest compliments that readers had ever received. Last week, I received a couple of unexpected and fortifying compliments from friends, and it sparked the idea to add another wing to the CHoF, so I put out a call for compliments on social media, and now here we are. The hope is that some people will feel seen by these kind words, or add them to their own repertoire of things to appreciate in friends, family, colleagues, lovers, and maybe even rivals. If you have a favorite compliment you’ve received in the past that you’d like to add to the Hall of Fame but didn’t get a chance to, just leave it in the comments!
I’ve tried to leave the compliments formatted as close to the the way I received them as I could, but a few emojis got lost in the transfer from social media to newsletter. I included most but not all of the compliments that I received. It’s still so many, but there were so many good ones!
Okay, let’s do this!!!
COMPLIMENTS ABOUT CHARACTER
“you have a beautiful sense of justice”
In college, a friend of mine told one of our other friends (who was going through a difficult time) "Kelli is the best person to be around when you're feeling unstable" and it made me feel so valuable
A new friend years ago realized I was single at the time and blurted out, "That has to be a mistake! Somebody like you, alone??? Whatever's in charge of the universe forgot to wind someone up."
A sailor I was dating in Japan emailed my mom and told her I "walk into every room with maximum aplomb" we're still friends 20 years later.
Once I was eating lunch outside at a restaurant alone on the upper East side. An older woman walked by, stopped and said “I love a woman who can enjoy a meal by herself. It’s fabulous, good for you!” It made me feel like such a badass lol
Someone - who didn’t even really like me, lol - once said of me, “Miranda’s laughter ignites a room. She isn’t the flame. She is the start of the fire.” One of my favorite compliments I’ve gotten.
My therapist once told me I was a great conversationalist!
I once heard a friend in high school tell other friends about me: "it's a pleasure to talk to him - he knows a lot, is generous with his time and he listens." As I was deep in late-teenager depression at the time, I still carry it with me and try to be the same as then.
A very nice, wonderful woman I once worked with told me that I was a mensch. And then she was thoughtful enough, knowing that I'm not Jewish, to ask "You know what a 'mensch' is, right?" I said that I had a good idea of it and that she flattered me and she said "That's what a mensch would say."
After our TIFF Q&A for LIVING, Aimee Lou Wood -- who is basically human sunshine as well as a brilliant actor -- said I was the nicest person she met in all of Canada. I'll take that to my grave.
My 2nd grade teacher gave me a little award for “generosity of spirit” and I think about it often, I want to always be that way!
One thing that struck me about these recollections is how many of them came from so long ago. Our culture focuses a lot on how past trauma informs the way people think of themselves, but it’s cool to be reminded that the opposite thing can happen as well. You can hear something good about yourself or have a positive interaction that informs the way you think of yourself. It doesn’t fit the narrative structure quite if Don Draper grows up into a capable ad exec because he has parents who praise his persuasive writing and authoritative charisma from a young age, but that kind of thing is (I have to imagine) a lot of how people find out what they’re skilled at end enjoy doing. It’s also the basis of one of my favorite Instagram accounts.
I love seeing all the different things people can appreciate about one another and what sticks with different people. Maximum aplomb? That’s a lot of aplomb. (Technically, it’s the most aplomb possible.) My eyebrows shot up reading that because it’s not something I’ve ever thought to say about someone. Or maybe I’ve never met anyone with quite so much aplomb. But even so, someone reaching the penultimate heights of aplomb would certainly stick out, no? I should really be more vigilant about these things.
I fill in as an interim executive director at senior living communities around the country until a permanent one is hired. At my last place I sent an email out letting the residents know that an ED had been hired. One of the residents I’d formed a friendly relationship with emailed to say that he was sorry they’d be losing me and then told me how I’d helped the community. It meant a lot.
My last day at work a couple of jobs ago, one of my co-workers (nice, but I didn't know particularly well) looked and me and said they'd miss me, because I made every day feel like I was hosting a dinner party and made everyone feel like an honoured guest.
A previous job terminated people immediately if they put in their two weeks’ notice and said they were going to a competitor. When I did that, they had me work the full two weeks because “well, we trust *you*” I really could have used a two week break, even if it was unpaid! (Josh’s note: BOOOO this employer!)
I once told my boss I wasn't sure if I was ready for the promotion I was up for and they said "I mean, you're smart and a good writer, you'll be fine" and I think about that almost every day.
I was DJing at a music festival recently and an older woman came up to tell me “Thank you for giving me something I didn’t know I needed” and that felt awfully special
As a manager, my favorite compliment is closing shift coming in and being visibly disappointed that I’m not closing with them
I have been a teacher, mostly at the university level, for many years. A student in one of my classes wrote this (anonymously) in my teaching evaluation: “Dr. Kimmerer can explain anything about anything to anyone.” I have tried to live up to that.
