#184. Charles Barkley and You

Hi everyone,

Happy Monday morning (sincere)! I was being kind of mopey last week, and I wish I could tie it to some general global despair or specific personal disappointment. But I was just kind of being a wimp about things. Then on Thursday night I went out to see Girl Mountain's new sketch show (so funny and silly) and pop in at my friend Laura's going away party, and I woke up on Friday feeling way better.

Josh, you might say, the lesson here is that you feel better when you are in social and artistic community with friends and peers. YEAH! DUH! But here's the thing: I was already doing that. So I'm not sure whether it was the cumulative effect of a week's worth of art and community, or something about the alchemy of Thursday night that made things click. Frankly, I'm inclined to believe that the lesson here is that the human brain is a Rubik's Cube that occasionally solves itself after a good night's sleep. Knowing that doesn't help at all in terms of establishing patterns for getting out of a rut, but it is a nice reminder that this or that too shall pass, even when the this or that in question is an unidentifiable funk.

The weather in New York has been perfect the past few days, and I've been doing a lot of walking around. Letting Maggie the Pug roam to her heart's content on her morning strolls. Hoofing it back and forth to Union Hall to do and see jokes. Wandering a mile and a half to meet my friend Clare for lunch. When I haven't been walking, I've been fully inert. Maris and I sat outside and had a lovely dinner on Saturday night and then fully caught up on Widow's Bay. We rarely binge tv shows, but we had three episodes backlogged and we smashed through them. I'm not a big horror fan (based on my own squeamishness, not a criticism of the genre) and what I like about this series is that it starts out so fun and kooky and then slowly turns up the temperature on how unsettling things are. ALSO, the things that happen to the characters are for sure scary for them to go through, but they're not so disturbing (yet) that I feel terror watching them at home.

On Sunday night I saw Alison Leiby's work-in-progress solo show which was so so so funny. I can't wait to see it more times and enjoy watching Alison turn it into another great hour. And I'm a little late getting this newsletter to you because I got up early to record an episode of The Bugle that will release a little later this week.

Oh! And! McSweeney's published the short humor piece that I'd written to read at Zach Zimmerman and Blythe Roberson's live reading series. It's called "At Long Last I Have Maxximized My Looks". It's about those weirdos who who do meth and hit themselves with hammers to achieve some aesthetic no one asked them to attempt. It's very silly and gross (both the lifestyle and the piece I wrote), and people have been very nice about it. Thanks to McSweeney's for running it, as well as Zach and Blythe for being so encouraging when I read it out loud at their show!! I'd love if you gave it a look and showed it to someone else if you like it!

Tonight I'm hanging out at Frankenstein's Baby at Union Hall. It's Joyelle's last show before she skips town for the summer, and I think it'll be a fun time! And this weekend I'm going to Chicago to celebrate Bill Kurtis's retirement (with him...I'm not just cheering his exit from the workforce). It's shaping up to be a good week! I think my brain even agrees with its own opinion here. NEXT weekend, I'll be in Bristol, TN telling jokes at the Blue Ridge Comedy club! Stop by if you're around!

PEP TALK FOR CHARLES BARKLEY

Here are some things it might be helpful to know about Charles Barkley:
1. Charles Barkley is an all-time great NBA player who spent over a decade and a half in the league, including stints with the Philadelphia 76ers, the Phoenix Suns, and the Houston Rockets despite having a physique that, honestly, I can kind of relate to.
2. Barkley now broadcasts as part of the Inside The NBA crew, where he and Shaq embody the dynamic that we used to call "frenemies." Both Chuck and Shaq are extremely candid and entertaining, and neither of them seems to do one (1) minute of preparation for any broadcast. They routinely get players' names wrong, display little awareness of emerging stars, and talk about how great the athletes from their era were compared to now. I would not enjoy this from any other two people on earth, but this pair makes it entertaining (most of the time). They are kind of the Statler and Waldorf of basketball.
3. He has lost a lot of weight recently (and has an endorsement deal with weight loss drug Ro) but does not seem to have bought any new suits, so all of his clothes look enormous on him. He looks like if a dad was wearing a bigger dad's jacket.
4. During his playing career, Barkley once tossed a guy through a plate glass window for throwing ice in his face at a bar. He explicitly rejected the responsibility of being a role model, which seems fair if your priority is being able to throw your antagonists through windows.
5. One time when I was working for Last Week Tonight, Sir Charles walked by our writing staff on the way to get into hair and makeup to comment on a March Madness tournament game. "Good morning!" he greeted us blithely, as he passed our little conclave in the hall of the CBS Broadcast Center. (It was 4:30pm.) Many years before that, a friend told me that someone he met at a party had introduced himself as "[being] part of the team that keeps Charles Barkley alive." I think the guy was a masseuse?

