#182. Snobs and You

Hi everyone,

At long last, I have had a somewhat normal week! Cooked some dinner. Went out for drinks with some friends. Did some household chores. Got some work done. Caught up on the current series of Taskmaster. No flights. No fancy borrowed clothes. The Boston Celtics took a decade off my life by collapsing in games five and six against the 76ers, and then losing a tight game seven without Jayson Tatum. Nothing too wild. A week.

Wednesday night, Maris and I saw Natalie Walker and Bonnie Milligan (and special guest Deborah Monk) absolutely TEAR through an hour and change of songs together at Joe's Pub. Natalie and (Tony award winner!!!) Bonnie both have incredible, knock-your-boots-off-and-singe-your-mustache singing voices, and are so funny and at ease together. The band played flawlessly. The show hit the perfect nexus of extraordinarily talented people, prepared exceptionally well, for the purpose of maximal messing around.

On Friday I co-hosted a Fall of Freedom-connected comedy show with Hari Kondabolu. Hari read a lovely and inspiring version of the Fall of Freedom artist statement about using art to speak out against authoritarianism and censorship. Everyone on the show killed, and the sold out crowd gave us the opportunity to donate a little chunk of change to The Innocence Project. I missed out on the big May Day demonstration in the city, but this event (plus the month I spent working on the negotiation and ratification of the new Writers Guild contract) helped me feel in tune with the spirit of demonstration at least.

Also, my former boss, the great Desus Nice very graciously had me on his new-ish web series Desus Pieces. Desus is so funny and fast and smart, and I had a blast trying to keep up with him as we commented on a bunch of the big and small news stories for last week. I hadn't really watched that whole video where alleged sex criminal and confirmed loser Russell Brand tries to find a Bible verse to quote (he's very religious now, you know) but WOW we spent almost as long making fun of it as it took him to locate something to read out loud to Piers Morgan, which was a loooong time.

A short behind the scenes video where I mentioned being from Boston set off a controversy in the comments because I grew up in the suburbs before living in the city itself and was shorthanding for conciseness and humor purposes. It was very funny to me that people were SO picky about my language, even as I was defending their hometown, but it is the internet after all. I did a very nice job of restraining myself from commenting: "This attitude is why people from other places hate us." So good work, me.

Then, I stuck around for the looser (if you can believe) after-show with the whole Desus Pieces team, which was a great time as well.

Oh and one more thing! My friend Claire Friedman wrote a new Audible original rom com called The Summer Oath (starring Maya Hawke and KJ Apa), and she cast me in a fun little part. You can listen to it now!!! I enjoy doing this kind of voice acting very much and I should start seeking out more places to do it!

Tonight I'm hosting Frankenstein's Baby at Union Hall with Alison! We're going to have a great time! Come join us!

Quick PSA: Sunday is Mothers Day! Don't say I didn't warn you!

PEP TALK FOR SNOBS

I've spent a fair chunk of the last two decades trying to unburden myself from the feeling of teen guy smugness I had developed as a younger person. A lot of it, I think, was marbled with culturally entrenched sexism in a way I didn't and don't like. And another swath of that bad attitude is pure wasted energy. Ultimately, it is not my problem if people continue to enjoy TV Show X well after its quality has fallen off an obvious and precipitous cliff. Let people like what they like remains a decent starting point, at least for interpersonal conversation. You don't need to dress someone down at a dinner party for their love of UFC or self-published romantasy novels. Life is not long enough to make that recreational criticism worthwhile.

Recently, though, I've been thinking that I owe an apology to the concept of the snob. I've felt a little destabilized lately over how much mediocre garbage is funneled down our throats, as if we were all destined to become a rich foie gras made of Mr. Beast's viral stunts and dating shows where the eighteen hottest people in a small American city rub against each other until two of them are famous enough to do sponsored Instagram posts for FDA-ignored skincare products. It's overwhelming and dispiriting.

