Bex Finch
John Hodgman’s jokes are like thesis papers — intensely researched, compiled and cited, all for the purpose of wringing laughs from even the driest of topics. Vacationland, his latest “one-human show,” touches on subjects ranging from Maine to mustaches in what is described as “white privilege mortality comedy.” Isthmus caught up with Hodgman ahead of his Sept. 26 visit to the Barrymore Theatre to learn more about his life trajectory, including counting traffic in New Haven and wearing cheese hats in Black River Falls.
June 3, 1971
John Kellogg Hodgman is born in Brookline, Mass.
“I’m an only child and therefore was a loathsomely precocious and pretentious child who wished to leapfrog sexual adolescence as quickly as possible to become the 40-year-old gentleman bachelor that I believed at that time I was destined to become. So I wore Doctor Who clothes and I carried a briefcase. In the evening I would sit by myself in my small apartment that I carved out for myself in a rather large house that I shared with my mom and dad, and typed out poems and ate Triscuits by the boxful.”
1985-1989
Attends Brookline High School, where he is co-editor of a zine called Samizdat, the term for dissident Soviet Union literature that was reproduced and passed by hand from reader to reader.
“It was Xeroxed, barely made use of staples and was handed more or less in a manuscript form from weird student to weird student. May I reference how inappropriate it was to refer to the legacy of dissident literature that if caught with you could easily be put into a prison camp, whereas our motley collection of perverse cartoons, lame short stories and dumb sketches was photocopied at town hall thanks to the intervention of the principal of the school, whose son was co-editor with me. So we copied it at no cost — or at the cost of the town of Brookline and therefore had full endorsement of the State.”
1994
Hodgman graduates from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in literary theory. His first job is a “traffic counter” for the city of New Haven, Conn.
“I would stand on the street at 5 o’clock in the morning, in November, wearing three pairs of pants. I would have a type of clipboard with a traffic pattern on it and numerical clickers, and I would click for each car that went straight, right or left. It was quite miserable and cold and led to deep contemplation. And created ambition: Do not be a traffic counter.”
1994-2000
He works as a literary agent at Writers House in New York City, representing, among others, Darin Strauss, the late Deborah Digges and actor Bruce Campbell.
“I love books, and being an agent lets you really get into the idea of books without having to write any books. It was incredibly stimulating work to receive paper manuscripts from all over the world, and to be entrusted with people’s dreams to become a novelist and discovering people who were really beautiful and brilliant writers, and some of them you could help to get published. But ultimately I realized that I did not want to count traffic in any way. I wanted to make traffic. I wanted to make things rather than count them, sell them or facilitate them. And so I started writing for myself, writing short stories on my own and pieces of humor for the McSweeney’s magazine and website, which were just getting going at that time.”
Oct. 20, 2005
The Areas of My Expertise, his first book, is published.
Nov. 16, 2005
Hodgman appears as a guest on The Daily Show to promote it and becomes a regular contributor to the show on Jan. 16, 2006.
“My readers at that point were largely people in coastal cities who had gone to college and liked McSweeney’s, and maybe that wasn’t everyone in the world. What Jon [Stewart] did for me was he gave people permission to like what I was doing. His ratification just by having me [as a guest] on the show — and the lovely conversation we had about the hobo takeover of the United States in the 1930s — really changed my life completely, because those people who might be on the fence about this weird book with incredibly small type and who might pass it over now had an incentive to check it out.”
May 2006 through 2010
Co-stars in Apple’s “Get a Mac” advertising campaign with actor Justin Long.
“One of the most unlikely turns of events in my life, in tandem with The Daily Show, because one wouldn’t have happened without the other. Suddenly I had a whole new, unexpected career as a performer on camera.”
2007-present
Hodgman guest stars on TV shows including Flight of the Conchords, Battlestar Galactica, Bored to Death and Married, and appears in such films as Baby Mama, The Invention of Lying and Pitch Perfect 2.
Nov. 1, 2010
He begins the Judge John Hodgman podcast, now at 226 episodes and counting.
“I’m there to tell people who is right and who is wrong, whether it’s a debate over who should do the dishes or whether a machine gun qualifies as a robot. And the answer obviously is a machine gun is not a robot, because even though a machine gun can kill you, a machine gun does not want to kill you, the way all robots do.”
Nov. 1, 2011
His third book, That is All, includes a fictionalized calendar of events leading to the end of the world on Dec. 21, 2012.
“You may not have noticed that [the end of the world] happened because our memories were erased and we were shifted into another dimension — the one we occupy now — where everything is exactly the same as it was before except I no longer write books of absurd, surreal fake trivia but instead perform fairly traditional standup comedy.”
Oct. 19, 2014
Driving from Minneapolis to Madison, Hodgman makes a roadside stop at the Mocha Mouse restaurant and gift shop in Black River Falls.
“I discovered not merely the classic wedge of cheese hat, but also a cheese top hat and a cheese deerstalker, à la what Sherlock Holmes would have worn had he plied his investigative trade in Wisconsin. If you like to eat cheese as much as I do, and you don’t mind top hats, you get to combine two of your passions in one jaunty fashion statement.”
Sept. 26, 2015
Hodgman will perform at the Barrymore Theatre.
“It’s always a pleasure to play [in Madison] and at a beautiful theater with stars in the ceiling.”
