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Culture Stage

John Hodgman, professional fraud

JOHN HODGMAN Monday (September 28), 7 pm, the Royal (608 College), and Tuesday (September 29), 7 pm, Queen Elizabeth Theatre (190 Princes’). $30 or JFL42 pass. jfl42.com


John Hodgman has written three books of fake trivia, served as the Resident Expert on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and is currently an internet authority on the weekly Judge John Hodgman podcast. He is also an actor, turning up in everything from Battlestar Galactica and Bored To Death to Pitch Perfect 2 and the FX series Married. He comes to JFL 42 with a new one-man show, Vacationland.

In your public persona, you’re required to wield absolute authority on a lot of very strange things. How did you land on this persona?

I’ve always been someone who became preoccupied with a lot of different subjects, whether that was personally or professionally. When I was writing my books of fake trivia, I was fascinated with the secret history of the hoboes of the Great Depression, and how Big Rock Candy Mountain, that famous hobo song that became a children’s song, was actually devised to lure children to go with hoboes on the hobo road so they could be their special friends. The whole conceit that there were presidents who secretly had hooks for hands was all a part of my fascination with the secret history of power – the thing of FDR having polio, and no one [in the press] ever mentioning it or photographing him in his wheelchair. So that’s why I’d make the joke that no one knew FDR had a hook for a hand because they’d only photograph him from the wrist up – and that his hook was in the shape of a wheelchair.

And the book got you onto The Daily Show, where you became the Resident Expert. 

Oh yeah, it rapidly increased my potential for fraudulency. People felt that I was qualified to comment on anything and everything under the sun, when the truth was that those fake facts sort of proceeded from haphazard research that I had already done over a million readings of different trivia books, and later Wikipedia. But I could draw on my legit authority on cheese, from my year being a cheesemonger in London. You know, a little monging goes a long way. I could tell you about New England because I’m from here, and I’m a little upset with it. And now that I am a 44-year-old grown man with a weird-dad moustache and some experience in husbanding and parenting and comedianing and being on movie sets and seeing all kinds of different parts of the world due to my interests in touring and travel, I can bring a little bit more legit information and authority to bear when I’m talking to people on Judge John Hodgman and solving their problems and telling them who’s right and who’s wrong. Because I’ve been there.

You started as a literary agent, right?

It was my first job out of college, yeah. My first full-time job.

I love the fact that one of your clients was Bruce Campbell, the beloved cult star of the Evil Dead movies.

I represented his first book, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions Of A B-Movie Actor. And then I left the business and abandoned him to the cruel fate of making millions of dollars on Burn Notice and then re-launching his iconic role of Ash in The Evil Dead.

Now that you’ve changed careers, would you consider an appearance on the revived Evil Dead series?

Well, maybe you could call Bruce and ask him that. It hasn’t come up yet. I had an opportunity to act opposite him in Burn Notice – I couldn’t do it due to another commitment. It’s really one of my great painful regrets that I couldn’t be Bruce’s nebbishy accountant on Burn Notice. And I think the truth is that there are just fewer roles for nebbishy accountant types in the Evil Dead universe than there were in Burn Notice.

Don’t underestimate the nebbishy accountant types. I’d love to see you play the lead in a Purge movie, taking advantage of the chaos to rob a bank, only to see everything go to hell….

I’ll tell you about my experience with the Purge movies. One night, late at night, when I decided to be neglectful of my wife and children and stay up all night watching terrible movies, I watched the first half of Atlas Shrugged – while drunk – and then couldn’t handle it any more and switched over to the second half of The Purge. And somehow those two, mashed up together, were one crazy great movie.

I could see that working, especially if you’re not entirely sober.

Oh yeah, it made a lot of sense that night. It’s a good mashup, if anyone wants to check it out.

You’re coming to Toronto with a new show called Vacationland. What can you tell me about it?

Well, the thing is, in my Netflix special [Ragnarok], I predicted the world was going to end. You may have noticed that it didn’t end, and this was very embarrassing to me, especially since I really needed the world to end since I was out of material. I had written a thousand pages of fake facts, and had really come to the end of my desire to write invented truths. I could still do it, but I knew that my heart was going someplace else. And that someplace else was telling the truth, just being straightforward about my life as a no-longer-young person with a weird-dad moustache who has an extremely implausible career that puts me in contact with a lot of strange occurrences. And to some degree, that was what I was talking about in [my previous one-man show] I Stole Your Dad. 

The other part of my life that is equally true is that because neither I nor my family – especially my children – are properly employed, we have always been able to exile ourselves to New England for a good part of the summer,  leave the city and challenge ourselves to the invasion of nature that is rural life. First in western Massachusetts, which is my home commonwealth and a place very dear to me, and more recently in Maine, which is really a place that is much more meaningful to my wife, historically, than to me. And the rural challenges have grown even more prickly and painful, both existentially and physically, as every bit of flora and fauna here wants to hurt you. Whether it’s the waters, which are cold, or the beaches, which are made of knives, or the animals, which eat you, or the year-round humans who are very ambivalent about whether they want you anywhere near them. 

