By Josh Gondelman — 10 Aug 2026

#196. Mediocrity and You

Hi everyone,

Having recovered from my summer cold, I feel like I could jump kick my way into a bank vault. While just five days ago I was hesitant to make plans for next month because I couldn't imagine wanting to do anything ever again, now I feel like I could climb a greased-up lamppost like they seem to do in Philadelphia every three weeks (or once a year in Gloucester, MA).

Last week in my light daze, I forgot some eventful late July/early August occurrences:

My parents visited! They are extremely efficient and tactical about their trips into New York City, and they zipped into Brooklyn with my aunt and uncle to eat lunch with me and Maris and see our new apartment. Because they had a big dinner scheduled for later, we went to the extremely normal and totally decent cafe one block from our apartment. It was, logistically, much simpler than their usual visits where I try to choose a restaurant so perfect that it justifies my living two hundred miles away. My dad probably spends more time monitoring traffic patterns than anyone who doesn't operate a local tv helicopter, and as soon as he felt the first tremors of rush hour, they all hopped back in the car and headed for New Jersey. It was so nice to see my folks, and I'm psyched to hang out with them next month when I'm (slightly misquoting Guster voice) back in Massachusetts for shows at The Comedy Studio in Harvard Square.
I celebrated my fifteen year anniversary of living in New York on 7/31. In many ways that feels ridiculous to me. And yet, the math checks out. It's been a decade and a half. I still feel extremely From Massachusetts, but I have been here through hurricanes and Eric Adams (two equally destructive forces), through all of the covid social distancing era, an NBA championship for the Knicks (said neutrally), Pizza Rat, and the election of Zohran Mamdani. I met my wife and got married here. I got passed at the Comedy Cellar ten years ago (???) and have worked there ever since. Maris and I can see the Statue of Liberty from our building's rooftop. We watched D'Angelo (R.I.P.) record his SNL performance in person. Great city. I'll probably die here, but mostly because I presume I'll get hit by a car as I read a text message while jaywalking, Bostonly. Go Sox.

Tyrone, Me, and Alison on stage at Union Hall laughing. Donwill's laptop is visible but Donwill is out of frame. — We have fun. (Photo: Sam Brooks, the legend)

More recently, Maris and I had two great and long-overdue double dates! I got one small fun piece of work news that I think I'll be able to share soon! Alison, Tyrone, and I tri-hosted the most recent Frankenstein's Baby and the audience was NOT on board with my whole deal until the last five minutes of the show, which was a fun experience! Also, the whole lineup really knocked me on my butt! Everybody had such great jokes and crushed! I love working with Tyrone and Alison and Joyelle and Producer Jordan and Donwill! The show makes me feel great about comedy despite how bad so much other stuff makes me feel about comedy! Come to the next one if you're in town!

Oh shoot I'd also forgotten that I did a set on the Pretty Major show (hosted by Jay Jurden and Tessa Belle) as part of Union Hall's 20th anniversary! I love this venue so much. It's been a real artistic home for me for almost the entire time I've lived in NYC. Performing on Eugene Mirman's shows there reallllly made me feel like I was a part of this cool comedy scene that I'd read about and heard about for so long. I hope Union Hall stays open for another 200 years at least.

Wall of Fame at UH including posters for Josh Gondelman and People He Admires, Jack Tucker Comedy Standup Hour, Pop Show with Ziwe, Three Busy Debras, and a show hosted by Aparna Nancherla and Jo Firestone. — R.I.P. Bird Luger. Union Hall forever!!!

On Friday night, I was a judge (along with Max Fine and Jeff Wright) on Ask A Fuckboy, and it was so cool to see this fun/lively/inventive show that Val and Andie have created! I did a LOT of vampire voices for some reason. (Well, one vampire voice, but a LOT of times.)

