Hasan Minhaj

0:00To me, the whole end of that book is just a logistical problem. You guys need to text message your drug dealer and you guys need to take drugs at the same time. Well, Hasan, welcome to One Night Stand. Thank you for having me. Thrilled to have you here. Have you always been a big reader? I am not a big reader in relation to my sister. Okay. So I don't know, everybody has a... Everyone, yeah. Everyone has... There's someone in the family in relation to... Yeah. So in relation to Aisha, she was a voracious reader as a kid. but for many children of immigrants the library became this place where we would go there and wait to get picked up yeah so basically between 2 30 p.m to sometimes 5 30 or 6 we would just be at the library the library kind of became this I didn't know it at the time but a place where I could kind of see um I could goof off on the internet which you can still do today you could homework but you can also just kind of peruse and browse and it was the first time i got to understand what editorial taste is because your librarian yeah shout out to mrs caldwell she would have her picks of like hey these are the this is the new fiction that i like this is the new non-fiction that i like so that was like my first introduction to all of that stuff and also a librarian is is really great there's a particular age i remember we started going to the library around third grade like quite a bit and diving into beverly cleary ramona quimby aj ramona and bezos um judy bloom there were all these books fudge super fudge there were these books that the protagonists were your age yes and there's just something very special about meeting those characters at that time reading matilda right roldahl um uh james and the giant peach but there was just something so cool about I'm in school school feels like prison then there's these characters that are that also acknowledge kind of the weird existence of being a kid yeah but they have a ton of agency and they're hilarious and funny and that was kind of like my first introduction to reading and fiction specifically yeah and so your sister was very prolific and were you more like casual just you I would finish a book and she would have finished eight.

2:22And she was one of those girls where, you know,

2:27whole stacks coming out of the library and then just coming out of a weekend like, oh yeah, I finished it. Yeah, no, I know. And I was really kind of like, I'm going to say this because she watches this and listens to it. I was jealous of her, was envious of her. I thought it was pretentious. She definitely was like holding it above me. she's four years younger than me but she's reading at my level which is kind of insulting but that's such a like sibling type conflict to have it's it's peak i love it well maybe we can start with the man of many fathers by roywood jr tell me about your love of this book i love roywood jr i love who he is in comedy um i'm the eldest child in my family as as i've said this many times in my comedy so i have a younger sister she's four years younger than me but one of the things I always wished for in my life was having an older brother if you've read this book called the message by Ta-Nehisi Coates he talks about this idea of walking the land um as just a concept of of wisdom and the thing that I'm I'm so jealous of did you have older siblings no I've got one older one younger oh so you're middle child oh my god I don't think I'm a typical middle child but I don't know not at all yeah it's weird funny I think that's another podcast for another time but yeah because you're not there's not a middle child energy well the thing that I'm so envious of of people with older siblings is they they would always have the here's the new record here's the new movie oh have you heard of nirvana this is terminator 2 you shouldn't watch this we're gonna watch freddy crew they had all these like stories and lore and um navigating a life in the arts was very difficult and so much of adult life i realized was making sense of paradoxes making sense of things that don't, you can't quite reconcile.

4:11Meaning, I'll give you an example, like getting older. And it's one of the things that Roy talks about is he's the man of many fathers. His father, he talks about in the book, had another family. And he talks about this idea of him being very close to his mother, him meeting his father's second family and him seeing his father be closer to that family and a completely different type of father as well and he really like kind of vividly describes this idea of I don't know who this man was as he was holding his other children at a funeral and he said we will get through this and and um Roy says this in the book he says I I felt jealous of them and um there's these really profoundly beautiful stories about pain understanding longing yeah um there's so much of that in his book i've known him over 15 years and i texted him when i read the book the reason why i love people when they write a book is they have to really bleed on the page they really do i completely agree and and i don't know if that's a byproduct of your editor capitalism like i don't know what it is but they're like we need more no yeah totally and he i always wanted a big big brother he's always been like a big brother in the comedy community but the lessons of this which is he's he writes the book to his son and it's these gems of wisdom that are based on him walking the land totally it's not you know the typical sort of male self-help book there's a particular kind of cadence and grift to it there's just these beautiful lessons about adulthood that I took away from it and I was I was just profoundly kind of moved by it was it's so moving and just so much happens like I mean it's a really like exceptional unusual like childhood in the sense of I can't I just this is just yeah so many anecdotes where they where you really just go oh my god I can't believe he went through that and that and that and then but also makes it sound so like ordinary because when you're a kid you do just like roll with the punches a bit right yeah he sort of is the whole way through i mean it's incredible but he also had the wherewithal to to be like i took this lesson from it yeah so i experienced this thing hey there was this critical moment where i spoke back to my mother yeah and like she came down with the wrath of god here was the lesson that i learned from it but there was he ends every chapter with a note to his son there's a handful of things that you know i'm almost 41 years old and i'm i i'm still trying to internalize and process one of the lessons that he has early on is like don't be afraid to ask for help yeah yeah but he kind of unpacks the complicated thing about being a human being which is hey sometimes you're an adult and you ask for help from someone but they may be the wrong person to ask so it's like how do i navigate these very complicated crazy waters or you know understanding or unpacking, let's say with his father, he really did a really beautiful job of, he talks about his father slowly dying and they have this moment in the living room.