For the sake of the sports-hostile readers of this newsletter, I think it's helpful to establish Charles Barkley's general vibe of massively accomplished athlete who doesn't take any shit and is also kind of bombastic and totally unfiltered while remaining largely genial (when he is not throwing a guy through a plate glass window, of course).

Last week, the Inside The NBA team was eulogizing the late Jason Collins, the first openly gay NBA player, who passed away earlier this month from a brain tumor at age 47. The panelists all had warm remembrances of Collins as a player and a man. Kenny "The Jet" Smith added the context that when Collins came out in 2013, it was a bold and unexpected act for a male athlete to take, and it helped pave the way for broader acceptance of gay athletes.

Barkley chimed in to say that it would still be a big deal for a [male] athlete playing the four big team sports to be out, and that the reason it doesn't happen more often is societal pressure rather than a lack of gay people in sports.

“We live in a homophobic society...anybody who think we ain't got a bunch of gay players in all sports, they're just stupid,” he said, correctly. 

It's not the first time Barkley has gruffly aligned himself with the LGBTQ community. A few years ago, he spoke up at a celebrity golf tournament: “I want to say this: If you’re gay and transgender, I love you. And if anybody gives you shit, you tell them Charles said ‘Fuck you!’” Was he drunk at the time? MAYBE. But it's a celebrity golf tournament. No one in the world would expect him to be sober.

First of all, I've got to tip my cap to anyone who is nicer when they are inebriated. And on top of that, it's so excellent to see Barkley apply his stubborn clarity to the issue of human rights. People tend to reserve the descriptor of "telling it like it is" and "shooting from the hip" for people (at best) delivering uncomfortable feedback and (at worst) being openly racist.

More people should reclaim the attitude of "just saying what we're all thinking" for good. Reactionaries love to claim that their positions are common sense, and that they're stating obvious facts. Misogyny, to them, is not the result of centuries of societal indoctrination and patriarchy. It's the result of plainly analyzing observable data WITH NO FURTHER EXPLORATION NECESSARY. That is dumb as hell. While it's helpful and useful to debunk regressive dogma, it's equally if not more important to say: "If you are homophobic or transphobic...fuck you, you're stupid."

Obviously, the most important thing here is to listen to queer people and honor their humanity. It's better for the world, and it's incidentally better for competition. Sometimes in the NBA, twin brothers have to compete against one another. In the WNBA, married couples are pitted against each other. That's a huge upgrade in terms of stakes.

Women in sports, who often make a fraction of their male counterparts' salaries, are historically extremely vocal about these issues. It is wonderful to see sports leagues full of openly gay athletes of any gender thriving. But it's also important for the rest of us to get on...if not their level, at least Charles Barkley's. We've got to tell people it's baby brained to be homophobic. Just like we've got to cheer when college students boo commencement speakers who praise the AI software they're positioning to take those young people's jobs away. Smart and/or openhearted people are also allowed to take up the mantle of common sense.

Charles Barkley maintains he's not a role model. And not everything he says is correct. Four thirty in the afternoon, as pleasant as it may be, does not constitute a good morning. But other times when he shoots from the hip, he is right on target. I'm glad that that friend of a friend has helped keep him alive through all those celebrity golf tournaments and arguments with Shaq.

PEP TALK FOR A READER

I put out a call on BlueSky for pep talk requests, and I got a bunch of good ones. I'll get to them over the next few weeks! Sorry if this one is arriving too late to be helpful, but hopefully my encouragement is beneficial in the longer term.

