#112. Auld Acquiantance and You

Don't drop the ball (WINK) on friendship.

Hi everyone,

This is kind of a long one! I’m sorry. Or…you know what? You’re welcome! Yeah, let’s go with you’re welcome.

Happy (Almost) New Year! (Also) Happy Kwanzaa! And Happy Hanukkah (Still)! I’ve been lighting candles and saying the blessings every night at (or around) sundown, which I’d been sloppy about for a few years. But for the last two Hanukkahs I’ve been more attentive in part because it feels cozy to participate in tradition even when I’m not doing it with my whole family, and in part out of defiance of everyone who’s said I’m a bad Jew or a self-hating Jew or not a Jew at all for asserting that the United States should stop financing Israel’s assault on the people of Gaza (and Lebanon etc.).

Seeing friends’ year-in-review recaps has made me reflect on my year as well. I haven’t felt especially accomplished this year, which is okay (he says but has not internalized yet). But I have done a lot of STUFF. It’s harder to remember what I’ve done this year because we’re aware of so many things now. It used to be that occasionally you’d get a letter telling you about the ailments of a faraway cousin, and your harvest would be bountiful or…unbountiful. Now you have to know about Madame Web and a presidential election and a thousand other events that cast a shadow on your day-to-day life without your being able to do much of anything about them. (If you’re in line for Madame Web…get OUT of line! It’s not in theaters anymore and hasn’t been for months!)

joshgondelman

A post shared by @joshgondelman

So, in an effort to take stock of my own year, here’s a quick list of some things I’ve done that feel significant in terms of my own life (sorry you have to see them; I should really just have a journal). This year I: Crushed a seafood tower on my birthday, watched bootleg fireworks from a friend’s roof on July 4th, met Dionne Warwick, hosted the Writers Guild of America awards (New York ceremony), celebrated Maris’s birthday in Miami, drove all over Florida for gigs with my friend Negin (and also Dulcé and Alonzo were on the gigs but not in the car!), read a bunch of books, failed to read a bunch of other books, spent a weekend with my family on Cape Cod, saw Oh, Mary! off-Broadway and felt very smug about it, ate several bagels with my parents, worked very closely with a good friend on a short-term job, worked on a project that never quite went anywhere with a couple of other friends, worked on a project that hopefully will become something next year with a friend, recorded a new standup special with a team of friends as producers, made a big thing of soup, drank several awful Dunkin’ alcoholic beverages with my sister, watched the Celtics win an NBA championship (good), saw a bunch of great concerts, rode around in a van on tour with some of my favorite artists, said goodbye to our beloved elderly dog, celebrated lots of friends’ victories, bought some new sneakers, drank a million gallons of iced coffee, ate lots of good meals with Maris, complained, listened to friends complain, caught up with people I hadn’t seen in decades, made new friends, performed on the JoCo Cruise again, won a couple of Wait Wait episodes, closed down the bar a few nights, went home at a sensible hour many times, showed up in kind of a staggering “special thanks,” told jokes in two dozen or so cities, missed a gig because of weather, started a bi-weekly show at one of my favorite venues, got covid (probably) in Asbury Park, surprised an old buddy for his 40th birthday, did a big gig because a way more famous comedian couldn’t make it after all, attended Kristen and Kayla’s wedding and Mattie and Jaya’s anniversary party and Isaac and Kel’s “not wedding,” met several friends’ new babies, met the hosts of Taskmaster.

This picture again? Yes! Me and the Taskmaster guys!

That’s a year’s worth of stuff, I’d say!

Over the holiday week(s) Maris and I have been tearing through our DVR (okay, mostly via Hulu not actual DVR) and screeners, and here’s some stuff we’ve been enjoying:

Bad Sisters Season 2 (Apple+): We loooooved Season 1 of Bad Sisters and were extremely psyched for the Season 2 premiere. I thought this season meandered a little bit in the middle but was overall really good too! I’ve never written this kind of tv, but it seems hard to pivot from a thrilling mystery/caper in a show’s first season to a second season that’s in large part about Dealing With Consequences. (I felt this way about Search Party as well, which is one of my all time favorite shows, Seasons 1 & 3 especially!)

Interior Chinatown (Hulu): We just finished this last night. It’s formally inventive in ways that enhance the storytelling instead of feeling like bells and whistles. The themes are compelling, and the plotty mystery stuff is legitimately mysterious! Every performance is great; Ronny Chieng and Jimmy O. Yang especially are tremendous. There’s a touch too much voiceover in the pilot, imo, but I only even mention it to assure you that it eases back in subsequent episodes. This is truly a more people should be talking about this show type of show, and (as someone said to me on BlueSky) it really would have benefitted from a week-over-week release model where people could have caught on in the middle of the season.