7:25His father asked him, did I do a good job? And there's so much in kind of therapy talk about have the mea culpa, get the pound of flesh from your, from your parents. And he doesn't, he shows, Roy shows kind of grace and mercy in that moment when he had every right to kind of unload the clip for sure yeah and say this is how I felt and this is what I this is what I went through um I just I think it's an amazing book about how to navigate adulthood it's so much bigger than comedy it's really about navigating adulthood for sure and there's so much about parenting that made me laugh like the um chapter where he mentions about how with his mom that he could he might get told off for what he does or what he says but for never how he feels and I was like wow that's a very sort of profound sort of distinction to be able to draw because I don't think a lot of us are parented in that way.

8:13I thought another thing he did that was really great talk about that hey first of all his mother's an incredible person but to say to give him the space you are you totally have the right to feel how you want to feel but he also tells his son if you need to cry cry. Yes. He talks about the Apollo night and and this is a this is very common in showbiz but life itself which is there's always these kind of critical juncture moments where you think it's going to be a step function. I'm going to have my Super Mario Brothers moment where it's all going to change now. And it doesn't happen for him. There's so many of these kind of cold, harsh reality.

8:46He's just sitting in the car or the parking lot. And something went left. And I love that he articulates to his son, it's okay to cry. And if you need to get it out, get it out. But he also, again, holds this idea of, but then you got to get back on the horse and the work continues. and that idea of grief is an active thing like process it feel it let it out but also dwelling can be its own poison and knowing when to turn that pain into agency he has just so many beautiful true anecdotes from his life totally that you that you would think would absolutely define him i know and he and he he doesn't let define him but he lets it be a part of his story.

9:30Exactly. Many of my favorite chapters were the ones that talked about his jobs when he was a student, either at high school or university. Oh, it was great. So good. Did you have any jobs like that when you were young that you who works in subway, who works in a hospital, he works doing construction on like day shifts. Did you have any dish washing? Yeah, exactly. Cocaine Mike. Oh my gosh. Okay. So first of all, what I love about that is there's this idea that, you know, you have to read the greats and the Odyssey and Tolstoy. And, you know, I've said this before about comedy some of the funny funniest people that i know aren't comedians yeah it's a dude at cvs it's so true yeah like you walk into a cvs and you know for some reason you know deodorants locked behind bars like a committed vehicular manslaughter and then you got to go talk to the cvs parole officer and you know i'm here to see colgate you know you got two minutes and then i can go talk to the toothbrush for a little bit and the toothpaste but the the the point of what I'm saying is there have been people that I've met along the way that are funnier than some of the greatest comedians living on because they are they see the ironies and the humor of life and I felt this way going to a state school I went to UC Davis I always felt like oh in the ivory tower wisdom wisdom exists there you know I'm bagging groceries at a grocery store called Safeway, what could I possibly learn there?

10:50But the amount of types of people that I interacted with bagging groceries, I was a courtesy clerk, but I bagged groceries. I was the paper or plastic guy. But again, it's like, it was my first introduction to the irony of life of that, like, oh yeah, there's this like business decorum. You are a courtesy clerk. It's like, I'm a bagger. I bag people's groceries and I pick up carts from the parking lot and I put them back. but the you meet the the stubborn kid who you know is throwing a fit in the middle of the baby food aisle you meet the kind of petulant mom who has had too much and and she's letting the cashier have it you're meeting the confused dad who doesn't know what to do you're meeting the guys that are unloading the trucks that are bringing the like you really understand just boots on the ground how does all this stuff get here you know and from the moment the trucks arrive super early in the morning there's that person i i met every person if that makes sense i met like oh you're the cargo pants cigarette guy yes like there's a particular type and it's not even about gender like you're that yes character for sure oh you're the night shift person oh i totally get you yeah like oh you're the like the store manager so i i felt like Like I had this very unique opportunity working at Safeway and then getting fired from Safeway and then working at Office Max and selling printers.

12:16I kind of understood so many things about showbiz and life that I ended up experiencing later. What did you get fired for? I got fired for at Safeway. I got fired for being late and not shaving. Not shaving? Not shaving. How can they stipulate that? So Safeway and the parent company Vons has a clean shave policy. What? So you have to be clean shaven. Yeah, I know. Fuck you, Vons. really go to hell really good i mean at the time and this is going to date me a little bit this is the late 90s early 2000s so um i can i take it from your accent you're in the uk yes okay so craig david had young brown boys in a chokehold in the early 2000s and so i had the craig david i yeah it was getting perpendicular there was a geometry math homework assignment on my face and i refused to shave it i was like i think this looks really sharp i think this looks really sharp it's literally very sharp and um yeah so i shaved the lines but then i had the goatee and one day and it was a thin goatee is craig david very thin razor thin i put a band-aid over it like oh i cut myself shaving and my manager called me in and you again this preps you for life you know this working in a corporate setting when when someone says hey can we chat for a minute oh yeah you're like oh this is this is this is yeah buckle up this is the this is the diagnosis this is the diagnosis it's i'm gonna get hit with something really bad so i got the hasan hasan come to the neck i was like oh fuck and he had me remove the band-aid and that was my second strike oh yeah you were gone and i was gone fuck yeah that's so funny but i had a similar experience actually when i left university and it was like a kind of university where everyone thought they were going to be future masters of the universe and i went back to Birmingham where I grew up and worked in Selfridges which is an apartment store and it was the best three months of my life because I was saving to go and do unpaid internships in London because my parents were like well how are you gonna fuck you gonna pay for that right and it was just like I was like oh god I don't have to be around people like this for the rest of my life I can like work with normal people and because everyone was going into like they're gonna be bankers lawyers all like doing all of those types of jobs and like you I remember almost like wetting myself in the stock room several times because because I was laughing so much and everyone was so funny and they were all so interesting and doing interesting things.

