By Josh Gondelman — 09 Mar 2026

#174. Sexy Jabba the Hutt and You

Hi everyone,

I had a pretty quiet week for the most part! It was busy with STUFF but all the stuff slotted fairly neatly into the category of Things I Do Normally. I told some jokes. I did some work to prepare for my two weeks in LA as part of the Writers Guild of America's Negotiating Committee for the next contract. Watched some tv with Maris. Side note: We both really liked the pilot for DTF St. Louis and were kind of delighted that Jason Bateman looks like a normal handsome older man instead of a smooth, taut, uncanny balloon face person of indeterminate age and easily identifiable weirdness. The show is weird, in a way that is fun!

I also saw Ratboys play a great show at Warsaw in Greenpoint, which I loved even though the crowd was too dense for me to navigate towards the pierogi window. Fortunately, I had eaten a slice of street pizza (one of the great joys of walking around a pizza-abundant city) on the way to see my friend Amil Niazi give a talk about her book earlier in the evening. Okay so maybe I was busier than I thought.

Amil in cool red blazer and fleece hat standing with me (wearing a sweatshirt) at the Rachel Comey store in Brooklyn. — Kind of a high/low fashion juxtaposition is what I was going for here. (Amil is dressed well and I am wearing a sweatshirt.)

The week felt kind of like driving through a tunnel in part because I was nagged by a single preoccupation the whole time. I spent a lot of the time trying to schedule-machete my way through a fairly normal slate of tasks and gigs to get to a place where I could devote a fairly wide swath of time to revising a script before I head out west. By Friday at 11am, I had cleared out the rest of the day and then AGGRESSIVELY procrastinated until 4:30pm at which point I did get some editing done in a flurry of activity.

It's always a little slow going for me to dig into revisions on a project I'm doing on spec. Some of it is just the delicate work of making sure you change what isn't serving the bigger piece without knocking over a load bearing passage or dialogue exchange. But some of it is like...well, I wanted it THIS way, and if someone wants it to be different, they can pay me money to rewrite it. I do think I'll get the new draft finished by my self-imposed deadline even though I have minimal respect for the boss (again, me) who chose it. I do really enjoy this project, and I am trying to reframe this new draft as another opportunity to sit with a script I like a lot and enjoy the process of fleshing it out. I'm not the kind of writer who thinks that writing is torture, but I do feel like applying someone else's notes is at least a cramp or a wedgie.

The remainder of this week's emotional bandwidth was – humiliatingly – consumed with Boston Celtics star Jayson Tatum returning to action 298 days after sustaining a terrible Achilles Tendon injury during last year's playoffs. If you are not a big NBA fan (which many readers here aren't!) Tatum is one of the, let's say, eight best players in the league, and his possible return had been a topic of speculation and podcast fodder for nearly ten months. I think of myself as someone who absorbs emotionally impactful information pretty smoothly, but in an extremely New England twist, I felt overwhelmed with feeling watching JT throw down a putback dunk and then gracefully elude a defender to splash home a three pointer on back to back possessions Friday night.

I bet it felt so good for him to be back doing the thing he's great at after a long period of intensive recovery. Especially in front of a vocal, appreciative home crowd. People on this planet – even and especially ones who do not make tens of millions of dollars a year to play a game – suffer through worse injustices and indignities than he did all the time. And yet! I could not help but tear up watching the game on Friday night. Tatum even looked winded after his first six minutes on the court. Stars (recovering from surgery)! They're just like us!

I guess, if an All-NBA player can make it back from achilles surgery in less than a calendar year, I can finish those script edits by next week.

And also! Here's one of the nice pictures taken by Arin Sang-urai at the Comedians Earnestly Singing Musical Theater show I did. Sorry for including so many pictures of me lately! I like this one a lot though!

Me wearing a suit and tie onstage at Joe's Pub. I'm making a skeptical or unsure expression. — I looked unsure here, which is also how I feel about singing sincerely in public.Now thaN

My show in LA is in LESS THAN TWO WEEKS (3/20) and I'd love if you got tickets! I'll be announcing some special guests soon too!!!

And also we're basically a month out from my shows in Cincinnati(ish) (4/10-4/11) and DC (proper) (4/12)!!! I'm adding more dates all the time. (I'll be in Texas this October. Details forthcoming!)

PEP TALK FOR SEXY JABBA THE HUTT

Rutto the Hutt, a big jacked slug looking fella with abs holding...axe hammers or some shit? — Now those are what I call huttgutters.

Apparently this is not a picture of Sexy Jabba the Hutt. It's a picture of Rotta, also a Hutt obviously, from the new season of The Mandalorian and Grogu that I saw online. Rotta is Jabba's son, as far as I can tell. I do not like the idea of Jabba the Hutt helping a female of his species conceive a child (or reproducing on his own through something like mitosis). But it does seem like giving birth to a big-ass slug with arms would be much easier than pushing a human being through one's birth canal. Unless the abs and biceps are a Hutt's natural physique and Jabba was an aberration for being a little doughy (Pizza the Hutt was clearly the doughiest of them all). For this pep talk to Rotta the Hutt, I am assuming Hutts are not born looking like if D'Angelo from the "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" video had a baby with a snail. If that was the case, I apologize.