Someone I admire took time to write me after I facilitated a two-day, 35 person meeting that I epitomized “servant leadership.” That went right on the resume!
Been a hairstylist for 17 years. A client I'd known since he was a child came out to me as trans when he was ~15. He trusted me with this information before many of his own family members, because he felt safe. I have never felt better about my career than at that moment.
It’s lovely how many of these work compliments aren’t just about technical skill and how many of them encompass essential human qualities like trustworthiness and warmth and generosity. Not that everyone has to be a life coach or a therapist or a party planner at every moment at work. Just that it’s nice to know that people are noticing your excellent qualities whenever they’re on display. But also: You are good at your job is good for supervisors to recognize. As long as they’re not leveraging that to make you pick up the slack for everyone else. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, BOSSES MENTIONED IN ONE OF THESE COMPLIMENTS!
I read a long time ago that the doctors who receive the most malpractice complaints aren’t the ones who mess up the most; they’re the ones with the worst bedside manner. That really stuck with me, the realization that if someone likes you enough they won’t even be that mad if you sew up their chest cavity with a latex glove still inside them. More people take this fact (or fake fact I’m misremembering) into account in their day to day lives. Just be cool and most of the time people will be cool with you. A similar professional principle I exploited when I was a preschool teacher many years ago is that on the days I was the most tired, I dressed the nicest, so people would notice my tie and not the equally dangly bags under my eyes.
COMPLIMENTS ABOUT KIDS
Years ago the lady at the ice cream shop told me my kids had very good manners and I've been feeding off that emotion ever since.
At the ER with my croupy kid and the nurses asked me if I was also a nurse (I am not)
“You guys are like a gentle parenting podcast,” from our nanny who used to do early intervention programs helping other families of autistic kids. I cried.
When my kid was 6, their first grade teacher took me aside and said, "your child is the one that makes sure to be friends with the kids that the other kids don't want to be friends with." Best compliment I've ever heard.
I was out walking w/a smart and accomplished neighbor, with our dogs and my kid in a stroller, and a super fit woman jogged by. I lamented that I couldn't ever be like that; she responded, simply, "you are a mother and an intellectual." And yeah, that has low-key sustained me ever since.
I don’t have any children, but I imagine if I did I would be extremely moved by anyone saying anything nice about them or my parenting. After all, parenting is a difficult skill and kids are like a sequel to your genes. So it’s like people saying: You’re so good at being you, I’m glad you made another you. I already take any compliment about how cute my dog is as absolute validation of something I did right, even though I’m not her biological father, and her appearance has nothing to do with my genetics.
COMPLIMENTS FROM KIDS
When I was a teacher, a little girl in another class came up to me and asked me if I was Ms. Frizzle. I was so flattered!
When I worked in daycare and helped a 4yo after he used the toilet, he told me I was really good at wiping butts.
Got fresh highlights and poofy hairstyle. Group of 4 teen boys. 1 said I looked “like a beautiful blonde Sonic the Hedgehog”
My 5 yr old nephew once told me “you’re not a real adult” and that’s the highest compliment I’ve ever received
I had a very stylish teen (who I didn't know) tell me once that my pants were "stunnnninnnnng" and whenever I need a pick-me-up I think of it
The best compliment I ever got was my middle school class getting on their feet and cheering when I came back after a sick day. You want ME, over a sub you can mess with all day?? Huge.
A compliment from a kid isn’t always as sophisticated as one from an adult, but usually comes right from the heart. Little kids are too young to understand the utility of flattery, and teenagers don’t care about adults’ opinions enough to lie.
COMEDIC COMPLIMENTS
a comedian told me I had a great joke and currently uses it in his set, which feels very similar to a lot of the responses here so far but the difference is that I’m not a comedian! so it was a big day for me
I took an improv class in college (I went to theater school). The teacher, Martin deMaat, who had helped start the Second City training center, told me I had a knack for making a dying scene funny again.
A comedy friend told me he did a bit of mine in a convenience store. One of the clerks was drinking a soda, and when she heard the joke, she did an actual spit take.
As a (let’s say) professionally funny person, I think it’s important to give credit to people who are getting laughs for the love of the game, and not to share later on Instagram or TikTok. Getting laughs at the store is also every dad’s aspiration so congratulations on becoming an Apex Dad whether or not you have children!
EXTREMELY SPECIFIC COMPLIMENTS
Was wearing a piece of jewelry (costume, my grandmother’s) and my friend admired it and I said “it’s costume!” and she looked into my soul and said, contemplatively, “fake stuff looks real on you.”