14:33And it was just like, oh God, I don't have to stay on that course. It's like a very liberating experience having those types of jobs and you can feel that it is for him as well in this book. And it really, it's so additive and I thought it was really special. And it's also like, no matter which way this goes, there is this comfort of like, it'll be okay. Yeah, exactly. Like I can unload stuff from the trucks, I can load up, I can stock shelves, I can sell printers. Like you've done it before. so you you can do this meaning and and you I met everybody there from everybody from the hey this is my summer job for three months to like Kathy here since like serving you since 1981 exactly it's the best from before I was born like and yeah yeah you just you see everybody there it also I think does a really good job of talking about how the comedy industry and how hard it can be on people's mental health like the chapter around chicken or Michael really moving and I wondered has that ever been a struggle for you with working in comedy like this sort of pressure of being on stage and then the characters and coming out I don't know it sounds tough yeah he has this great story about um this character in comedy who goes to this huge comedy festival and has this huge explosive moment um and then they meet each other years later and that moment has kind of dwindled and gone away and really what he's articulating in the book and it it has taken me many years i've been doing this now 20 years is that you you realize and you find out that these kind of like moments for lack of a better term i call them like deadline.com hollywoodreporter.com the getty image moment is very temporary and the job for you as an artist is finding the joy and meaning in all of it And as trite and corny and cliche as that sounds, he talks about people that you meet along the way, especially in our business, that take their own life.

16:28And what I loved about what he's describing here is really pursuing a creative life and going through ups and downs in a creative life actually isn't about how high the highs are or how low the lows are. It's really about beyond meeting. It's about joy. and one of the things he says in it that I felt was so powerful is he tells his son never stop losing joy and he says as your father I'm gonna make sure I don't lose that joy and it was a reminder to me the times that I've been through that are really difficult yeah and stark and dark and you don't know what's next and you don't know what's gonna happen your children can see that worry in your and they have just such a like a clear sense there's no bullshitting them they sniff it out right away I really love that he said that it's incumbent on us as fathers to not lose that joy that way we continue to give it to them yeah because that darkness that kind of existential dad stare into the distance is like a very real thing um and he's been someone that I've known personally on the road who has checked in and has given me these little gems and things of joy hey you're in charlotte you should go here or like hey do you have a nintendo switch i mean these are like yeah i know they sound like asinine no but it makes you like feel locked in in a real place yeah with a real person yeah i also love the stuff about college and he talks about how um one of the quotes that i wrote down because i think it's true it's like everything at college is great or devastating there's no middle it's one or the other yeah it's very true for best of the best as well which is the experience of the characters of your new movie on netflix was your experience of college like that too it was 100 yeah it was just intense expectation yes so my parents want me to be a doctor and you're just going like head first into biochem 103 it's just so hard you know like you're doing math there's no numbers page one no numbers like i i have to like the whole book is no numbers but it's math it's it's stuff like that where the devastation is the actual academic devastation is big but then also like your first real relationship like that type of devastation is really big you're also for lack of a better term like trying on your different that's so true you'll have like i i'm in this hat phase yes like the window that I went to college in 04 to 08 we moved on from Craig David to Justin Timberlake Justin Timberlake had young boys in college in a chokehold were you a fedora wearer there is there are photographs of me on a canon digital camera of me wearing a fedora yeah have you got them squirreled away they're on a hard drive to be destroyed they're going to be thrown deep into the ocean the way the u.s government threw osama bin laden into the ocean they're going to be in the depths of the ocean i i pray these don't come out but there are some interesting photos of me in college on the internet you can save them for your memoir but what's interesting you know it's i appreciate you kind of um mentioning that in the movie you know it college is also the first time you get to kind of be number one on the call sheet you get to be the lead of your own life yes who am i what do i believe who do i want to be there's something really beautiful also about this idea of infinite possibility so there's so much that's possible there's something i think that's also so devastating watching someone go through that their first heartbreak their first one but one of the things that i thought would be we really wanted to explore in the film is when you think about the college movie oftentimes it's about two roommates and it's the there's usually a love interest or a boy involved and there's this will they won't they in this movie we wanted it to be a will they won't they about the female friendship exactly and growing up in an immigrant community when you come to the united states and a lot of diaspora kids in the uk have this as well you call someone your family friend which means your parents probably came at the same time and so when you're your friends it's not just your friends it's like there are photos of us together taking you know in the bathtub as babies you know your your mom took care of me they fed me i've been you know i've worn clothes from your closet yeah and i thought about that as an interesting concept of oh if a friendship like that was on the rocks how does it's not just a friendship falling apart it's like a family oh totally and you have to find like a new rhythm as an adult for relationships like that I think of like you know how to find a way to exist which is kind of actually a theme in the next book that we'll talk about gold diggers um oh my god which it really the these kids grow up together like you say they are deep family friends and they have intimacy in their own friendships but they have to find a way to exist as they all like find their own path yeah what so what I loved about gold diggers i don't know if you've experienced this so there is a will they won't they that's it's that classic kind of two kids growing up in the same neighborhood but what i immediately attached to in gold diggers is i've always seen my own memories almost like a 16 by 9 where i feel like I'm watching or observing something and that feeling especially growing up in like an Indian American household the the main character and the protagonist in it sees this girl and she's so smart and everything comes to her so easy and there's this what would life be like that like for you I wonder and there's this feeling of like envy of jealousy I remember when I was graduating high school there was a kid and I've told him this he doesn't believe me his name's Nikhil Sachdev and I remember we were he was walking graduation day and it was like and he will be attending Stanford University and I was like I wonder what this day must be like for him because like his parents are so proud he's going to one of the best like schools in the country it's just a few hours away from us like in in the Bay Area I'm graduating during this period of time where like technology software yeah the internet it's like burgeoning i got to grow up around this idea that like silicon valley is this magical place and i was like you're 18 you did it all right yeah like to me nakil was a pop star yeah you did it yeah and i was like i was going to a state school and gonna have to potentially i was gonna end up living at home with my parents so i really felt like a fuck up a failure like oh this is it yeah and this is your destiny and what i loved about gold diggers is it's the first real analysis through magical realism of this idea of like ambition yes and like coveting that the story of ambition can sometimes be carried for many generations yeah well and it's their burden to carry like one of the lines i wrote down is like it wasn't just our job to grow up but to grow up in such a way that made sense of our parents choice to leave behind all they knew to cross the oceans yeah it's like you're not just carrying your ambition like you're carrying like multiple generations ambition.