And finally for now, over the weekend, I performed on three live shows as part of the rollout for Rebecca Sheir and Eric Shimelonis's new podcast Lions & Legends. Rebecca and Eric are SO talented and wonderful. For years they wrote/scored/hosted/produced Circle Round, a podcast for people of all ages but especially kids that turns folklore from all over the world into (essentially) radio plays. The outdoor venue on Little Island was so beautiful and a great environment for a show, but the weather was not super cooperative. And the helicopters flying directly overhead (Billy Joel, is that you???) will be a challenge to edit out of the recordings, but that is not my job. Still, we had a lot of fun, and the other performers (Omar Offendum and Maria-Christina Oliveras) were a joy to work with! It's an honor to be an occasional part of Rebecca and Eric's projects, and whenever old Circle Round episodes re-air I hear from friends who listen with their children. Rebecca is also a BIG celebrity with small children which is so fun to see. They have gone independent with their new show, and they're working on bringing their audience over to the new thing in advance of their official launch in early September. If this sounds up your alley at all, you've gotta get in on the ground floor of Lions & Legends.

Okay sorry one more quick little plug: My friend Reid Pope is directing a suuuuuuper low budget indie movie coming up, and they just put up a Seed & Spark campaign to raise some funds if you have some funds!

Sorry to talk so much about comedy shows this week! I can get a little complain-y, so I am always trying to be appreciative (here and elsewhere) of the cool stuff I get to see and be a part of! Thanks for sitting through my longwinded, post-cold yammering. Now on to the pep talks!

PEP TALK FOR MEDIOCRITY

Sophie Cunningham in her Fever uniform looking like: "Huh?" Photo credit: John Mac

In 2019, I went out to lunch with Enes Freedom (surname Kanter at the time). I was working at Desus & Mero on Showtime, and Enes had appeared on the Viceland version of the show while he was based in NYC playing for the Knicks. His major political cause at the time was speaking out against the repressive Erdogan regime in his home country of Turkey. For someone so tall and active, he ate a surprisingly modest amount of sushi. We stayed in touch for a little bit after that. He would text thoughtfully during the Jewish high holidays. We fell out of contact as he found a steady political home at Fox News.

Even after watching that happen, it was still a real disappointment to see Freedom enlist in Sophie Cunningham's War On Trans Women. Smarter people than I, including many transgender writers have written about this situation. All you really need to know is that Cunningham popped off about "protecting girls in sports" and then hid behind a borderline-translucent curtain of plausible deniability in:re her own transphobia until she started taking pictures with decent-amateur-swimmer-turned-successful-professional-bigot Riley Gaines.

Hanging out with Riley Gaines gives the game away, because she has literally made a career out of the pathetic barfly grievance of: "If it wasn't for x, y, or z, I would have gone pro." The only things separating her from your six-beers-deep uncle who played right field for his high school baseball team are a head of Fox News-worthy blonde hair and the fact that she chose to blame a trans woman instead of an ill-timed knee injury for her woes. She is, in all meaningful ways, a professional loser.

Freedom (the guy, not the concept) and former NBA sorta-player Royce White have joined the Loser Army by "announcing" their "eligibility" for the next WNBA draft in order to prove...a point, I guess? This is a pull-my-finger level gambit made by the kind of guy who is so obsessed with performing masculinity that he shits standing up at a urinal so no one sees his feet facing away from a toilet and thinks he's a woman sitting to pee. I almost said that this kind of stunt is the kind of thing you do when you're not legally allowed to see your kids, and you're pretty psyched about it...except that for legitimately bleak reasons, Royce White is not actually allowed to see his son. He's vastly more dangerous to women and children than any transgender woman who has dreamed of playing competitive basketball. There are a lot of self-styled tough guys who seem to only "speak up for women's safety" when it lets them be homophobic or transphobic. Seems to me like that's not a coincidence.

Please trust me when I say: I do not want to write about this shit. It bums me out to see someone I had only experienced as pleasant and generous so thoroughly immerse himself in the Grift Economy. And the idea that a domestic abuser (the other guy, to be extremely clear) would be some kind of savior for women and girls is, well, par for the course in the right wing grievance ecosystem. But it's still shocking how widely White (with a capital W in this case) has been embraced by the right.

I'm writing this in light of the fact that my friend Marisa Kabas asked in earnest on her social media whether calling out this kind of obvious bad faith bullshit helps at all, or if it only serves to waft the scent of that bullshit farther. The consistent response I saw from transgender people was that in an environment where access to medical treatment and even a government ID is being stripped from them, the show of solidarity is more important than trying to keep a lid on the public profile of a few dedicated charlatans.