My friendly acquaintance Rebecca Jennings recently shared a stray comment (a little tongue in cheek I think) about bringing back snobs and gatekeepers, and I agree. Media literacy has cratered. Part of that is that many giant institutions have always been wildly unreliable (Fox News) or are intentionally sprinting in that direction (CBS News). Another part of it is that we've fake-democratized media through online channels, and the best work doesn't always rise to the top, because "good" isn't what the owners of these platforms care about.

With nobody in place to say: "Nope! You don't get to be popular!" anyone can make a career in media if they're willing to do whatever it takes. Obviously, gatekeepers of the past were riddled with racism, sexism, and ageism, but the fake populists in charge of TikTok and YouTube (and others) are not any more enlightened. They just pretend their thumbs aren't on the scale. That's how we get podcasts where guys authoritatively and inaccurately paraphrase incorrect information they half-remember some other guy saying on a different podcast for millions of dollars. Somebody has to say: No thanks! Even when popular opinion is against them.

I'm forty-one years old, and culture at large isn't about me anymore. I mean, there's definitely plenty of stuff made for men my age, but it has mostly been bad since the Coen Brothers stopped making movies together. Why is everything for men (more specifically, the straight ones) Yellowstone or Scott Galloway now????? Why is nothing FUN? That's my snob thing. That and my annoyance when Oscar-winners or Oscar-super-hopefuls (looking at you, Bradley Cooper) are in ads for Pop Chips or whatever fungible consumer good can book a-list celebrities now because there's no such thing as shame.

We need all kinds of snobs, too, not just dudes who love free jazz. If you want to be a snob about the Real Housewives franchises, go for it. (My smart, funny friend Ali wrote a whole book about that!) Alison Leiby wrote about Summer House in her newsletter last week. Like the things you like and think about them and grapple with them and invest them with meaning. Some of the best and worst standup comedians alive have had equal success thanks to social media, but that doesn't mean they're equally good, and we shouldn't pretend it means that. Be a snob about your favorite things, please, no matter what they are!!!

(Side note: I do legitimately believe that they shouldn't put straight guys on Bravo shows because inevitably they do something monstrous and then I have to hear about them. Any female reality star's boyfriend or husband should have his face blurred out and his name bleeped when they're shown or mentioned. That way when a creative director or bartender I've never met cheats on his girlfriend, I don't have to hear his name 1,000 times a day. He did not earn it! He was just mildly telegenic and completely shameless in pursuit of fame!)

An important caveat here: Many snobs have horrible taste themselves, placing their own pretension and elitism at the top of the hierarchy of artistic merit. Those people are dweebs and we should tell them so. BUT! It's good that people care enough to be pretentious!!!

It's not even that I have good taste! I have pretty medium taste myself. Probably a lot of snobs would tell me that I should watch art films instead of basketball games when I'm awake late at night. And to those people, I say: "Pound sand, nerd! Dunks rule!" But the idea of discernment itself is still worth preserving.

The opposite of snobbery isn't bad taste, it's no taste at all. That's what we're up against. As the moon of late capitalism approaches its midnight apex, nobody with money wants to make anything good as long as enough people will accept something that is bad in a popular way. Sometimes great work gets done anyway, but it feels rarer and rarer, to me at least. More and more, we fill our time mindlessly with stuff that didn't even take that much attention or care to make in the first place. Maybe we can't change that right now, but we can still say that it stinks. And we don't have to slurp the slop gladly.

So, thank you, snobs. We need you on that wall. Even the total dorks among you.

PEP TALK FOR A READER

I did a little reformatting of this request to fit the newsletter style, but I left the gist of it unchanged.

I’ve been plugging away and querying managers for screenwriting. I have a lot of faith in what I’ve written but have gotten dead silence. And that’s almost worse than rejection (though it is obviously rejection). How do you navigate rejection that just feels like ghosting at this point?
- Wordsworthit?

Did I write a pep talk for writers last week? Yes. Is that different from what I'm going to do this week? I think so! To me, there's a difference between the existential value of writers, and the professional and creative strain of one writer singular. We're working on the No Homers Club principle here.