My high school guidance counselor told me I reminded him of Gracie Allen. I don’t know if it was supposed to be a compliment, but I took it as one, as she’s my comedic hero (along with Jack Benny - I’m an old soul).
About 25 yrs ago one of my best friends wrote in an email “you are always impressing me” and it absolutely made me feel like I could walk on water then and still does
"I bet when you were in school, recess was your least favorite class. Because you don't play, man."
A friend once told me I have "such a finely honed sense of the absurd" and I don't think anyone has ever described my brain better.
In line at the grocery store, the couple behind me complimented my shirt. I said "thanks my girlfriend made it", which was true. They said, "you seem like you’re smart enough to appreciate how lucky you are".
Someone just told me they think I swim beautifully.
“I really like learning things with you”
Excuse me, are you Brazilian?
hi josh, i spent a semester studying in puebla, mexico & had apparently picked up the local accent. one night i was talking w/ my host sister's boyfriend & he said (in spanish) "you sound like a poblana!" that was one of the best compliments i ever got
Today my friend told me i’m “really good at going to the zoo”
I had blood drawn recently, and when the phlebotomist started, she yelled “You’ve got those ideal veins!” Then as she was finishing the blood draw: “That’s some BEAUTIFUL blood, baby!”
Years ago good pal Jake Weisman told me I wore flowers in my hair really well and I think about it still!
Decades ago on LiveJournal, users could have multiple avatars (“icons”) and pick which to use for each post based on mood, topic, etc. Someone told me I had the funniest icon keywords they’d ever seen and I never forgot it. You don’t expect to be appreciated for the lil jokes in your icon keywords!
I was told I was the « cleanest person at burning man » (I didn’t want to be there but this kept me going)
I once got mentioned in the "I Spy" section of the local alt weekly (our town’s version of missed connections kind of thing) by a gal who noticed me at a show, and called me a "Furtive glance magnet" and I will ride high on that compliment to my grave.
We’ve got some great off-menu compliments going on here. It’s always, in my experience at least, a thrill to realize you’re great at something you hadn’t even intended to master, or something you’re proud of but you didn’t know that anyone else was tracking. Like, I know I’m pretty decent at the stuff I work hard at and talk about all the time (although I will still accept praise for that, OBVIOUSLY) but receiving credit for a less obvious skill or trait is like the onion ring in your french fries of the human experience. I guess finding an onion ring in your french fries is also a human experience, but it’s more human-on-carb rather than human-on-human.
I will never forget the time a drag queen told me, “You are so fucking pretty.”
I was at a happy hour for a young professional event (circa 2007) where Toms founder Blake Mycoskie was speaking. I happened to chat with him a bit and he told me I looked like Anne Hathaway and had similar mannerisms. My 26-year old self died a bit inside
I was the first female geek squad agent at the best buy I worked at and one of the customers told me I was too pretty to be a geek. Boy, was she wrong.
someone called me “pretty” this past week, and I realized that was the first time I’ve ever been called pretty. It meant the world to me.
'You look so beautiful' because I've only been told that once, 20 years ago & I still think about it from time to time
My friend in high school went to a wizard rock show and her mom said “your eye shadow is way too well blended for this crap”
this isn’t the best compliment but definitely one of the most unique: at a plastic surgeons office (i was getting botox) a woman asked me if my nose was “real” because it suited my face so well?? if anyone knew a good nose, it was someone who worked in a plastic surgeons office!
"If you liked guys, you'd be the perfect bear."
Was joking with a girl I'd just met about dating her brother and she said, with great sincerity, "You're so beautiful! I can't wait for you to date my brother!"
an old lady i was briefly caring for in a friend’s absence said, when i first opened the door, “i’m staring into the face of god” i identified as an atheist and she was in full dotage, but still!
Someone once told me I was the spitting image of a young James Spader while I was tending bar at a hotel
Someone pointed at a screen on which Aishwarya Rai was appearing in the 1990s bollywood film Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and said "oh, she looks like you". this was probably 13 years ago but you bet your ass I remember it
"Wow, you look like Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality!"
I have dark auburn hair and used to wear Betty page bangs and once some redneck in the city with his fam looked at me with disgust and said “hello ELVIRA” while steering his baby’s stroller away from me like I would infect it with glamour I was sooo honored. Like my hair isn’t black and I’m not goth but!! She’s a queen so I’ll take it!!
35 years ago, while I was wearing my Navy-issued winter dress coat over my dress uniform, someone told me I looked like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. Pretty much best compliment ever!
