By Josh Gondelman — 23 Mar 2026

#176. Popcorn and You

Hi everyone,

I've been in Los Angeles for a week, and I'm going to be here for roughly another week. It's been really hot, and I have no idea how to both dress for warm weather and carry a backpack with any dignity. Every day I maneuver through the city looking like I'm on my way to some kind of summer camp for bald guys. Like I'm taking a bus to an office park to work on my fantasy baseball roster and talk about my favorite Hold Steady b-sides with other guys who have kids or seem like they do. The shorts are the problem, honestly. But some days it's too hot to wear pants to go on a coffee run.

Thanks to everyone who came to my show at Dynasty Typewriter! I had such a great time, and I appreciate you making it out of the house at 10pm which is like New York City 1am and not just because of the time difference. Thanks also to Lindsay Adams, Ify Nwadiwe, and Aparna Nancherla for being so funny!!!

On Saturday I bought a ticket to see my friend Joe McAdam put on his show "The McAdamy Awards" (perfect name) and it was so much fun. It was a truly silly passion project where Joe gave out awards to things and people he likes ranging from "Best Guy (Old)" to "Best Guy (Nude)" to "Best Section of Criss Angel's Restaurant's Menu." He also handed out smelling salts to the audience in case they needed a pick-me-up after intermission. I laughed an amount that probably annoyed the people sitting near me. My favorite thing is when people take on creative projects that are both exceptional and not scalable. All creative ambition, no careerism. A perfect night!

On Sunday, a little drinks-and-dinner thing a friend had organized got muscled out of a bar by an ever-growing cosplay contingent attending Legend of Zelda Night. They all seemed very nice, but the increasing volume and dominant prosthetic-elf-ear energy was too much to socialize through. I wish the Zeldas and Links the best. This was not an important feature of my week, but it was somewhat...indelible.

Another fun little thing that happened recently was that Wyatt Cenac put all the episodes of his standup showcase Night Train (which I believe aired originally on SeeSo...I'm sorry if those words don't make sense to you) on his YouTube channel. I was really thrilled to get to be a part of this show, and I followed an extremely elaborate Abraham Lincoln Pageant featuring John Hodgman and Kurt Braunohler (who introduced me while dressed as John Wilkes Booth) and Scott Adsit. This taping was so long ago that I have some hair. I know, it's not much. I just said some.

As a weekly live show, Night Train started after Kurt and Kristen Schaal moved their show Hot Tub to LA. Then Aparna, Jo Firestone, and Maeve Higgins started Butter Boy in the same room when Wyatt stopped hosting. Frankenstein's Baby which I host with Alison Leiby, Joyelle Nicole Johnson, and Tyrone Thornhill, is in the lineage of those shows (even though we moved venues a few blocks over), and that feels meaningful to me. So I'm excited to share this!

I also got to pop onto the public radio show This Is Uncomfortable (thanks to brilliant producer and friend Alice Wilder) along with Leiby to talk about friendship and money! It was a great discussion! Thanks to Alice and host Reema Khrais for having us along!

I'll be in the Cincinnati area in a few weeks (4/10-4/11) and then in Washington DC the day after that (4/12) telling jokes. This hour is really shaping up in a way that's been exciting to work on, and I think I'm going to start figuring out how/when to record it. The screws need a little tightening but that's the fun part.

PEP TALK FOR POPCORN

Sometimes after you pop, the fun *does* stop.

After my show on Friday night, the venue manager presented me with a large clear plastic bag full of buttered popcorn.

"You can take it with you, or we'll have to throw it out," was the deal I was offered. I grabbed the bag by its little newborn belly button knot and carried it outside with me, hoping to do my part to reduce food waste in the greater Los Angeles area. After two days of steady snacking, the original corn-ucopia appears virtually untouched. Now the doomsday clock approaches midnight. Sequestered in a hotel with no airtight storage available, my cache of corn is nearing its expiration date.

Popcorn is the opposite of scallops. While a half dozen marble-sized morsels of mollusk can take a hefty toll on your wallet, the most popcorn you've ever seen in one place effectively costs the same amount to produce as no popcorn at all. Obviously movie theaters jack up the cost to consumers, but they only have that prerogative because they can tell you not to pop your own trough full of corn at home for $5 and bring it with you. And the cost per kernel (CPK) is minuscule compared to the unit cost of shellfish or even M&Ms (don't quote me on that second thing). You can shovel it indefinitely into your face without thinking too much, which is a perfect quality for a movie theater snack.

There's not a ton of nutrition in popcorn, nor is there much that's going to accelerate your demise. It's a true example of abundance, which I imagine is in part because of how much corn is grown in the American heartland, but also it tends to fluff up further than you require like a new hotel pillow. And even if I'm wasting some (most) of my Halloween pillowcase's worth of solid ethanol, there's always more where that came from. Popcorn is there when you need it, and also when you don't, and there's something comforting in that. Thank you for your service, popcorn. You're dismissed.