I am prone to an occasional lapse of my "no advice" guideline, but I will quickly reiterate my basic, two-pronged suggestion for people making art or taking on any kind of endeavor without a prescribed path forward...
1. Do work you are proud of.
2. Put it in a place where people can see it.
I've said that more than once in the newsletter already, but I wanted to reiterate it as a baseline before we get to this specific situation.

It sounds like, Wordsworthit?, you are already working in accordance with those principles, but maybe someone else reading needs that advice! For you, I have some encouragement: Keep at it! There's that popular quote about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, and I don't know that it's medically or even metaphorically accurate. Often, by doing the same thing a bunch of times, you get better at it. Or you do it in front of the right person to appreciate the thing you happen to have practiced a bunch. Or someone who said no to you (or didn't reply) in the past happens to need someone who does That Thing You Do (dir. Tom Hanks) down the line.

The industry is in a bleak place, and it was already unfair to begin with. Silence on the other end of the line doesn't mean you did a bad job. It means you haven't yet shaken the person you're approaching out of their own desperate scramble. I hate it. But even with that being true, what? Are you going to stop doing the stuff that makes you feel alive? Yoda (the prequel and also the sequel to Baby Yoda) once said: "Do or do not. There is no try." But that's bullshit. He was a senile old cucumber who happened to be magical. Try is all there is. It's all try. Do and do not aren't up to you, but you can only do not unless you try to do.

Many people have built successful careers in the arts primarily by being relentless to the point of becoming unbearable. If you are talented and relentless and also bearable, you're in pretty good shape regardless of who's returning or not returning your emails right now.

My favorite way to think about artistic success is to conceive of it as making the work you want to be making while also being (financially, medically, socially) as okay as possible. If you're doing those things, you are already succeeding.

One more small piece of advice as long as we're here: I don't know too many people who have been repped as screenwriters based on blind queries (book agents are different), so I think the best thing to do here might be to see if you have friends with reps they like, and then asking for an intro. It is, again, a bad time in the industry slash world, but a recommendation gives you as much of a leg up as possible, imo.

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
Nu Genea - "People of the Moon"

My pal Grace Spelman has started publishing an extremely cool weekly New Music Friday playlist over at The Grace Spelman Music Project (very worth subscribing to, especially if you feel like you are in a rut with finding new music) and my big find from the first edition was Nu Genea, an Italian duo that interpolates all sorts of different musical styles and traditions in their work.

I do not understand most of the words to this song, but it's full of breezy, jazzy percussion, including the satisfying bonk of a cowbell. I do not understand most of what the gentle, breathy vocalist is singing about (language barrier, not obscure metaphor), but the song evokes:

• Setting off into the ocean on, not a yacht, but certainly a nice boat.
• A tune you might get stuck in your head before realizing–and resenting–that you first heard it in an iPod commercial.
• Armie Hammer (Sorry!) dancing in Call Me By Your Name.
• A montage of your life getting better by increments.
• An Aperol Spritz.
• The first day of the year when it's nice enough to really wear shorts outside not the fake shorts days.

It's a great anthem for the early days of late spring, and it found me at the right time (thanks to Grace, of course).

UPCOMING SHOWS

I'm mostly bopping around NYC this spring and summer doing spots, and I'm lining up my road schedule for the fall! Where should I go?

5/4: Co-hosting Frankenstein's Baby at Union Hall (Brooklyn)

5/5: Wild Card at Alphaville (Brooklyn)

5/7: The Comedy Cellar (NYC)

5/8: Greenpoint Comedy Club (Brooklyn)

5/27: Josh Gondelman, Jean Grae, and John Hodgman in Alphabetical Order at Union Hall (Brooklyn)

5/29-5/30: Blue Ridge Comedy Club (Bristol, TN)

6/3: Fundraiser Gig (Burlington, VT)

6/11: Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Live Recording (Chicago)

7/23: Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Live Recording (Chicago)

10/21: Dallas, TX (DETAILS COMING SOON)

10/22: Houston, TX (DETAILS COMING SOON)