23:50We did this for what, right? And you got to see what I loved about even the characters is they talk about the parents. Again, protagonist in any book, of course, like a tried and to trope is my parents suck. And they suck and they always will suck. And, you know, parents suck. But there was a tenderness and love and understanding to unpacking their parents as these primary characters that had to endure a lot and there's this understanding of oh I know what my mom had to go through and they they kind of peel that back they see the history of their parents and what they had to sacrifice I also love that there's this big time jump yes about what happens when ambition kind of um things don't work out the way you thought they would.

24:40Well, yeah. And when it starts to fertilize in the wild of things like not going maybe the way you think they will. And it's, I think the sense of place is so good in it. Like it starts in Georgia and then ends in San Francisco. And just, I felt obviously not growing up in either of those places. She's so good at making it feel so vivid. Did it, did the version of San Francisco feel relatable to you? I mean, the, the version that she describes both in suburban Georgia totally was like suburban Davis where I grew up. the family parties, the sense of weirdness. I mean, Sanjana perfectly describes male puberty like brilliantly.

25:15I don't know how she did it, but she nailed it. And I was like, how are you in my head? Yeah, in my brain. It was insane. She also does this really great job of articulating, I call it brown yearning. There is a yearning that's beyond, it isn't a HBO euphoria high school yearning. there's this feeling that you have I certainly had it with my first crushes I don't even know how to describe this but it's like I don't know what's happening inside of me but I like looking at you and I would maybe want to hold your hand yeah I don't know what you want to call that but that's a feeling it's just a feeling and that feeling for some reason can like last you years yes yes totally and also it's because it's that mix of like that all playing out in the amphitheater of high school which is traumatic with its own like ecosystems and power structures and the way that those things like the politics that you have in those friends inside your home and then at your in like public is completely different i remember this such a tiny thing but i remember when i went to primary school and my cousin who was like eight years older than me i was like hey and he was like oh no i was like this high or whatever but because obviously i'm used to like him coming over and we're like besties but he was like bitch we did not talk but it's that experience and she kind of gets at that the way that like you can be forever friends through your family and then in high school yeah you guys will not cross did you have a moment with your cousin like that where you're like but we're family like we're best friends oh totally i remember it was in like a we were doing like a singing thing so i was in reception which is the first class and we had to like pick pull someone in to like go run around the circle with you and i was like well obviously i'm pulling obviously he was like what the he was like in year six or sixth grade as we'd say here but yeah yeah so far there are moments like that that can wreck you i had a moment like that with my cousin where we had to write we had had this assignment describe your best friend so me and my cousin went to the same school so i wrote an essay about him it's like he's my best friend we play basketball together after school yeah his aunt his auntie takes care of me yeah i wrote this like beautiful like sonnet of our friendship and i was like and he is my best friend and he was like husson we're not best friends we're just cousins and there's a cousin fifth grade yeah mrs parker's class fifth grade yeah we can identify it fifth six combo yeah wrecked me that sentence that couplet sentence i was at his wedding two weeks ago yeah that sentence wrecked me you know it really destroyed everything inside of me and just it you know this is pre-tweets elon musk hadn't even created what the you know the you destroyed me in 14 words yeah not less we're not best friends we're yeah you wrecked me in six words yeah well talking of weddings i also loved her description of the wedding as a she goes indian weddings are memory dungeon memory dungeons you wander through them and everyone is throwing some version of your past self at you do you relate to that does that feel true Yeah.

28:19So Indian weddings are also so interesting in the sense that they're these weird, at least with aunties and uncles, it's this like high school or university reunion where they get to track where you're at. And there really is this kind of very fucked up check in of like, so what are you up to? And it's so loaded. It's so heavy. And I know what you're saying, which is essentially like you didn't pan out the way I thought. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. Yeah. And now when you go to them, are they like super impressed and like, wow, like, or? You know what's so interesting? This kind of connects with the Roy Wood Jr.