As Parker Molloy has written, there are legitimate fairness and inclusivity discussions to have in high level competitive sports. And in fact many athletic governing bodies have settled on ways to welcome transgender athletes while keeping out the kind of people who are trying to belittle women's sports in service of belittling trans people overall. The way that the Sophie Cunningham et al talk about these issues smells to me like a hundred sweaty Greek guys in a big wooden horse. These folks do not want sports to be fair and inclusive. They want exclusivity regardless of fairness. Trans people deserve to live with dignity and that includes a fair chance to play sports. If you're talking about the safety of women and girls in athletics and that doesn't include trans women and girls, that's bigotry, end of story.

We are too hard on mediocre people. They get a bad rap. Most people, statistically, are mediocre. Some of my best friends are mediocre. I myself have several mediocre qualities. And that's fine. In fact, being mediocre in comparison to other professional athletes is extremely impressive, as long as you're not leveraging that into a series of interviews on Newsmax and The Ghost Of Charlie Kirk's Podcast. Not everyone can be a champion. But that doesn't mean you have to be a loser.

PEP TALK FOR A READER

I did not edit this request very much but I did add the nickname. You know the deal by this point!

I mean it when I say I just moved - it was 3 days ago! I know I’ll look back on these early days and laugh, but now I need help getting through this time of overwhelm, indecision, and some mourning of the old place.
- Mover/Shaken

Hopefully by now things have settled in for you. It took me a little while to respond because there's only one Monday every week (part of God's pact with Garfield). I'm sure you're still at least a little bit in it still though. Because of all the normal things we do, moving is the worst. Someone told me that the stress of a move is equivalent to grieving a lost relative. I did no further investigation into whether that's true, but I did justify a lot of recent wallowing under the premise that it is.

I've also read that after childbirth, the human body releases hormones that help you forget the agony of the process. Otherwise, people would be less inclined to have additional children. I want those hormones for moving into a new apartment. I love the place that Maris and I ended up in after our recent (and well chronicled, sorry!) flood. But when friends suggest that it might have been worth losing the old place to get into this one, my eyes roll back in my head. You don't have to experience an act of God (or an act of otherwise-lovely upstairs neighbor) to seek out better accommodations. And the strain of the recent move is still too present for me to feel like it was a blessing in disguise.

There are lots of things I miss about our old apartment too! But ultimately that's like missing your ex's parents' pool. Like, it's not embarrassing, but it certainly doesn't mean you want to go back.

One nice thing about the trauma (citation needed but not going to be given) of moving, is that it really only resurfaces when you have to move again, which isn't that frequent in most cases. It's not like being attacked by birds where your mind perceives potential avian assailants everywhere you go from that point on. When you move, you settle in, and you either like your place enough to stay, or it gets bad enough that you're ready to move again.

You've lived through the worst part, and now what's left is finding the good where you are. Unless you were fleeing a truly scary scene, you can't possibly love your new home as much as the old one because you haven't had any good times in it yet. But they're coming. And if they're not as abundant as you hope, it's never too soon to start counting down the days on your lease. GodandGarfieldforbid.

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
Bud Powell - "Tempus Fugue-It"

I have been listening to a lot of jazz lately, and I still can't tell how I feel about it. By that I mean: I don't know how I feel about both some of the music and my recent transformation into a Jazz Guy. One exciting thing about this process is developing my own sense of taste. What do I really think about this genre and all the subgenres within it? I've been hassling my foremost Jazz Appreciator friends Natalie Weiner and Ian Karmel for their recommendations, which led me to Sonny Rollins and Ben Webster most directly. And I've been letting Apple Music send me on some shuffle-based journeys too.

What I've been especially into lately are songs with a driving piano presence, and that led me to Bud Powell's catalog. "Tempus Fugue-it" is not, as Wikipedia tells me, a fugue, but rather a pun on the Latin "tempus fugit" meaning, "time flies." This song was originally recorded in 1949, and people must have been keeling over backwards from how much it ripped back then. It sounds, in the best ways, like it would have been used as the soundtrack to a classic Looney Tunes short. It's a real barrage of rapid-fire energy and technique, but not in the stereotypical jazz way (which I say as a rebuke to people like the me of three weeks ago, not the art form itself) of obscure virtuosity for the appreciation of sound sommeliers only. It's fun! Actual fun! Jazz!