#169. Football Fans and You
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Hi everyone,
I've been home for (slightly) over a week straight for the first time in a little while, and I could not have picked a worse stretch to hunker down in New York City. The beauty of the recent snowstorm has settled into an urban grid covered in what you could accurately call dog piss slushy. Temperatures have lingered in the single digits or teens all week. Because of a quirk (real-estate euphemism) of our apartment building that renders our bedroom basically an enclosed porch temperature-wise, I've been sleeping in full-on sweatpants and occasionally a hoodie. The one upside to this brutal weather is that when I put a glass of iced coffee next to my window, it stays cold for roughly a fortnight. You win one, you lose some.
In spite of the weather, I've gotten to do lots of fun little things around town in the past week. I hosted the delightful Comedy Grab Bag show put on by the Wait Wait team (and I'll be on the radio this weekend). Thanks to Wait Wait panelist and pal Faith Salie, I spent Thursday morning and early afternoon chatting with middle and high school students about comedy writing and standup. They had so many excellent questions! Way more than the average stranger one might end up sitting next to on an airplane.
On Thursday night, Alison Leiby and I co-hosted a show at the Jewish Museum, which required me to bravely travel into Manhattan for the second time that day. We got to help curate an outstanding lineup (Ariel Elias, Joyelle Nicole Johnson, Esther Fallick, Emmy Blotnick, Ilana Glazer) in conversation with an exhibit of Joan Semmel's work called "In The Flesh." The museum encouraged comics to talk openly about bodies and sexuality. I assured my friend Jenna on the museum staff that this wouldn't take a lot of prodding.
Alison and I got to see the exhibit before the show, and it was beautiful and vibrant and EXTREMELY horny. I had never seen so many paintings whose dominant characteristic was "from the back." I told the curator that I loved the exhibition and had also never seen so much fingering depicted on canvases before.
Across the hall from the showroom was a showcase of Anish Kapoor's sculptures which were additionally excellent. Most thrilling was the fact that I got to see Alison encounter vantablack in the wild. Vantablack is a black coating that reflects less than 1% of visible light, making it one of the darkest substances known to humankind. It's less than fifteen years old, and it's extremely interesting to look at. Last year, while Alison and I were working on a script that takes place in an art museum, we tried really hard to squeeze in a vantablack joke to little avail. Several of Kapoor's works looked like flat black circles mounted on the wall from straight on, but from the side you could see that they were 3D constructions. I texted our friend (Alison's best friend) Natasha (whose new book about hot pot is out NOW) that it was like watching someone meet a celebrity. And just as I was sending that text, Alison exclaimed to the museum staff: "THIS IS LIKE MEETING A CELEBRITY!"
Art can be anything! Bright paintings of nude bodies! Nearly invisible sculpture! Me talking about witnessing a guy openly browsing foot fetish websites in at a karaoke bar! Isn't that beautiful?
In other recent news: I was on the most recent episode of The Bugle with Andy Zaltzman and Tiff Stevenson, talking about the news of the week, pre-Epstein Files Pt. 1,000. I remember that I described some recent occurrence or another as "bringing a Faberge Egg to a diarrhea fight" but I cannot for the life of me remember which occurrence. Listen and find out (and tell me, if you want)!
Tonight I'm co-hosting Frankenstein's Baby at Union Hall in Park Slope with Alison. It's another outrageously good lineup thanks to our producer Jordan. David Cross? George Civeris? On a MONDAY? Get outta town with that!
Thursday I'll be in Chicago for a Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! live recording. And Saturday I'm making a quick jaunt home to tell some jokes at the record release show for my good friends The Grownup Noise!!! I cannot wait to hear them play music for the first time in...over a decade? I am ready to die in this mosh pit (there will not be a pit; I will not die).