Rotta, buddy. Obviously you needed to cultivate some upper body strength. You're carrying around two enormous axes that also appear to be hammers. That's huge for when you need to alternate smashing and chopping in rapid succession. Maybe you're cooking dinner and have to prepare mashed potatoes and diced carrots as they alternate moving past you on a conveyer belt? Under any other circumstances, double-fisting hammaxes (axmmers?) seems impractical. Tough to scratch an itch without injuring yourself or sip from a cool bottle of Topo Chico without crushing it to damp shards.

It's useful and healthy to maintain your muscle mass. But I am a little worried about such a drastic departure from the standard Hutt body type of "big soggy croissant." Have you approached this in a healthy, measured way? Or are you on a cocktail of supplements and injections that would make RFK Jr. blush an even deeper shade of crimson than his at-rest medium-rare skin tone? Why do you even want your torso to look like it was frozen in carbonite, Han Solo style?

Some of this is on me. I'm not sure why I assumed that you're a "sexy" Hutt. That's my own baggage. For all I know, those abs could be extremely painful for you, or unpleasant to look at for other Hutts. They could be tumors or big pimples. Not that you can't be sexy and have tumors or big pimples. It's just rarely because of those things.

Also – and this is an idea I'm never able to get across just right – I don't think guys should submit to the pressure to be hot. Guys are allowed to be hot, sure. But I'm a firm believer in equality across gender lines. And I don't think it's fair to subject women to unequal beauty standards. But the answer to that isn't applying more smothering benchmarks to men. We have to hold the line and exercise our male privilege to look like shit as praxis. Or else we'll never dismantle the expectations that have been set for women, and we'll just get more twenty-year-old dudes who hit themselves in the face with hammers to increase the definition of their jawlines, but not hard enough to knock themselves deservedly unconscious. Anyway!

Rotta, come on. It seems like you're trying to be your own Hutt, which I salute. But it doesn't have to be like this!

The problem with your father wasn't his body type. It was the fact that he kept sex slaves and ran a violent interstellar multi-species criminal enterprise. If you are looking to differentiate yourself from him, do it by approaching the world around you with goodness and generosity, not by getting fucking shredded like you're Magic Mike with a tail. You can get in shape to run a half marathon, but you can never run away from yourself. Although I guess since you have no legs, you technically can't do either.

PEP TALK FOR A READER

I've done a little re-formatting of this request, but it's otherwise unchanged!

I gave a decade of my life to taking care of other people, and I'm finally branching out and doing things for me. I have two big trips coming up to places I've never been and I'm equally nervous and excited. Any words of pep-etry?
Signed,
Vacation Guilt-ina

Learning to be good to yourself and learning to be good to other people are related skills, but they aren't quite the same. It's not that life has to move at a one-decade-for-me/one-decade-for-you pace. But it's not a given that after ten years of caring for others full time – or full-enough time – you'd have the chops to care for yourself equally well even though you are also a person who deserves compassion and attentiveness, just like your loved ones. It's good news that you're taking time and space to do make some big plans just for you. And it makes a lot of sense that you'd feel a little on edge about it, considering how out of practice you are.

I cannot assure that nothing will go wrong on your trips. There is an outside chance (waaaaay outside, but still) that you will run headlong into a rock face that someone had previously painted to look like a tunnel. You could find yourself tricked into carrying illegal substances through customs by a charismatic stranger and find yourself up against the possibility of decades incarcerated overseas. (What? You don't remember the premise of Brokedown Palace?) The odds, however, vastly favor those things not happening. You're not even a roadrunner or Claire Danes as far as I can tell.

With major, life-ruining problems being unlikely, what's left to be nervous over are the little hiccups. Missed flights. Nasty weather on days you're supposed to go hiking. Visiting a nation where iced coffee is unavailable even in the summer. (Year round iced coffee availability is the only arena in which the U.S. maintains a firm edge over the rest of the world, at this point in history.)

Most of these things won't happen either. But if they do, that's part of it. An adventure isn't only worth embarking on if it goes smoothly. Vacation doesn't start when you get to the beach or the mountain or the hotel or the convention or the basement where the unsanctioned fight club meets. A two-hour delay at the airport isn't as pleasant as being by the pool already, but you can still overpay for an elaborate beverage and read your book. There's no need to deny yourself the happiness that's available on hand because you aren't exactly where you want to be yet. A shirt is still a shirt if it's wrinkled. It's not just a collection of creases. And you can smooth the situation out to the best of your ability.

You've done so much for others, and I don't imagine that part of your life is fully concluded. But for now, it's time to enjoy the excitement, even the parts that aren't technically exciting.

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
Sasha Smith - "Spelling"

I have listened to this song many times over the past week. The piano melody makes me feel like I'm wearing a tuxedo. If my life were a movie, "Spelling" would play while I carefully solved or planned a crime. Could go either way. I hope the whole album (coming soon) is also this evocative! It also feels like great music to write to, which I worry comes across as an insult (unobtrusive, background-appropriate) but I mean it as a compliment (stimulating, enabling of great focus and imaginative capacity.