Speaking of Ronny: Standup specials by Ronny Chieng (Netflix), Nate Bargatze (Netflix), and Ilana Glazer (Hulu), James Acaster (Max), Jim Gaffigan (Hulu). There’s so much good standup happening!!! Maybe I’ll do some specific standup recommendations on social media or here if people have requests/tastes that they want catered to. I’m also excited to watch Rose Matafeo’s special on Max and Michelle Buteau’s upcoming Netflix special, but I haven’t gotten around to one and the other isn’t available yet.

Anora: I really liked this movie! Probably don’t watch it with your parents like

Laura Bassett

did though!!! Midway through, Maris declared it to be Home Alone + Pretty Woman and then there’s a healthy dose of After Hours thrown in too. It’s full of one of my favorite movie things: Big ol’ goons getting in way over their heads. If you like overwhelmed goons, Anora is up there with The Beekeeper for me in terms of this year’s releases.

Hundreds of Beavers (free to watch on YouTube with ads!!!) is totally bonkers. People have described it as a live action Looney Tunes short stretched out to feature length. It’s visually spectacular in a way that is entirely out of step with the kinds of things being made right now (more on that in a sec). It’s much more like a classic film comedy (down to some gags that are clearly homages to that era). It slows down in the middle where you might go “Okay, I get it!” but the third act is spectacular. My eyes were wide the whole time. Watch the trailer below, and if you are at all intrigued, I think you’ll be dazzled by this silly-ass movie.

Not to be too ~inside baseball~ but I read this great reported piece in n+1 about how Netflix’s explicit mandate for its programming is to make and distribute series and feature films that are so accessible, they’re basically made to be watched while doing other things. The responses on social media were full of writers/producers/directors affirming that Netflix had told them in some form: “We don’t want to make stuff you have to pay attention to!”

This, in my humble opinion, stinks. Not that everything needs to be challenging to viewers, but it should at least strive for engaging. Between this and Liz Pelly’s excellent-slash-demoralizing exploration of the fake(ish) artists that Spotify has invented to populate their playlists, it is both stabilizing and devastating to receive confirmation that giant, zillion dollar corporations are lowering the bar for all sorts of art forms. There’s no problem with wanting background music (or even background tv on occasion) but starting from the premise of: “Make this mediocre because we don’t want people to focus on it!” lowers the ceiling on some of this work to crawl space heights. I don’t want to sound like I’m looking down my nose (or roiling with jealousy) at the artists who make these deals. Goodness knows I’ve done some weird gigs for money. But the “aim low” mantra from the biggest names (and bank accounts) in the industry really makes me queasy.

This all feels related to how every app and website offers AI assistance that takes slightly less time than a human could complete that task and returns worse results. Oh, Coca-Cola’s Christmas ad was generated by AI? Cool! I could tell by the way it’s a slurry of its previous Christmas ads (not exactly the apex of creativity to begin with) that looks bad and adds nothing new to the canon. I don’t mean to discount there ever being any useful implementation for this kind of computing technology (I think it came through for me while changing a flight in January), I’m just deeply skeptical of how quickly and forcefully it’s being shoved in front of us half-baked as a solution to the problems of “having to write a three-sentence email” and “people wanting to be paid for their work.” Even the Coke commercial works more as a signifier of “this is basically what you expect from a Coca-Cola Christmas ad” if you’re not paying attention. Nobody wants that! Nobody wants a half-assed product delivered under the assumption that nobody cares whether anything is good.

The thing about Hundreds of Beavers that I didn’t mention earlier is that it’s basically impossible to “second-screen” because there’s so little dialogue. You really have to keep your eyes on the action and follow along at a truly madcap pace. On one hand, it was annoying to not be able to send a text mid-movie without losing my place, but on the other hand, fuck me for expecting to be able to zone out! So many people worked hard on this film! The least I can do is hit PAUSE for nine seconds to reply “lol” to a friend’s message. So, on top of everything else, Hundreds of Beavers demands presence and mindfulness from the viewer in a way that felt very special and necessary.

I am hoping for more weird, trend-averse art in 2025, both from others and from myself!

(If you’re looking for something affirmative and big-hearted to read, I strongly recommend Blythe Roberson’s essay about going hunting as a vegan.)

What have you all been enjoying lately that feels made by humans for humans?

PEP TALK FOR AULD ACQUAINTANCE

Most people don’t know this, but the Times Square ball used to be made of covid.

Come on, Auld Acquaintance. No one is saying that you should be forgot. The song is just asking questions. Which, yes, is often cover for stating an opinion but lilting your voice at the end so you retain plausible deniability. But that’s not what’s going on here! You’re brought to mind, like, all the time! Just the other day I was thinking about back in the day when we were hanging out and you said that funny thing. Everybody was dying at how funny it was. I was so happy you were brought to mind when I remembered. So you definitely haven’t been forgot.