Cards on the table, am I feeling a little out of sync midway through a long stay in a hotel? For sure. Did I look around my room, antsy for something to write about? Oh yeah. Did I seize on the first unique feature I saw and just kind of go for it? You betcha. Thank you for bearing with me, readers.

PEP TALK FOR A READER

I didn't edit this request very much, but I did add the nickname.

My wife and I took a big leap 27 years ago and moved to Asia for work. We never thought we would be here so long, but the work has been good and our family thrived. Now we are facing the inevitability of repatriation in the next few years, and the prospect of returning to Trump's America scares the bejeezus out of us. We are returning to Massachusetts, a nice progressive place, but still we could use a pep talk. Thanks.
- Forlorn In The U.S.A.

In addition to the vibrant and exciting possibilities presented by international travel, there are many specific reasons to want to live not in the United States these days. Returning home will give you an up close look at all the government functions your tax dollars do and don't fund. Going to the doctor requires answering a series of riddles and maybe also handing over your life savings. Meanwhile, the national debt we (we, lol) have taken on to fund unjust and unpopular wars has a number of zeroes in it that I can't count on two hands.

There are many nice things that happen here still. Several of the best slam dunks in history have occurred in the continental United States. Not all. But several. That's in part because, for now at least, the U.S. provides the world's most popular and lucrative forum for dunking. That could change based on how hard the government is making it for people to enter this country for any reason other than international bribe delivery. Similarly, I travel all over the country and as long as public land isn't fully deregulated, allowing full deforestation and smogifying and mountain jackhammering to see if there's any oil inside that people hadn't found yet...there is so much diverse natural beauty to take in. It makes my brain spin around inside my skull to consider that the redwood forests of the west coast, and the Grand Canyon, and Cape Cod are all one country. Let's not talk about how they got to be one country. Again, we are finding the silver lining here, not focusing on the outer coating of barbed wire.

Most importantly, the United States you're returning to is not characterized by top-down homogeneity, despite what it might feel like from the outside. The nation is not one 3.5-million-square-foot Donald Trump flavored cake. (What a horrible birthday surprise that would be, a cake that tastes like a week's worth of bronzer and concealer topped with frosting infused with Big Mac burps.) As smart people in the South and Midwest point out often, to write off a place because the political scales have tipped for a time in one direction is to ignore the people standing in opposition to, or being oppressed by, the dominant paradigm. The totality of our current federal government's agenda is staggeringly unpopular, which doesn't make it better (it's demoralizing to see so much violence and inequality being carried out in defiance of popular opinion), but it helps to answer the question "Who wants this?" with a resounding: "Not most people!" So many people are working together all the time to keep each other safe and healthy. We've got a ways to go, but it's not as if no one is trying.

I don't mean to craft American apologia, which is wild because I'll apologize for basically anything. I just mean to say that living in the United States feels like watching a blockbuster movie with forty-five minutes of amazing scenes, and an hour and a half of nonsensical jingoistic bullshit. The good doesn't excuse the bad, but it reminds us that things can be better, and we can make them that way with hard work. That's kind of a motif of this newsletter, but it applies the most when thinking about changing big institutions which are riddled with inertia and more than a few powerful dumbasses.

And you're moving to Massachusetts, a place that is part of the United States in the same way that Cape Canaveral is part of Florida. Like, yes, for sure it counts. But it's not the part you think of when you imagine its umbrella organization.

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
A Tribe Called Quest - "Check The Rhime"

Sunday marked the ten year anniversary of the death of Phife Dawg. Weirdly, I learned about Phife's passing while I was on a different trip to Los Angeles. I know I wrote about A Tribe Called Quest a little bit last week, and I'm on kind of a Native Tongues streak with these suggestions, but reading that it had been ten years brought me back to the extremely medium-quality hotel I was staying at in Hollywood. When I heard the news, I flopped down on the bed and listened to Tribe's entire Midnight Marauders album in the dark. (This song is from Low End Theory, which I listened to after.) In a car later, I ruined the driver's afternoon by accidentally breaking the news to him, and I can still remember the way his voice cracked when he replied. "Did something happen do Phife?"

It was also the day I made my late night standup comedy debut on CONAN. I'll never forget the words Conan O'Brien said to me as the credits rolled: "You know we can't use any of that, right?" I reacted with so much fake dismay that my manager was worried we were actually arguing.

There has been a little uptick in 2016 nostalgia lately, and this day was really memorable for me for better and for worse.

Also: I'd be derelict in my newslettering if I didn't say the new Gladie album is out now and it's very good!