28:58book is that I am living my dream. I am getting to do what I love to do. But what's so fascinating is you get to that destination and now like a mortgage and back pain. And these new problems emerge. and there's in I think gold diggers talks about that too with the time jump is this thing that you thought would be the dream this thing that you thought would be the destination carries its own baggage and problems there's something you know very unique about me and my wife I'm entering my 40s we've been married now 11 years I've known her 20 years you know we're entering a whole new chapter of life funny enough some of the kind of painful cute yearnings stories and moments those were inspirations for best of the best you know the after parties the like the feeling the yearning all that sort of stuff so good but when I look at it I'm like that that is me but it's not me like I'm another person we're both different people yeah and when I'm at those weddings sometimes there's this feeling of like oh I know you like and they're they're connecting with me oh I know I knew you when I held you when you were a baby or I knew you when you were in the eighth grade yeah and i don't even know how to describe this but it's that feeling of i am the same person but i'm not completely different yeah it's it's really hard but i am the same it's it's such a paradox it is tell me about your college experience with you so were you dancing i was not dancing she was she was dancing but i was yeah oh she was dancing yeah there was a whole nother level two which is the competitive dance circuit which means hundreds of teams are competitively dancing in in sometimes various different styles which is like garba ross Baranathiam, which is classical Indian dance, Hindi film, in Hindi fusion, there's hip hop, break dancing, crumping, all combined into one.

30:50It's really competitive. So you have a bunch of kind of like STEM majors by day, but then hardcore dancers by night. And yeah, there's a lot of hormones and a lot of feelings and a lot of yearning and a lot of real passion that is both comedic but I also think it's beautiful in the sense that we're all these diaspora kids from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka that we're able to kind of reclaim the vestiges of kind of colonialism and these kind of sectarian beefs that we all come from but we get to reclaim it in the best version through our love of music and dance and there is something really powerful about finding yes there is true political strife and there are a lot of things that need to be unpacked that the diaspora is continuing to unpack but joy love dance music these are all things that make us human and they're revolutionary in and of themselves as well to see us articulate our place in the world with a huge amount of agency outside of um pain and suffering and one of the kind of sub themes that we have in the movie is this idea of what what do we do with the kohenor diamond this is something that's been talked about deep for a long time totally oxford union you know reparations the case for reparations it should be given back to india and i thought there was something that was really powerful in it our lead played by my tray remi krishnan who is thumel sri lankan she's so brilliant she's fucking yeah so brilliant in it but she has this thing of like keep it yeah we don't need it yeah and it's this acknowledgement of the past this recognition of the past but this stepping forward to create something new and beautiful i thought that was so well done the sort of disputes that the team has about how they want to take tradition and history and how they want to infuse that in their work and but also find a way forward i think that's such an interesting will this define us yes which you know which is so interesting because i feel like james by percival everett does that so brilliantly yeah taking an iconic piece of fiction that I grew up reading as a kid okay Huck Finn everybody has to read it in elementary school I always love in books when they take a premise and they just kind of flip it on its head totally what if we were to look at this thing and I feel like sometimes films aren't aren't doing that no but the great uh fiction writers and Percival Everett does it brilliantly in this book and there's another book called um The Sellout by Paul Beattie like similar in that way too but The premise here that I think is just so badass is it takes the story of Huck Finn, but it's told from the perspective of Jim, who's the slave in the book.

33:42And in comedy, irony is always, it's the weapon of choice that you want. Like finding something that, like, oh, that's weird or strange. a character with anger management issues has to be in a safe house with monsters that will only wake up when you're loud that's you know what i mean like a premise like that where hey these things are in tension with one another what i loved about this book was was that jim the slave is actually this incredibly brilliant erudite thoughtful poet and that the slaves during that period of time are actually playing a character oh yeah they they're quite literally smarter than even their own masters and then the flip at the end and the reveal that huck asks jim why do you care about me so much which is every kind of piece of iconic text for example when i remember first reading romeo and juliet to me the whole end of that book is just a logistical problem you guys need to text message your drug dealer and you guys need to take drugs at the same time the problem is you guys have two different yeah not on the same schedule yeah you're just not on the same schedule yeah it's totally that what um i love the reveal here and it was sitting there the whole time but he's just so brilliant at pointing this out the reason why jim cares about huck so much is he's like i'm your dad yeah that's why why else would i help you up and down the road why do you think I would be so gracious why would I look out for you you're you're kind of an idiot yeah you know like for what who am I doing this for and I thought that was really beautiful then there's a part of it that you know I've had to I've definitely dealt with this challenge in my work and I'm sure you've had to deal with this as a writer as well which is how do I say the thing without literally saying the thing and there's this moment where where Huck basically goes wait so does that mean i'm a slave does that mean i'm the n-word yeah does that mean i will be is my destiny defined by chattel slavery like will they do what to me what they did to you and james says something really jim who is james says something really powerful to him which is doesn't fucking matter they don't see you as black yeah yeah and it was this really powerful moment where I realized it's such a beautiful articulation of the it's only about the way the world sees you that's actually what matters that's how you navigate race in America he's not seen as black so he can play the the charade as long as he'd like and you see Huck understand for the first time real empathy of the privileges that he has and the way he's been able to navigate and move through the world yeah and I just thought it was it was done really brilliantly and the end is just fucking badass if you love Django Unchained and like it's just awesome it's so good I mean it's a it's so gripping as a book as well that you can't put it down and you sort of like can't believe that it's all coming together in the way that it comes together and I just love there was so much that I love about what it says about how you sort of write yourself as a character as you grow up as well like and that's really what you know he says I with my pencil I wrote myself into being I wrote myself to here and I think that's like a pretty like in a way quite relatable concept in a way I mean and I wonder did you ever have that experience early in your career where you felt like you were sort of not like were you writing yourself into the version of who you wanted to be because there is some of that with a lot of our work yeah I think one of the the biggest challenges I've experienced as a person and a performer is there's a way you see yourself, but so much of your life is defined by the way people see you.

