John Hodgman: The Daily Show, Aliens and Raccoon Poop
By Ben Youngerman, ArtsQuest Marketing Manager
Comedian John Hodgman thinks he’s living in a virtual reality machine wandering the cosmos. Since joining The Daily Show as a contributor in 2006, Hodgman feels like such an unlikely person so receive the type of work he has mastered over the years. Currently, he’s the host of the Judge John Hodgman podcast, writes a weekly column for New York Times Magazine as Judge John Hodgman, appears in the show Red Oaks on Amazon, and voices John Glaser’s personal assistant Geary on TruTV’s John Glaser Loves Gear (“It’s wonderful to be able to perform in the nude, which has always been my dream.”)
But when he performs his one-man show “Vacationland” at the Musikfest Cafe presented by Yuengling on November 17, you’ll finally get to see and hear the real, but still hilarious, side of John Hodgman.
We’re very excited to have you here on November 17 for your show…
Hang on, let me check my calendar. Let me check my calendar. Pause. Yup, that’s what I got!
Phew. We’re glad you’re still free. What can fans expect from your “Vacationland” show?
“Vacationland” is a series of personal and true stories about me, an asthmatic child of the city, spending time awkwardly in two distinct wildernesses: the woods of western Massachusetts and the painful, painful beaches of coastal Maine. And along the way I encounter various terrifying events such as taking my garbage to the dump to throw it in a hole and confronting the men who work there, and mysterious river witches of the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts and the angry craftspeople who turn wood into boats in Maine.
It’s a story about growing up because when you live in New York City, as I do, you can delude yourself into thinking you are still a young person. Because the city is designed to keep you in a state of perpetual adolescence. You never have to drive, you never have to learn to drive, you can stay up all night in bars with your friends, convince yourself that you’re still in your 20’s. Even if you have your own home, it’s still an apartment which is basically a glorified dorm room. You never have to learn any adult skills or learn how to fix anything in your house because if anything breaks you don’t fix it you call a landlord or super or some other surrogate dad to fix it for you. You don’t need to know what a septic system is. I don’t know what a septic system is and I think I own two of them now. I don’t know what they are.
As someone who just turned 30, all of those are hurtful truths…
We don’t know how to do things the way grown ups of a generation or two ago did. Too many services are foisted upon us until you are alone in the woods with a raccoon latreen on your porch. That’s when you have to learn. Let me give you a hint: if a raccoon poops all over your porch, do not just go out there and clean it up. For 90% of all raccoons and 100% of all of those raccoons’ poops, there is a parasitic roundworm that if it gets into your brain, it will cause you to go into a coma and possibly die. So put on a mask, buy a jump suit and get as far away as possible and call someone to do it for you. Or if you have to do it for yourself take real care. Honestly, I learned this the hard way, the CDC recommends removing raccoon poop by burning it with fire. So that’s why I had to get a flamethrower.
It’s like the old poop in a brown paper bag on a doorstep trick, but to the next level.
Yeah, I mean, if you teamed up with a raccoon and got it to poop into a paper bag and put it on your enemy’s porch and lit it on fire, you would be a murderer. It would not just be a funny trick to watch to that person stamp out that poop, you’d be putting raccoon coma poop on that guy’s foot and maybe even in his body. You would not be able to live with yourself, so don’t do it.
Don’t murder anyone with raccoon poop is a good advice for everyone.
Yes, nature is cruel. It has seeded the woods with wasps and mice and snakes and things that don’t want you there including raccoons that poop poison! It is hard to keep track of which animals in life to love and care for and which to murder with traps and poison.
Most folks know you from The Daily Show; what is your “Deranged Millionaire” persona up to these days?
Oh, I took off my Deranged Millionaire skin and put it in a closet the minute Donald Trump declared his candidacy for President last June. I realized that whole bit was inspired in need by Donald Trump going on all the news channels and claiming Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, and all of a sudden he was constantly being sought out as a commentator on the news simply for being a cartoon caricature of a rich person. At the time, we were also going through the aftermath of Occupy Wall Street and a lot of national discussion about wealth inequality and the concentration of power among the 1%. So I said to The Daily Show, we need to have a Trumpian figure on the show because everyone needs to know what the rich people are thinking, and certainly all the rich people think that everybody needs to know what they’re thinking.
So that was the genesis of my character, but once Trump decided to run for President, while you think that character would become more necessary than ever, in fact, he became absolutely obsolete immediately. I think we’ve seen this over the past 18 months, there is no comedy that I felt that I could do as my character that could rival the long-form improv comedy that Donald Trump has been doing himself. There is no exaggeration of him that would ridicule or rival the increasing exaggeration of himself that he is doing all the time.
He’s basically the third-beat of an improv show, he’s the most heightened version is what you’re saying?
