John Hodgman is author of The Areas of My Expertise, as well as curator and host of the "The Little Gray Book Lectures" and a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine and public radio's This American Life. He also has published articles in The Paris Review, McSweeney's, One Story and The Believer. John read from The Areas of My Expertise at the University of Baltimore last semester. Here, he speaks with Both & Neither about the writing life.
Q: At what point did you realize you were funny?
A: I try to think back to early funny experiences, and all I remember are some very embarrassing elementary school and high school play experiences that mainly involved me trying to be funny, desperately, horribly, failingly. I suppose I was attempting what most “funny” people were up to in school: trying to get some form of acceptance, trying to make up for being unable to play sports. But I was a terrible ham during these school plays, and one of them was “Pirates of Penzance,” so you can imagine the various levels of un-funny at work there. Sometime after that I learned restraint and deadpan, but where and how? It’s hard to say.
Q: What's it like writing literary humor? Do youfind it difficult to be taken seriously? Or, do you even care?
A: Writing literary humor, like all writing for me, is like being overtaken by a trance. Telling a joke seems impossible before it happens, and afterward, I don’t know how I did it or will ever do it again. Same goes for non-jokes. Same goes for even incomplete sentences.
And, as you note, I do write both jokes and non-jokes. I am a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and a sometimes contributor to “This American Life.” But I’m lucky in that I haven’t had a problem being taken seriously in both fields. In fact, it seems that people take the humor more seriously because I write the regular journalism; and people find the regular journalism more palatable because I also tell jokes. Each seems to enhance the other, and while I try not to pay too much attention to that, I know personally I’ve benefited from doing both.
Q: What intrigued you most about the almanac as a form?
A: I’ve always really loved ephemeral literature: almanacs, crackpot reference books, instruction manuals, obscure journals that last only a couple of issues, elementary school newsletters (and for that matter, humor books) – all the sort of marginal quasi-literary forms that no on bothered to take seriously, never had pretensions to “the ages,” and in fact may have been designed to be forgotten, whether in a year or a day.
I host a literary reading and performance series called the Little Gray Book Lectures that are inspired by a series of instructional pamphlets from the 20s and 30s called “The Little Blue Books.” They had names like “How to Tie All Kinds of Knots” and “How to Make All Kinds of Candy” and “The Best Hobo Jokes.” The influence should be obvious.
These kinds of works were always so unguarded, unpretentious, and unself-conscious. They always attempted to tell one story, but ended up revealing as much about the author’s time, place in the world, and bizarre psychology as anything else. This kind of saying two things at once is the heart of all good fiction (at least that which interests me), including that most compact of short stories, the joke.
Q: What authors do you admire and why?
A: To say that my work is influenced by Borges only makes it look worse than it already does. But apart from his plain genius, I also admire his comfort living between genres, his utter lack of literary snobbishness, and obviously his encyclopediaphilia.
Q: When you’re feeling uninspired, what do you do to get yourself writing again?
A: The tonic for the past 2 years has been the song “Drop of Holy Water” by Cynthia Hopkins. I hope I never develop a tolerance for that particular drug.
Q: What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
A: Persistence always trumps talent. It’s good to develop both.
• Read more about The Areas of My Expertise at www.areasofmyexpertise.com.
- Posted February 2006