I have to make one (1) phone call, which as a millennial is very distressing. Words of encouragement welcomed.
- Phone-y Baloney

Full disclosure: I'm a phone call guy. I love a long catchup with a friend, using our voices. And when I say phone call, I mean phone call. I don't need to "hop on a Zoom" and tether myself to my desk as we chat. I don't need to make pseudo eye-contact over FaceTime, and I certainly do not need you to see how I am dressed (or the full extend of my croissant-like posture) during our conversation. I'm an avid texter, and I am happy to hear a story or a big time update as a voice note on occasion, but I've found that habitual voice-noters sometimes want to have the experience of a phone call without taking on the work of listening.

That said, the experience of most phone calls in 2026 is purgatory if not outright hell. Friends and distant family members only call unexpectedly when someone has died. Local businesses let their lines ring forever, unanswered. Any establishment with more than one outpost makes you call a centralized number and navigate a forest of options before keeping you on hold for half an hour to talk to a person. Anything simple to accomplish or delightful to hear has been spun off into a website, a social media profile, or a text message. Gen X and Millennials had to adjust to this decline. Boomers (in my experience) persevere with phone calls regardless, and I salute their tenacity. Gen Z doesn't know firsthand what's been taken from us.

I know this writer is being a little tongue in cheek, but I want to offer a mostly-sincere answer! "We can do hard things," goes the mantra popularized by Glennon Doyle, Amanda Doyle, and Abby Wambach. I think that's kind of a nice thing to keep in mind when we are up against life's big challenges. People are resilient. We have the capacity to grow and change. We are often surrounded by more love and care than we realize. With all that being true, we do not have to hard-thing-ify every annoyance in our lives. Sitting on hold waiting to talk to a human customer service representative from your airline of choice is a pain in the ass, but it's not difficult, if you have the space to get other things done while your phone pumps out music so anodyne it might as well be the sound of leaves fluttering in a breeze.

Making a phone call, standing in line at the post office, breaking down a bunch of cardboard boxes so the recycling person will pick them up...these are all annoyances. We aren't supposed to forestall getting these tasks done out of dread. Unless you have a disability that prevents you from doing so, or enough wealth that you never have to experience inconvenience, you are supposed to deal with these tasks as they arise and then complain about them afterwards. This is a subtle distinction, but a meaningful one. You are allowed to not complain at all, but I would never propose infringing on your right to grumble.

One insidious facet of the internet is how easy it becomes to co-opt the language of suffering for the experience of annoyance. It goes from a valid expression of a real difficulty, to a tongue in cheek in-joke, to people's actual stance whether it's a legitimate one or not. "Millennials hate making phone calls." Okay sure, but we're not supposed to fear them, right? We've got to stop saying things so much that we end up meaning them. We cannot let a meme dictate our behavior. It's not "I hate phone calls so I won't make one," it's "I hate phone calls so I will do it and then talk about how irritating it was." With support and intention we can do hard things. But all the other shit, we kind of just have to get over with.

If you have clinical anxiety around telephone communication, I feel for you, and I hope you are able to find the peace to get through this stressful task. If not, though, I hope you manage to suck it up and start complaining.

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: Muna - "It Gets So Hot"

Maris and I listened to Muna's new album last week while we drove to New Jersey, and it is good music to listen to while you move fast. That could be zipping through Staten Island in a rented Toyota Corolla or (presumably) running past your still-sleeping neighbors' homes as the sun rises or jumping up and down at a concert. It feels, lyrically and musically, like hitting a boiling point, approaching the precipice of boiling over. I know the band is iconic in many lesbian communities, but respectfully, I enjoy them as well.

Muna picked the perfect week to have released this album, at least in terms of it suiting the weather where I happen to live. With a little luck, "It Gets So Hot" will be one of those songs that stays married in my mind to the sensory experience of hearing it for the first time. Right as spring started to feel like summer. There's much better than adding a new entry into your personal catalog of pleasurable and occasionally replicable experiences. Maybe you can have one too.

UPCOMING SHOWS

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

5/19: The Internet Live at BibbleBash (Brooklyn)

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

5/28: Do It Live w/ Chika at Caveat (NYC)

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

6/1: Frankenstein's Baby at Union Hall (Brooklyn)

6/3: Fundraiser Gig (Burlington, VT)

6/9: World's Best Dads at Caveat (NYC)

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

6/14: Beauty Bar (NYC)

6/21: Father's Day Daytime Show at Harpoon Brewery (Boston)

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)