They see you as the summer people.

As I say, it’s a little embarrassing to talk about this stuff, because I’m in a world where people don’t get to take weeks off and go to a completely different life all the time. You know, Maine is called Vacationland almost hysterically, because you look at this place and you’re like, “You know that they’ve figured out that there are other beaches in the world, which are actually nice to be on.” There are places you can go for a real vacation that are not as physically and existentially challenging as the Maine woods are. And you have to remember that when Maine was invented in 1820, a vacation was something that very few people got to enjoy – just wealthy Bostonians, basically, who would go up north to drink and not talk to anyone and look at water that you would never, ever swim in.

Did they simply colonize the wrong place? Cape Cod is another Boston escape, and it’s really nice….

Well, Cape Cod is a pleasurable place to be. Maine is beautiful, but ruggedly so – it’s a pleasurable but challenging place to be. That’s why people get so obsessed with it. The thing that I would always note as we drove up to visit my wife’s family up here was, we would stop off at every roadside stand and there would be CDs and books of Maine humour. And I would say, “No matter what else happens in my life, I will never be a regional Maine comedian.” And here I am that is exactly what I’ve become. 

How do you feel about that?

My good friend, the musician John Roderick, after hearing some of these stories, he’d go, “Ladies and gentlemen, the white-privilege mortality comedy of John Hodgman!” And it’s true. It’s a sting to appreciate that, but if you’re gonna tell the truth about your life, you might as well tell the truth about your life – and acknowledge when you reach a point in your life where you’re no longer becoming something or someone, and instead are ending up as something or someone…. It’s not this specific place that the show is about so much as a specific time in your life when you realize you’re not the person who you were. You know, I thought I was in my 20s well into my late 30s, I had to realize… yeah, yeah. And there are those moments in your life where it’s like, yeah, I listened to some really good rap music in the early 90s, but that doesn’t make me any less Caucasian. Or it doesn’t make me any less of a dude who’s going to vacation in Maine at the same time that Michael Brown has been murdered and the protests are happening in Ferguson, Missouri. So it’s about realizing who and where you are in your life with clear eyes. The end.

So there’s morality as well as mortality. Is middle age weighing on you?

I mean, I’ve had a moustache now for a couple of years, and only recently have I begun to appreciate why all of us weird dads, at a certain age, have a moustache. It is an evolutionary visual marker that you are complicit in, that you put upon your face to reveal to the world: I have procreated, and I have fulfilled my physical purpose. This moustache means I no longer deserve physical affection.

But a moustache is still a choice, isn’t it? Or do you feel it was inevitable?

Something in my genetic code triggered the necessity of a moustache in my life. 

When I saw you perform I Stole Your Dad in New York City, I mentioned during the Q&A that the structure and the humanity of the piece reminded me very much of what Spalding Gray did with his monologues. You seemed uncomfortable with the comparison.

No, no – I mean, Spalding Gray was a huge influence upon me, and I love his work. It was very flattering for me to hear. I think part of what I may have reacted to was me saying, “Yeah, but it’s supposed to be comedy.” There’s a mode, unfortunately, of comedians defining what comedy is and what comedy isn’t, and as someone who came into comedy through an unusual career path – you know, not many comedians start out as literary agents – I was sensitive to the fact that I’m doing the best stand-up comedy I’ve ever done in my life. I’m better at it than I’ve ever been. So I don’t want to give anybody any ammunition to say, “Oh, that’s storytelling,” which is how comedians put down people who aren’t telling yuk-yuk jokes at a certain pace all the time. And now it’s [about] appreciating who you really are and owning it, and not being embarrassed that your comedy really is white-privilege mortality comedy. 

Which brings us back to Spalding Gray, I guess.

It’s a little bit of a wince, but I acknowledge who I am in life, and I think all comedians and storytellers who connect with audiences are doing so because they’re being honest. They’re just doing what they see and what they observe and what they feel, as honestly as possible. So I’m less concerned with that now, because now I realize that “this is comedy and this isn’t comedy” are usually lines drawn by comics who are anxious because someone’s doing something they don’t understand. That sounds very snobby, but I say that with respect and humility. I also don’t mind because I know what I’m doing is really funny. I think we’re all going to have a really good time together contemplating my death at the hands of the people here who I believe may end up stoning me at the end of the summer. I’m not sure. They may stone me or burn me to death to favour their pagan god. To me, that’s what a visit to the country always ends with. 

You don’t mean Canada, do you? We’d never stone anyone to death.

No, no, no, no. The Canadians would never stone me to death. They would yes me to death. [laughter]

I’m sure you’ll be fine. 

You know, it’s the first time I’ve really done a real performance. I did an In Conversation thing in Winnipeg, which was a delight, but this is really the first time I’ve performed comedy – if that’s what you want to call it – in Canada, and it means a lot to me because we have a lot of podcast listeners there. I like Canada. It’s my second favourite North American country.

I’m surprised it took you this long.

I always knew I’d get around to it eventually.

Well, I look forward to seeing you at the Queen Elizabeth.

It’s a big goddamn hall, so please spread the word.

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