By Josh Gondelman — 12 Jan 2026

#166. Smithereens and You

Kind of the national mood lately, yeah?

Hi everyone,

I am writing to you all from the desert in California where I spent the weekend with Maris and her parents. We had a nice visit in the sunshine and starlight of the southwest where no two things seemed to be near each other, a stark difference from the cloudy, human-lit, dense environs of our neighborhood in Brooklyn. The four of us got to watch Nikki Glaser crush her Golden Globes monologue (again! she's very good at this!) and then my father-in-law's friend Mal set his phone up on the table at dinner so we could watch Drake Maye lead the Patriots to their first playoff win in several years. I took both as personal victories despite having nothing to do with either, and never having met Drake Maye.

The rest of the week was kind of a blur, with individual hours tricky to account for. I went to Washington DC to perform as part of my friend Chris Duffy’s science/comedy panel show Wrong Answers Only. I learned a lot about soil which is NOT the same as dirt (one of the things I learned). Chris’s book Humor Me came out last week, and he’s an excellent writer, and the book is full of smart thoughts and fun stories!

I also barfed out the end of a draft of a script I had been dragging my feet on completing for roughly sixteen months. Maybe the time away from the open Final Draft document gave me space to think creatively. Or maybe sitting down and actually writing the thing is what let me get it done. A real chicken or egg type of question. Science just has not figured out the answer to this one.

Some writers complain about sitting down and doing the work of churning words out, but honestly, I love the writing part of writing the way a toddler likes to mash the keys on a piano. "Look at what I can do! This is FUN!" The worst part for me (aka where I am now) is the editing process where I make sure the characters sound like real people and not like a little puppet show where I’m doing all the voices as they/I get off their/my pithy zingers. Sorry to Maris and probably Alison who I will ask to read the Puppet Show Draft. And slightly less sorry to my managers and agents who are professionally obligated to read the next version that is slightly better.

The rest of the week was a little foggy with sadness over the news. The killing of Renee Nicole Good and Keith Porter Jr. by ICE agents have really shaken me up. America has an autoimmune disease. The government, which should be directed towards making people’s lives healthier and safer, has been turned in large part into an apparatus for inflicting pain and cruelty. Seeing the protests across the country, and specifically the way people in Minneapolis came together to keep families safe from ICE gave me hope that humanity can heal itself. But man there are a lot of people who walk around wanting to hurt other people and that’s a bleak thought to have to walk around with.

Some good things are happening. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul aligned herself and the state’s budget with launching NYC Mayor Mamdani’s universal childcare program for kids age two and older. I think it’s going to do a lot of good for a lot of families. A victory like this is a loud reminder that our government shouldn’t just exist to wage war on people within and outside of the country. It’s for helping people take care of themselves and each other.

Me and Alison and Donwill on stage at Union Hall. Alison is smiling. I am...shouting? Laughing? — Jarring visual segue!

Also! Leiby and I hosted a sold out Frankenstein’s Baby show on Monday (featuring the great Jeff Hiller from Somebody Somewhere amongst other wonderful performers), and we’re hosting a Sup, Bro? show on Saturday in San Francisco! Please come if you’re nearby! Cobb’s is really big, and it’s better with audience members there!

I’ll be in LA before that, which I always think will feel relaxing and then ends up being a slightly chaotic mix of professional obligations which I try to squeeze friendship in around. No standup this time I don’t think (although I am taping an episode of Comics Unleashed tomorrow, but hopefully I’ll do a headlining show in town later this spring! It’s my birthday on Thursday and I am stressed out by putting together a little gathering that doesn’t exclude anyone I really want to see. Great to know that no matter what’s going on in the world, I can still sweat the small stuff.

PEP TALK FOR SMITHEREENS

It’s unfair that we only ever hear about smithereens when things are being blown apart. Like, okay, something exploded. What now? What’s next? Very small particles aren’t NOTHING, they’re lots of tiny somethings.

No one ever talks about cleaning the smithereens up or putting them back together. We rarely think about what the smithereens used to be, just that whatever they were is dust now. But that doesn't mean they're gone or even insignificant. There’s an injustice to our dismissal. Attention must be paid and so on. "Forget it, Jake. It's smithereens."