A quick heads up: I thiiiiiink I'm coming back to Philadelphia (for the third time in as many months) for comedy in a few weeks, but this time I'm doing headlining shows. If you missed me last summer at the Philadelphia Comedy Festival, come through! If you saw me there, I do have a pretty substantial cache of even newer jokes as part of the set! Details to come next week, let's hope!
PEP TALK FOR FOOTBALL FANS
On Friday night, our friend Rachel had some plans shift under her feet and had to reschedule a little get together she had invited me and Maris to. She asked if we could make it next Sunday evening instead, and I had to explain that, humiliatingly, I am unable to join at that time because I am once again emotionally invested in the Super Bowl.
Like many people, I have a lot of feelings tied up in professional sports, despite not being a professional athlete myself anymore. I thought I'd managed to divest pretty well from the NFL, but that period abstinence proved to be precarious at best and was enabled by several years of the New England Patriots being pretty bad at football. (Not many years, but enough that I could convince myself I was out of the game I was never technically in.) The franchise's funniest humiliation took place last week when Bill Belichick, the most accomplished coach in NFL history, did not make it into the Hall of Fame, presumably because he is kind of a jerk.
Last week, Patriots owner Robert Kraft was spotted hanging out with his good friend Donald Trump at the premiere of Melania, the bribe in the shape of a movie that alleged sex pest Brett Ratner directed to flatter the president and his wife. His name was also spotted in the most recent batch of Epstein Files. I have to imagine the guest list for the Melania premiere party and the guest list for Little St. James include a whole bunch of names in common, and it's the list of people who know whether the conspiracy theories about Epstein's death are true or false.
I believe that most NFL team owners are a basically fungible collection of shitheads. And nobody cheers for the owners anyway. Still, it feels morally grey to watch the big game (unclear if I'm legally allowed to use that phrase) under the best circumstances, and these are not those. I feel similarly about watching any NFL game as I do towards eating meat: I have no justification for this behavior, but here we are!
This is not a new problem for me! Over ten years ago, my friend Emma Sandoe and I started the #AGoodGame project. You can tell that this endeavor kicked off in the twenty-teens because of the prominence of a hashtag. Essentially, as penance for partaking in America's third most fraught national pastime (after gender reveal parties that set local flora on fire and destabilizing foreign governments), we made a donation to an organization that offset some of the harms done by the league itself, and many of its key figures. It's a little squishy in terms of ethics, but we figured it would do more concrete good in the world than trying to organize a boycott that would land as a drop in the proverbial (Gatorade) bucket.
This year for every Patriots touchdown I'll donate $250 to a local organization that helps immigrants and refugees, and I'll do $100 for every Pats field goal, with a few other capricious dollar amounts tossed around for various landmark moments in the (mortifying, unsettling) event of a Seahawks blowout.
In the past, people have contributed amounts ranging from the thousands of dollars all the way down to a few bucks per score, and obviously any amount is helpful. If you want to use a hashtag and party like it's 2016, you're more than welcome to. I'd also love if you tagged me on Bluesky or Instagram if you're planning to donate! Or even just leave a comment here with the dollar amount you're planning on, and the organization you're directing the cash towards.
The best way to be helpful to the people around us is to get out in the world and do some good in person. But for one night it's nice to throw money at a problem while you watch the game, even if you're just waiting for Bad Bunny to perform.
PEP TALK FOR A READER
I've done some light tweaking to this request! But the heart of it remains untouched! Okay? Okay!
I injured myself putting out a small house fire in our basement two weeks back. My recovery is taking place alongside a job hunt which has been going on since November. Both are headed in the right direction, but it's been hard to stay positive.
- Heating Up, Not On Fire
Hurting yourself in a fire while you're in the middle of a job search is a true pioneering effort in the field of "adding injury to insult." I hate when one bad thing happens (sorry to be controversial), and as I often say here, it should honestly be illegal for two bad things to happen at once. Last weekend, Maris wasn't feeling well, and in her couchbound state, she kept reading horrifying revelations from the Epstein Files and saying "Oh my god!" out loud. One bad things makes the other bad thing feel worse, is what I'm saying.