37:45And funny enough, as someone who worked in retail, there is that thing of you're assessing and whether it's school or a shop or you're going to go get coffee or you're meeting someone for the first time, we're all being assessed very quickly. Showbiz is also one of those things of what feeling do you evoke through the screen immediately. Women have to deal with this all the time. Like what the way they present to the world, but the way the world sees them and these things constantly being this tug of war. But I loved how he talked about this idea of like, I wrote myself into existence. Just even that idea, it exists in ancient biblical texts.

38:22It's in the Quran, all of those things, this idea of reading and writing of what is possible. And I love the way it pays off at the end with the, the, he faces off with judge Thatcher and the judge says, do you know what's going to happen to you if you kill me basically? And he pushes back. It's this huge, like middle finger moment of like, Oh, you're asking me, can I imagine? Yeah. Can I imagine it? Oh, I can fucking imagine it. Can you imagine it? Yeah. And there's this beautiful thing where at the beginning of the novel it's this idea of you write your way to agency I think writing yes is our way to to say like hey I'm not I may not be in control of the things that happen to me yes but I am in control of this yeah this this pen I will write my way I will write this role for myself I will write the way I feel about this I don't have the answer yet shout out to Roy I don't have the answer to this thing that I'm grieving but I will write my way through it and then at the end what love about the end of this book is this idea of don't lose that sense of imagination like imagine that you do have agency imagine that you you know for james he imagines himself as a whole person yes literally debating in fever dreams with voltaire you know like no i i do stand with the great philosophers and kings of our time yeah and it's a thing where for me even as a performer I've had to think about that.

39:52You do need to make art where you're centered in the frame. You do need to make art where you center the beauty of your culture in the frame. And I know this sounds like a plug, but I do believe it. The way I feel about the film, our music, our culture, our beauty, the beauty of my culture is put center frame. and it's something that I did not get to see a lot specifically in American cinema, that type of like glamour, joy, love and aspiration. When I think about the American musical, it was always seen through the lens of like Chicago singing in the rain. And then there were these VHS cassette tapes that I grew up with.

40:34I'm like, no, no, no, nobody does musicals the way we do music. You don't understand. And this is kind of my offering. I think this is and can be a part of the American musical. Yeah, I love it. I think that's exactly, it's like writing that story into existence. When the author was, when Puzzle Everett was working on this book, he reread Huckleberry Friend around 15 times. Are there any books that you love to reread? What is a book that I love to reread? I'm not a big rereader. I don't think everyone does it. I love rereading the books that my kids are rereading. Oh, what are they reading? Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

41:11Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. Amelia Bedelia. Yeah. Great. So good. And yeah, revisiting Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary. They're my favorites. They really are. And there's a what's so interesting is so I was born 1985. I love also looking at like the first page. Yeah. And I was like, this was written 1968. Yeah. And so for us as writers, it's it's so fascinating where I don't know if you ever have to you struggle with this in your writing is how much does pop culture, politics and technology infuse itself into the story yeah but when i reread beverly cleary i realized like there are these really powerful just timeless emotions jealousy yeah envy why does she have that totally you know it's like it's just timeless i know and there's also so much funny stuff that you're like god that's really dark like i we've got all of my um our all of our childhood books at home and my sisters both my sister's kids read them and one is like postman pat gets fat like that's the title of the book and like all of these tropes that you're like it's I mean it's quite funny when you see the original you're like oh that's how we all ended up with a complex about that thing that's how we ended up with a complex about that thing because you see it in these stories things are yes like rereading where I was like this is a story this is a story about neglect yeah he's basically sent upstairs without a meal yeah and then I think he has a hunger-induced post ayahuasca trip essentially i know it's it's so funny and seeing all of those like cultural tropes play out like talking to a point about the irony you do just like when i'm reading some of them sometimes i'm like aha i see where the seeds of this this neurosis came from it's so funny but um and then sometimes it's sometimes it's so silly like but it's beautiful so diary of a wimpy kid sometimes it'll just be a joke about like butts or farting and it is fun i was like it is funny yeah it is and watching my kids just like laugh at that I'm like you're right it is like a trumpet but down there yeah that's a funny thing like it's not deeper than that yeah you know it's all joy it's a reminder of joy in and of itself do you have to get your kids to read or they like natural readers or like enjoy reading or I'm very lucky that both me and my wife we're on the same page yeah um my kind of policy is I will get you literally any book yeah and any book you want yes like it's yours yeah and um I really love actually just reading with them yes because there is a sense

43:40um you know one thing I'm struggling with at this point in my life is dealing with finiteness things are feeling finite this past weekend I was with my parents I'm starting to see them slow down I'm really starting to see them age you know my dad's hair dye it's missing in some spots like I'm seeing time really take its toll and I'm really processing this like oh these are going to be the last few moments we probably have together there is the window is closing yeah and it's scary I'm not ready for it yeah and I don't know how I'm going to get through it

