#130. J.K. Rowling and You

If only you were jk about being a huge asshole.

May 05, 2025

Hi everyone,

It feels weird to have a slightly lighter-than-usual standup schedule lately. “But Josh, that’s like…your job. What have you been doing?” Short answer: Don’t worry about it. Shorter answer: Other things!

Last night I performed on a fun show called 54/54/54 (featuring 54 performers singing 54-second songs on 5/4 at Manhattan’s 54 Below). It’s a little 55 burgers 55 fries 55 tacos 55 pies… in a fun way. I sang, per the host’s request, slightly less than a minute of “Birdhouse in Your Soul” by They Might Be Giants. I think I was…credible. But I was tucked into the lineup amidst some very heavy musical theater hitters. And, backstage, I had mentioned my song choice to other performers with little recognition in their eyes. So I did open my 54-second set by saying: “The performers you’ve seen tonight have beautiful voices and are performing songs you all know and love. I’m the only one brave enough to do neither.” Ten seconds in (or roughly 18% of the way through my performance), I made eye contact with a guy in the front row singing along, which made me feel literally and metaphorically seen. A fun night!

Earlier this year, I went on a little ticket-buying spree for all sorts of shows, and even though the money left my bank account months ago for some of these things, I’m finally reaping (going to shows) what I’ve sewn (ticket purchases). Last week Maris and I saw our friend (and Drama Desk Award Nominee!!!) Natalie Walker in a new musical where she is customarily brilliant. Her big musical number was the clear highlight of the show, not that it’s a competition with the other songs.

Then on Friday we saw Paul F. Tompkins’s Varietopia show on the tour’s NYC stop. (Okay this one we did not buy tickets for because a friend hooked us up. Thank you, Jordan!!!) This show was, also customarily, great. Paul was so funny as always and sang a beautiful tribute to the late Jill Sobule. And the musical guest (Medusa) was excellent as was the guest magician (Artoun Nazareth). In an unexpected coincidence, one of his magic tricks was extremely similar to one from the last magic performance we saw (last summer, we’re not doing like…constant magic watching), but that fact really highlighted how good his performance was, that we’d seen the trick before but enjoyed it this time even more. So much of the magic in a magic show isn’t about the magic part.

We also attended a one-year-old’s birthday party which was so much fun in part because a party for a kid that small is basically for adults, except everyone is more careful about covering electrical outlets and keeping knives out of reach. Happy birthday, Lulu!

This week I’m going to be hanging out at Frankenstein’s Baby tonight at Union Hall! On Wednesday I’m seeing Chris Farren and Oceanator play a show! Friday I’m going to

She's A Beast: A Swole Woman's Newsletter

’s book launch and then to Anthony DeVito’s new standup special taping.

I’ve got a few fun things coming up, including a live Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me recording up in Portland, Maine at the end of June! And on June 1st I’m doing another What’s New? show at Union Hall in Brooklyn to work out some new material. My friend Meredith Dietz who is very funny will be on the show as well, and I’ll announce some other guests soon too. I’m also hanging out at tonight’s Frankenstein’s Baby at Union Hall and co-hosting on the 19th!

In the meantime, you can listen to me on the

Culture Study

podcast talking about Massachusetts culture, and I got to chat with Griffin and David and Ben on the great Blank Check podcast about Amy Heckerling’s extremely silly gangster comedy Johny Dangerously which is actually really tricky to watch. (I used an internet archive link with pretty shaky video quality.)

Artwork for the Blank Check miniseries Pod Times at Ridgemont Cast. — Truly hilarious photoshops going on here.

PEP TALK FOR J.K. ROWLING

J.K. Rowling, peering into, presumably, the void. — Too bad she’s not taking a long, hard look in the mirror.

Last week, in defense of the network’s upcoming Harry Potter TV show, HBO’s Casey Bloys asserted that the series would not “secretly [be] infused” with J.K. Rowling’s worldview. Which, let’s take a second and acknowledge the bleak humor in saying, essentially: “We want this person’s intellectual property, but not, you know, her personal intellect, so much as one can call it that.” As if Hagrid Ogreman (last name presumed by me) comes from a separate part of Rowling’s mind, hermetically sealed off from a level of transphobia that appears, even to the casual observer, to have consumed her brain the way syphilis did to Al Capone’s. This is such a wild statement for Bloys to feel compelled to make. Like, when Woody Allen puts out a new movie, nobody feels the need to go: “Don’t worry! There’s no stepdaughter-marrying stuff in here!”

It didn’t have to be this way. You, J.K., created one of the most beloved book/movie series of all time. I don’t know why Harry Potter resonated as much as it did. But who knows why anything works? Mickey Mouse is a rodent who sounds like he’s been doing whippets. Jerry Seinfeld from the show Seinfeld is loosely based on Jerry Seinfeld, a New Yorker who hates everything. These are not intrinsically likable characters. And sure, there have been allegations of antisemitism in the Harry Potter universe. Personally, as a Jew, I was less offended by the gold-hoarding goblins than the fact that you decided the most evil guy in the universe should be named “Mort.” Still, you could have lived in your castle and even built another castle around that castle to insulate people from your terrible opinions. But instead you became more and more animated by your most bigoted impulses. It’s like you pointed a magic wand at your own head and shouted: “Transphobus amplifius!” or some other bullshit first-thought fake Latin.