Fortunately for the two of us (you and I, not me and Maris), you have already identified a cause for hope. Both the job search and the burns are headed in the right direction. Obviously, "headed in the right direction" doesn't mean "fixed." But you can't get from Miami to London without crossing an ocean. And heading there in the right direction gets you there a heck of a lot faster than if you start moonwalking towards the Gulf of Mexico.
One of the easiest pieces of advice to give is that a struggle isn't about the destination, but rather the journey. That is wildly untrue about both finding a job and recovering from injury. I imagine there are epiphanies to be gleaned from physical rehab and aggressive LinkedIn browsing, but these lessons (tenacity, resilience, embellishing a resume beyond recognition) are also possible to learn from less strenuous circumstances. These endeavors are very much about the destination. And lucky for you, the journey is closer to over than it's ever been.
Outside of a best case scenario coming to immediate fruition, there are many other valences of experience to take heart in. For example, it is encouraging when bad things happen to bad people. It's a nice reminder that evil isn't automatically rewarded (just as it isn't punished as a course of nature). Bad things no longer happening to a good person is even more hopeful. This is the direction you're moving in. Once you're all healed and employed you'll still have to have a human body (Boo!) and do work (Boo!). It sounds like you're on your way out of the woods. And as we only all know, the only way to get there is through the woods, since it's impossible to avoid going into the forest at all.
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
Joyce Manor - "Falling Into It"
Critic and buddy Grace Robins-Somerville hypothesizes that "Falling Into It" might be Joyce Manor's first unambiguous love song. There's little doubt what "it" they're falling into. It's an exuberant tune! There's a little mid-period Weezerishness to the tone and length of the solo and also the laying-on-your-tummy-kicking-your-heels nature of the lyrics. (Tangentially: Guess how many studio albums Weezer has released. WRONG. It's WAY MORE THAN THAT.)
I'd been in a little new music rut, and this fresh Joyce Manor album busted me out of it. I'm not new to the band; I saw them a few years ago in concert, and it was the loudest musical performance I'd ever witnessed. I am normally pretty laid back about such things, but this set really pulverized my brain. My friend Casey and I wound up listening from the concourse of the big event center in Long Beach, CA where the show took place. For context, we had enjoyed earlier acts PUP and Jeff Rosenstock from within the room where the music was being played. This isn't even a criticism of Joyce Manor, a band I really, really like. More of a pin I'm putting in my personal physical tolerance for incoming sound waves.
Another tangent: I'm seeing Jeff and Chris Farren play at Antarctigo Vespucci this weekend and I'm very excited for it. Fingers crossed for a new A.V. album sometime too! It's been too long, in my humble opinion! I'm going to the show at Warsaw in Brooklyn where you can buy pierogi at the concession window, an innovation that more venues should adopt. I imagine I'll see some That's Marvelous readers out and around there!
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’ve got lots of fun live shows on the horizon for early 2026! More to be announced soon!
2/2: Co-hosting Frankenstein's Baby at Union Hall (Brooklyn)
2/5: Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Live Recording (Chicago)
2/7: Opening for The Grownup Noise at Deep Cuts (Medford, MA)
2/8: Investing Too Much of My Emotional State in the Super Bowl
2/12: The Red Room at KGB Bar (NYC)
2/13: Love Letters Reading at The Monroe (NYC)
2/19: Gorge Night at Club Cumming (NYC)
2/20-2/21: Philadelphia
2/26: Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Live Recording (Bloomington, IN)
2/27: Comedians Earnestly Singing Musical Theater at Joe's Pub (Manhattan)
2/28: Fundraiser (Hyde Park, NY)
4/10-4/11: Commonwealth Comedy Club (Cincinnati-ish)
5/29-5/30: Blue Ridge Comedy Club (Bristol, TN)