44:18but what I love about reading children's books with them is there's that feeling of infiniteness yeah and there still is safety yeah there is safety and comfort um things are hard but you don't have to answer the hard questions just yet yeah and so I'm holding these two things at the same time in my life right now which is um my parents are in the fourth quarter this is like this is their last chapter and I'm taking care of them and I'm my in-laws are getting older and I'm going to a lot more funerals and those like that is a reality and then also we're taking first grade photos and like my son is like being really goofy in the photo and he's meeting all his classmates for the first time yeah and it's just boundless energy and joy is that sandwich generation thing isn't it i was talking about with sophia bush last week when she came on that that thing when you have to start parenting your parents and you're like parenting the other direction as well i think is it's a heart heavy weight to carry and i think it's this thing i don't know if there's a word for it what is the word for holding joy and grief at the same time god or even impending grief the feeling of oh i know where this is going i mean that's the thing that a lot of people run from right i mean that's being able to hold it simultaneously is very mature and capable i think a lot i don't have i'm like looking at you i was like can you call colman domingo right now no literally we need his advice how do we do it no for real though because i mean because it's so it is truly i don't have fuck you just can't but i think you're right about reading with kids and i remember viola davis saying that when she came on she said she read the twilight books with her nieces when they were in their teens because she was like i want to know what they're like what they're where their imaginations living in a way and what world they're living in.

46:13I think it's such a fun way to connect with children and find joy. But I love this book so much and I also think it has one of the best descriptions about the joy of reading in it where it talks about it was a completely private affair and completely free and therefore completely subversive because that's what I remember when I first found books that I loved as a teenager. It was that sense of, well, I think this means this and I know that they say this, but I'm feeling this and it's such a personal experience and it's so wonderful. yeah I love it it's a very special book well last we can talk about Yesteryear by Cara Claire Buck which is your fourth book tell me what you love about this one so I'm not even done with it yet oh you've got some way to go where so where are you up to I am at she has transported oh okay yeah if you talk to any comedian every comedian is jealous of a great premise they'll be like oh that's a great bit yeah what she has laid out in these first few chapters I was like oh this is a great fucking premise yeah so I travel a bunch for work I've been on tour while I'm promoting this movie as well and we're about to shoot a special but I keep walking past this book at Hudson Newsstand and I keep seeing people at the airport reading it a couple of things that I've always tried to do is irrespective of hey is this my taste or is this not my taste it doesn't matter I completely agree you've got to consume especially when it's that much of a pop culture moment yeah and i'm i'm always wondering to myself what's the um there's usually one of two things that happens i think with pop culture where it has this it spreads like wildfire the first is thank you for saying this moment jordan peele's get out had that yes where i could feel it in the theater there's people that are like this is what it feels like yeah yes it feels like being in a horror movie being black feels like you're in a horror movie so there's this feeling of affirmation some of our screenings of best of the best the moment they hear some of these the people in the crowd hear the songs they're like that's my fucking child i grew up dancing to that song there's a video of me eight years old i'm dancing at a wedding to that song there's that feeling of thank you for saying this thank you for articulating this thing that has existed within me and the second is i've never seen the world this way oh what an interesting new way to see the world and so the things that have been floating around in the zeitgeist what is a trad wife what is a traditional marriage what are marital responsibilities expectations versus reality in marriage the way we present ourselves online on social media but the premise of this of trad wife influencer gets teleported to a new time question mark yeah and has to live with the consequences of what traditional living would be in the mid 19th century it is such a great premise and I think that's what's drawn so many people and do you follow any trad wife creators are you familiar with the light biggie so you know how you asked me where you were like hey what's your greatest joy about reading with your children one of the one of the things i felt and i don't know if you have felt this with interpersonal relationships intimate relationships sometimes i've had this where i've got where i've gone with people that i love i go i feel like we're in two different algorithms yeah we're we're watching the sopranos oh yeah but you're in season six and i'm in season one yeah you know and i'm like i feel like we're in two different but i but i i do feel like society and also in relationships sometimes you're on a different fyp a for you page and what you're what you're watching is different from what i'm watching the beauty of reading amelia bedelia we're landing at the same point at the same time yeah at the same place and there's something really it's rare yeah it is in this day and age to be in the same quote-unquote culture yeah yeah but that's what it means to like read something together so i have observed like my wife will be on tiktok or instagram and there's this influencer that like she like whispers like i'm cutting up green onions and then i'm putting it in a french onions and i was like what is this and she's like oh she's a trad there's just there's times where I feel like I'm not for this world.

50:35No, I know. I feel this way. And so I have to like, hey, walk me through this PEMDAS style, take me through the whole math equation so I understand what's happening. This book was just a great, I finally understood kind of what being as FYP page was. I was like, oh, this is what's popping up in your algorithm. Interesting. Oh God. And again, like there's this great interaction. Like this is what I mean. What I mean, reading can really expand your perspective and make you feel empathy and you can live in other people's shoes and i know that sounds obvious but there was this interaction that happens in the grocery store where she visits someone from high school and there's there's all these subliminals that are happening both ways but she talks about this idea of oh she's the people in the comments are quote unquote angry women yes and i thought oh the author is really beautifully articulating jealousy envy yeah expectations, failed expectations, living a fulfilling life versus people who are living an unfulfilling life.