It’s time we reframed our thinking around smithereens. I don’t say “rebrand” because not everything has to be a brand. In fact, even many brands should probably knock it off in terms of branding, but that’s for another conversation. We’re going to recontextualize the language around what it means to be a smithereen beyond a piece of scattered debris that something larger has been reduced to. It’ll be like how every few years PETA releases a list of revamped idioms where no hypothetical animals get metaphorically hurt. (Ex: Instead of “killing two birds with one stone” they suggest some shit like “trilling two birds with one tone” or whatever. No disrespect to vegans or plant-based diets, but I do not think we need to use exclusively cruelty-free figurative language.)

Still, out of respect to particles, here are some alternative use cases for smithereens:

If you’re at a birthday party but not especially hungry you can say that you’ll just take a smithereen of cake.
When you wake up before your alarm and roll over to pass back out, you can tell the person sleeping next to you that you just need a few more smithereens of sleep.
A deep clean of your home could, perhaps, be said to have scrubbed every last smithereen from your abode’s nooks and crannies. What is a cranny if not a hiding place for smithereens, after all?
One quote from The Simpsons side character Mr. Smithers? That’s a smithereen, baby.
“Can we push lunch back by half an hour? I’m trying to get a few smithereens of work done before I leave.”

You get the point. I am not sure why I was even thinking about this. Maybe it’s just that we’ve been hearing so much about things being destroyed lately, and it’s nice to think about what’s left after and how we can rebuild.

PEP TALK FOR A READER

I've done a little tweaking to this request for clarity!

Can you give a pep talk to someone starting amsmall standup show that does its best to bring great comics from everywhere to our city. Local comedy is becoming more difficult to draw in audiences even in big markets, and we could use some encouragement!

Sometimes you’ve got to do the thing and see who shows up. You can’t put on an independent show as a shot across the bow of Livenation or Spotify or whoever. Their bows are too big and expensive. They’ll barely even notice. You’ve got to do it to do it. See if anyone nearby wants the same things you do. And you have to be prepared for the answer to be: "Only sorta...for now."

Maybe the density of people who crave these specific off-beat experiences isn’t as high as you want where you are. All the more reason to send up the Cool Shit Signal into the night. Maybe more people than you think will come out of the woodwork where they’d been lurking anonymously on Reddit or hibernating while raising a toddler. Maybe you’ll shake something awake in your neighbors who had become content or at least complacent with letting algorithms shunt low-risk entertainment into their eyes and ears and brains.

Chris Gethard (one of the true champions of cultivating a scene) spoke really powerfully about the value of true DIY (rather than corporations forcing artists to finance professional-grade work out of pocket) on a recent episode of Going Down with Ella Yurman (and then again in an interview about that episode on Good One with Jesse David Fox).

It’s good to do stuff that you don’t think will make you rich and famous if you have an inkling it might make you happy. Chances are it’ll make some people nearby happy too. Maybe not as many as you’d like, but doesn’t that sound nicer than letting the well-financed major players keep you miserable?

PICK ME UP SONG OF THE WEEK

Purple Mountains - “That’s Just the Way I Feel”

My good buddy Rax wrote about this song and hearing a friend of a friend (Molly? Steph? Nina?) sing it at karaoke and feeling like she OWNED it. Like oh this is a song that Mollystephnina created for this occasion.

Obviously she didn’t do that (imagine if she did). It’s from David Berman’s last album, which he recorded with an ensemble called Purple Mountains. It is a wry and wounded song about having accumulated various bumps and bruises over the course of a life, and wanting to stop wanting anything at all. It’s shambling and groovy, the kind of song that would feel warm and wistful if you heard it played by an old man for the ten thousandth time in his career. It hurts to know that Berman’s life ended so soon after he released this album.

The lyrics range from charmingly plain spoken (“you see things have not been going well/this time I think I finally fucked myself”) and aggressively eloquent (“we stand the standard distance distant strangers stand apart”, “a ceaseless feast of schadenfreude”).

The most tragic moment in the tune however is the acknowledgement that “a setback can be a setup/for a comeback if you don’t let up.” Things CAN get better, just not for this narrator of this song. Or at least that’s just the way that he felt.

But it was so captivating hearing Mollystephnina sing this song at a party and reading what Rax wrote about it three months later and then seeking it out again myself and writing about it too a week after that. It’s kind of its own magic that a song about feeling so bad and alone can make people feel so good and connected to each other.