Yeah, yeah. There’s no way to go beyond him and there’s no point. I also did not particularly care to suggest that anything about what he was doing was funny or hilarious because it’s equally terrifying. We talk about virtual reality being the next art form. Donald Trump created a virtual reality before our eyes. An alternate dimension where Donald Trump is taken seriously as a candidate, must be taken seriously as a candidate and can say and do the things that he does and suffer no political consequences for it. It’s incredible. So I think at one point I stumbled and fell through a dimensional portal in which Donald Trump was running for President. Who could imagine such a crazy thing. Well, now it is our lives.
So it was around that time that I already had been doing standup and storytelling on my once weekly, now monthly secret show just to figure out what was in my mind after my last book and tour and I discovered that while so much of my comedic career had been built on absurd truths and invented truths and personas and caricatures, I felt more inclined to drop the last costume. Instead of being some version of John Hodgman, just being myself. Loathsome, young middle-aged, badly facial-haired, aging, only-child, weirdo, nerd dad.
You got to tell jokes for the President of the United States at the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner. Looking back 8 years, what was that like?
It’s still astonishing and hard to look back on because I remember so little of it. I mean the thing that really gets me is the distortion field that the President causes is very, very powerful. Such that even though we had a conversation, I remember not a single word of what he said to me. It’s all Charlie Brown Teacher language. It just came off as “womp womp WOMP womp!” It was basically like “Hello, Mr. President.” “Wa Womp womp womp WOMP!” “Yes, Mr. President.” “Womp womp WOMP womp womp womp womp.” “Thank you, Mr. President.” I’m so sad that my brain was so freaked out that it ceased accepting memories.
But I do remember having a really good time, and do distinctly remember that the whole trick of the routine was to get him to flash the “Live Long and Prosper” Vulcan salute hand sign. I thought I was going to have to nerd shame him into doing it by the end of the talk. But the minute I said Mr. Spock. By the time I said “Mr. Spo–” he had that sign up. He was already doing it. That was a fun moment to trade a Star Trek Vulcan salute with the President of the United States.
You have given a few TED Talks, especially about the Fermi Paradox and finding aliens that you gave a few years ago. Since then, have you found any extra evidence or discovered anything to prove that aliens are real?
So the premise of that talk, all of the stories of those weird occurrences, those weird people who talked to me on the street when I was a child in Ocean City, New Jersey. The weird fact that they did make a movie about Christopher Walken receiving an anal probe from an alien. The weird fact that I managed to go on dates with women in my life. These completely un-explainable events were cover memories for actual alien encounters, like my talk with the President, my brain had erased or twisted it into lies. Since then, and especially since 2008 when I gave that TED Talk, my career has just grown more and more implausible I’ve gotten to meet more and more of my heroes and work on more and more interesting and unexpected TV shows and movies. I mean, when you look at me, I’m the last person that should be involved in visual media of any kind. I wonder if now that the truth is that I’ve been in a simulation, that I’ve been asleep in a suspension pod in an alien spacecraft since about 2006. Since the day I first went on The Daily Show I feel like none of it is possibly real, and this Donald Trump delusion is proof that reality would not allow this to happen. So I’m in a simulation.
You wrote a trilogy of books with fake historical trivia in them. Your show at SteelStacks on November 17, you’ll be doing standup in the shadow of the Bethlehem Steel blast furnaces where we made steel for the Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building, Madison Square Garden and ships for World War II. Do you have any fake trivia facts that you can tell us about Bethlehem Steel?
Well, first of all, let me just say thank you for all of those things. And second, the unfortunate answer is no, because making up fake trivia is actually more work than you’d think. I would have to do, and now intend to do, more research into the history of the blast furnaces so I could craft some weird, absurd fact that has a little bit of resonance of truth in it because that’s where the fun comes from. Also because making up fake facts isn’t what I do anymore. I mean it was something that had come so naturally to me for about eight years and then all of a sudden I just felt like telling real facts. That’s basically what I’ve been doing in my on stage storytelling and standup since then. I’m sorry that I can’t tell a lie about your city. I’m more interested in the truth of it.
You’re getting into the actual reality instead of the alternate reality that you’ve been thrust into. So baby steps in the right direction.
Yeah, I wonder if this is a part of my slow, waking up within my nutrient bath on the ship far away. Pretty soon they’re going to say he can’t handle the simulation anymore and poop me out like they did Keanu Reeves in The Matrix and I’m going to end up in a pool somewhere discarded.
That’s actually an accurate description of one’s greatest fears in middle age. Laughs. The simulation has no more need for me. The whole system is going to poop me out pretty soon so that others can take my place.
So simulation poop and raccoon poop. Is there anything else you’d like to tell the fine folks of Bethlehem before your show here in the Musikfest Cafe presented by Yuengling?
Yeah, it’s not just poop jokes! It’s more than poop! It’s sincere and funny storytelling by your weird dad, John Hodgman.
EDITOR’S NOTE: John Hodgman will be hanging around after the show to sign stuff and give you weird dad advice.