51:38Like I loved how complicated and messy and layered all of that was. And again, it's like, I don't know this world. Yeah. I mean, I love that a bit later, and I don't think this is a spoiler, one of the women who she's working with, or maybe it is early on, she talks about how, why do you not show them that side of it? And she's like, they don't want to see it. and I think that I wonder the producer yeah the producer and and she's like that's not what the audience wants do you ever feel that with your comedy that there's you have to serve up a certain version of what people want rather than maybe necessarily I don't know just like how do you weigh that up that's like a great question it's a it's a bit of a long-winded answer is it okay yeah go off there's a great book by Neil Postman called amusing ourselves to death it was written in 1985 but it's about I think you would love it I don't know if you if you haven't read it yet it's a really great analysis of media and a beautiful articulation of the medium is the message but Postman was a journalist and writer and he writes about this idea this insanity of what television is so he breaks down this concept the news specifically so you'll go from like an eight minute news segment about a genocide or a war or starvation in Somalia and then immediately you'll cut to commercial break and now it's toyota thon yeah zero percent down zero percent apr financing but you've just seen children killed this is written in 1985 and he was like this is mental illness the news that you are consuming yeah via peter jennings yeah is insane because to to be human and to see other people's humanity means to see images and photos and experiences and you actually have to live with them and process them you cannot immediately go to a commercial for zyrtec no yeah you call your doctor about like it's a it's a truly bizarre thing but the scroll is that as well the the point of what i'm getting to is postman argues that this medium of multiple cuts of packaging it in either eight minutes now what we have is short form content this will exist in long form but then in these like little tick tock little nibbles and bites and sips is an insane premise and should be approached as such you know my father's an organic chemist if i were to tell my dad who has a phd in organic chemistry that there are people that teach themselves via youtube shorts about deep scientific concepts it would he would go crazy yeah yeah it wouldn't compete it would fry his brain and one of the things that postman tries to tell us is just just know that the medium is the message but these things you You know, you will not TikTok, tweet, YouTube short, or podcast your way into deep understanding or meaning.

54:40Know the medium that you are engaging with. And as someone who's worked in, you know, political satire, television, film, now that I've seen behind the curtain, I've been in the final draft, and I'm sure you've had this as you've edited things, where they say, we need to turn up the escalation. What are the stakes? Like these are manufactured things by design. Life isn't like that. There isn't always a act to be act three. No. Entertainment is an allegory for life. It can be a very entertaining and edifying reflection of what life can be, but it is not life. And so I think that idea of. I as I've gotten older, I've come to understand what I do is entertaining.

55:27at the very least I need to deliver laughs and entertainment x many times per minute if it's done at its best it can be both entertaining and edifying yes it can uplift as well Sesame Street is a great example of that Fred Rogers is a great example of that Reading Rainbow is a great example of that there's many television Ken Burns and what they're doing a lot of the programming on PBS still does that it entertains and edifies but it is not salvation in and of itself it is not the be-all and end-all for that and so there's there's things that I've realized that there are certain conversations that I can try to communicate via road mic or through a 50 millimeter lens or an 85 but fundamentally I'm trapped by Avid yeah the editing software it is an edit it is a cut exactly it's an intermediated reality yeah it is media and I know it sounds like what I'm saying is very heavy but it is fabricated it is made up yeah and it's that I think making that connection that like your channels if you're on social media might be an expression of yourself they're not yourself though like they're just like a channel through which certain parts of you are mediated and that but that can feel hard because you get such immediate feedback and I don't know it's just it's and I think this book that's one of the things I think it gets out really well is that you know as much as I think you know they sort of want us to hate the the trad wife and hate the trad wife creator i'm like she's just a product of this like fucked up infrastructure we're all living with and like that we're all frankly making money from and i love the flashbacks yes you know so there's just this idea and i don't know if you have this um you know like people who like they're like i know you know you yeah so she has these really powerful painful flashbacks of there's domestic violence alcoholism abuse neglect um i have this with like my friends as well they're like oh you're you're hassan minaj and you're on one nightstand yeah oh really you're with bustle yeah you're it's like and they'll watch this and be like bro i know you yeah i actually know you you're passing from yeah you know and i've talked to riz i met about this he's like do people know me but you're fucking riz from wendley yeah i know i like i actually know who you are and there is that gap yeah because it's a weird thing yeah what are you yeah and we're all doing that we're all doing it and i sometimes think that i get the like oh but you're participating in a bit too much for it to maybe like have you like lost and it's like no i'm just like trying to make money i don't know what i would do whatever it is it's so like weird it's a weird thing to but then we're all also participating in it too exactly which is like the carousels of like today's day like yeah and so i i think the themes of what the book is talking about of just the presentation and performance of life i think the weird thing that social media has now done is it's been it's given us this um wager or wish fulfillment of like you can go from civilian to celebrity yes and aren't we all i know and your kids could be that too and you're like you know and i'm at the beginning of the book but i can't wait to see where it goes yeah well last question in this book she has like her college nemesis which is rena and i think best of the best is such a fun way into the like college nemesis thing did you have any nemesis in college you did yeah are you friends with them now i i'm i'm okay with them can i tell you yes please okay some of them were some of them were some of the people that my wife dated before we got together yeah but i love them as people they're lovely people who they are and I wish you well wherever you are on LinkedIn but I just want to let you know I won yeah but I also lost probably being this petty I probably lost but I won um what else um there are you know there's like chapters of your life yeah that there is that classroom nemesis there is that like I can't um but time is actually like a really beautiful thing because it truly does ravage us all oh i know and then you sort of like down the line and like it but it's you're all kind of in the same soup by the end of things like you know and what feels like these lines that you're on different side it all goes away yeah and you're just like in the waiting room at and while you land gone and you're like yeah you're here to for your colonoscopy too like it it spares no one and so the like the the like the pettiness and the foibles and they're all kind of funny now when you think about it.

1:00:00I know. Yeah. Well, I loved Best of the Best. I thought it was so fun. And it was such a, you know, joyful experience. And I think everyone does such a great job. All the different relationship dynamics feel so relatable. Thank you so much. Exciting. And thank you so much. Thanks for having me.