My ex is a Lord of the Rings fan and she said that my “elegant” features and pixie cut made me look like an “elf, but gay.” Queer Cate Blanchett! I treasure it!
There are so many ways to look good, and I think we hit many of the big ones: gay elf, drag queen-approved, big guy, congruous nose, brother-appropriate, celebrity lookalike, hot nerd. We’ve covered many, if not all, of the bases, some of which I didn’t realize were bases at all until this morning.
MORE SPECIFIC COMEDY COMPLIMENTS
Todd Barry told Greg Johnson I was funny while I was on stage at Rififi.
“You gotta see Anthony Atamanuik on Colbert; he talks about how he developed the impersonation of Trump, and it’s really good. It’s like a trailer from a master class on how to impersonate someone.” Catherine O’Hara said this in an interview and I love SCTV more than life itself. [Josh’s note: For context, this came from Anthony Atamanuik.]
One time at work Anthony Atamanuik casually mentioned my “elite Soviet face” then just moved on like it was a normal thing we all already had discussed
Some extremely inside baseball (or otherwise Atamanuik-intensive) comedy compliments here, so I thought they deserved their own little section. A Catherine O’Hara compliment is so legendary, as is a secondhand compliment from Todd Barry, a great comedian with high standards.
POTENTIALLY BACKHANDED COMPLIMENTS (I DUNNO, YOU DECIDE)
A guest at my wedding was impressed that the event was “financially responsible”
My dentist told me I was too young to be losing my molars.
The best compliment I’ve ever received was in high school where someone said “you’re too damn nice to hate and I hate you for it”…. However, I’ve also been told “Brendan, I don’t think you’ll ever be a good person”, so I’ve got my bases covered
“When it comes to movies and books, I never know what you’re going to like.”
Once had a coworker tell me I dressed “like a celebrity who’s trying to dress like a normal person” and I definitely took that as a compliment
A posh, elderly lady told me, "You have the posture of someone much better dressed."
In college a Lithuanian dude at a party told me I looked like "long-haired bad guy from American high school movie"
was told I was "like the male ms.frizzle" and i think it was meant disparagingly ab my appearance, but the group i was with all started agreeing & adding bits of context on my love of learning & cosmic garb & supportive nature & i felt so celebrated & uplifted, totally backfired
I was once told I was “annoyingly likable” by a friend, which I took as a compliment at the time. Honestly, it’s pretty on the nose.
“You are Valium in human form”
"You're stronger than you look."
My wife once told me that I'd ruined her for all normal human men.
my best friend once told me "for someone as smart as you are, you have the worst sense of direction of anyone i've ever met" and I just thought it was nice to have my intellect recognized while also being number one at something
Wow these really ride the line between beautiful and brutal. It’s a truly incredible feat of optimism by this newsletter’s readers to interpret some of these statements as compliments at all. “You have the posture of someone much better dressed,” in particular would make me throw out my entire wardrobe while still standing up a little bit straighter (if that’s even possible given my already impeccable posture in this scenario). I have nothing but respect for the level of self-esteem that makes a generous takeaway from that utterance possible.
A COMPLIMENT I’M NOT POSITIVE IS REAL, BUT SURE WHY NOT?
I work in a medical examiner’s office. a mother showed up looking for her deceased son’s cock ring (we didn’t have it). she told me her son would’ve loved my hair color and my kindness towards her. she called later to say she found his ring in a drawer
I have no idea if this is a real story or a prank or the plot of a Six Feet Under episode, but I am absolutely not going to google “dead guy cock ring mother” to find out. I love that in this story the grieving mother had the presence of mind to be kind to the people in the medical examiner’s office and to follow up so they wouldn’t waste time looking for an already-recovered piece of intimate jewelry.
Two Tree Hill is a super funny musical comedy group. I recently got to perform at their show Don’t Stop I’m About To Jazz (co-hosted by hilarious pal Rose Kelso) where comedians perform over a jazz accompaniment, and I had a GREAT time and couldn’t recommend seeing it more. “Awesome School” is a very catchy and funny comedy-ska song that will get stuck in your head and destroy your brain from the inside, but in a good way. I can’t recall hearing too many comedy songs that are ska, which I think is a mistake because the trombone is one of the funniest musical instruments on its own.
Oh one more little recommendation: My friend Adam Pally has a new tv show on Peacock that co-stars the aforementioned Steph Curry (who very graciously raised awareness of the show by playing out of his mind in the Olympic medal round) as well as Ego Nwodim and Ayden Mayeri! It’s called Mr. Throwback and I’m enjoying it a lot!
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’ve got a bunch of NYC dates coming up, and then a few back on the road! See you there?!?!
Login