No, I don’t know why they wrote a song about the possibility of forgetting you. Maybe whoever wrote it was just going through some shit of their own and it’s about them more than it’s about you. Okay I looked it up and the lyrics to “Auld Lang Syne” are by Robert Burns, who I believe is Robert Frost’s Chris Gaines. Maybe he (Robert Burns) was worried about being forgotten himself. And he wrote this defensively like: “Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? lol I don’t know but wouldn’t it be weird if we kissed?” Stop hiding your true feelings, Burns! Just say what you mean!

Okay, you’re right. I can’t guarantee you’ll e’er (annoying poet speak for “ever”) be brought to mind. What I can can promise is that I’ll make a good faith effort to stay in touch. And if you do the same, we will figure out a way to be in each other’s lives. Or we won’t, but it won’t be for lack of effort. People fade away from each other with time. And it’s nobody’s fault. Or it’s somebody’s fault. But these things happen. Or they don’t.

Anyway, let’s totally grab coffee in the new year. It’s been auld lang syne.

PEP TALK FOR A READER

I’ve edited this request just a bit for length AS IS MY CUSTOM!

I’m a paramedic in a really, really, rural area with sketchy terrain and weather. There are not nearly enough medical professionals; it’s 45 min to the closest ambulance station and almost 2 hours by car to a trauma center. I’m 41, my health concerns are under control, I don’t have a legitimate reason to not do [this job] except that I’m burnt out. But, if I quit, or even cut back, there literally are not enough medics. Either even more people will go unhelped or my co-workers (the 3 of them) will all have to pick up more work than any of them can reasonably do. The community doesn’t have enough money to offer enough to bring outside people in and no one is local is interested in going through the training. I’m afraid it might not get better and while it would definitely be better for me to quit, is my little bit better worth the little bit worse for everyone else? Also, would the guilt eat me alive? Or should I just get a 3rd dog and put all of my emotional well being into that?
- Medic Alert

As usual, I do not have the answer to this question! But I do have some encouragement for you in what is clearly an intense and draining situation!

In most cases, it’s helpful to remind people that it’s not their job to worry about the lives of everyone around them. What makes this situation tricky is that it literally is your job to save their lives, which is the whole problem, right? Someone’s got to do it. And right now that someone is you, and so far no one else has reached out to grab that baton and run with it. So you’re stuck running and running, and because you’re a human being, you’re tired.

To reduce this to the level of children’s literature (I used to be a preschool teacher after all), it might help to ask yourself…are you being a Lorax here, or are you acting like a Giving Tree. The Lorax famously “spoke for the trees” like a pro bono attorney or a very confident boyfriend ordering for his girlfriend at a restaurant for some reason. The Giving Tree spent her life going straight Papa Roach (“CUT MY LIFE INTO PIECES!”) until all that was left of her was a stump. Honestly, the Giving Tree could have used a Lorax of her own to tell that kid to stop lopping off her branches. Nice work chopping up your best friend, idiot. And Giving Tree, set some boundaries!

What I mean to say is, there are many ways to offer care to others and to care for yourself. I don’t know what the Lorax did to unwind. Maybe he had an extensive hair-and-mustache-care regimen that helped him decompress while keeping his fur(?) lustrous. Maybe he did hot yoga. Maybe he had a drum kit in a cave somewhere that he could just fuckin’ go berserk on for an hour every night. I don’t know. Dr. Seuss didn’t cover it. He had other allegories to get to.

Regardless of whether The Lorax was a gamer or studied Brazilian jujitsu or practiced transcendental meditation, he’s a helpful model to keep in mind. Were his results perfect? No. But he was up against a problem that was bigger than his Danny DeVito-sized ass could handle. And so are you!

I don’t know whether the answer to your problem is leaving the job entirely, or taking a sabbatical, or scaling back your hours, or forming a union with your coworkers so the conditions are more sustainable, or merely grinding yourself down into a fine powder and blowing away in a breeze (hopefully not that one). But if you stick with a Giving Tree mindset, you’ll end up with an old man sitting on your stump, and by then it’s too late. You’ve been cut down, which is like being burnt out, but with an ax instead of a candle.

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
The Mountain Goats - “This Year”

This year and every year. A That’s Marvelous tradition like no other: Listening to this Mountain Goats song on New Year’s Day (which isn’t until Wednesday, so you can get a jump on it by listening now, or hold off until then, or both).

UPCOMING SHOWS

It’s a slow time of the year, but I’ve got some more shows to announce soon!

1/1: The Comedy Cellar (NYC)

1/9: Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me Live Recording (Chicago)

1/18: Bushwick Comedy Club (Brooklyn)

1/20: Co-hosting Frankenstein’s Baby at Union Hall (Brooklyn)

1/25: Sup, Bro? at SF Sketchfest