Remember the halcyon days of 2007 when you were like “Truth bomb: Dumbledore is gay!” and people were like, okay sure that’s kind of a Macklemore-ass thing of you to say, but we’re with it. (Obviously there are two caveats needed here: Macklemore in his current Mackleform was not famous in 2007. And also, against most odds including his former signature haircut, Macklemore seems cool now.)

Today, instead of using your massive wizard wealth to cure a disease or feed the hungry, you are funding campaigns to make sure transgender women can’t enjoy water polo or whatever the hell you’re on about lately. It stinks. You, frankly, stink.

Here’s the bright side for you, J.K. Rowling, a person who will never feel meaningful consequences for the harm you’ve done to others and doesn’t actually deserve consolation. The criticism you’re receiving and the turmoil around your work: It is all your fault. You did this to you. I imagine the criticism now feels the same as when religious weirdos protested your books for promoting an agenda of Dark Magick. Just like Ricky Gervais gets the same charge out of his transphobia as he did from saying the Bible may have taken some liberties with details (bold!) and Dave Chappelle can’t distinguish between the criticisms he receives after talking shit about marginalized people or saying that American society is positively termite-ridden with racism (he’s right about the second thing, of course). But it’s not the same, obviously. And you with a fully-formed prefrontal cortex should be able to tell the difference.

The ball is in your court. Or, to address you with your own mythology, the Quidditch puck(?) is in your…I don’t know…broom-catcher? You certainly don’t deserve any benefit of the doubt here, but you could have, at any point over the past seven or eight years, stopped this all from happening. Instead, you continue to spew garbage thoughts while generating enormous sums of money off of the performances of a new generation of child actors who will probably grow up to know better than you like the last ones did.

So, congratulations, I guess. You are become Mort, destroyer of your own legacy.

[Brief, non-joke point!!!! In this oppressive political and cultural climate, a nice thing you can do is support trans artists and also non-artist transgender people! Perhaps throw a few bucks towards Trans Lifeline or check out the artists performing at the Liberation Weekend music festival later this month in Washington DC as two examples of things to do. Okay thanks!]

PEP TALK FOR A READER

This was a very concise request, but I did add one comma and a nickname.

I got laid off almost two months ago now and thought I'd feel creative (I play in a band, I make art) in my newfound free time, but mostly I feel bummed out. Is there a pep talk for that?
- Brainiyuck

There IS a pep talk for that, and it’s right HERE! Well, right BELOW HERE! Wait for it…

HERE IT IS: I have to believe that you are bummed out at least in part because the thing that happened to you is a bummer. Even (especially!) if the job you were at was a true pain in the neck, you were there for a reason, and not in a spiritual, everything happens for a reason, sense. The reason in this case is that they were giving you money to show up. And now you don’t have to show up anymore, which has its benefits, certainly. But they probably aren’t paying you anymore either, which is a pretty substantial drawback.

And, irritatingly, it’s not just unstructured hours of the day that allow for the best creation of art. You also need to cultivate the right mental space, not to mention pulling together the financial resources for art materials and things like dinner and electricity. It’s a bad deal, honestly. Unless your creative work brings in enough money to live off of (and sometimes even in that case) you’re always trying to balance a seesaw with Enough Bandwidth on one side and Enough Money on the other. The tricky part is, the seesaw of capitalism isn’t designed to be in balance!

An important part of pep talking, to me, is The Validation of Feelings. Because if I don’t acknowledge that there are legitimate reasons for you to feel bad, any response will come off as: “Actually things are fine, dummy!” Which is not what I mean! Especially because in many cases, things are not fine. (Will not elaborate. No need. If you think all things are fine…why are you here?)

Now, here’s the pep talk part of the pep talk: You can shake yourself out of this funk!!! Or, crucially, someone else can help shake you out of this funk. This funk-shaking could take many forms, probably not all of which are necessary! On the smallest level, you can fence off some time to do creative work in a contained period. Don’t kick your own ass for not being a gushing geyser of generative energy. You deserve to give yourself a few hours where imagining and executing creative projects becomes your entire task. Commit to not job searching or doing chores you put off over your entire tenure at the last gig or staring at the ceiling (or your phone) spiraling over the discrepancy between where you thought you’d be by now and where you currently find yourself. ESPECIALLY take some time off from that last thing. Maybe a friend can hold you accountable or even better collaborate with you on one of these simmering ideas. Or you could find a way to make some money that doesn’t stress you out too badly. OR, and I don’t mean to diagnose from afar, but I’ve spent some time around creative people, and maybe what you’re feeling is not just a post-job malaise but a smidge of depression. There are treatments and strategies for dealing with that too, despite what our current HHS Secretary might tell you!

This potential for satisfaction and improvement extends beyond creative ambition too. If there’s anyone reading who wants to learn how to rock climb or draft a will and testament or get a new printer cartridge, you can probably do those things with a combination of effort and support. Often that takes a little effort to discern what external obstacles are in your way and which obstacles are obstacling from inside the house, as it were or…as it ‘stacle.

So, to boil this pep talk down to two points, which maybe I should have done in the first place, but there’s no going back now because I’m too lazy to do that…

Your feelings of malaise are completely valid!
You can do something to adjust those feelings even though they are legitimate!!!

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
Aesop Rock - “Send Help”

Okay so last week I shared (and ultimately deleted from the newsletter archives) a kind of stitched-together late-90s style rap song that at least one of the artists involved didn’t want out there. Sorry, Big Daddy Kane! My bad! Please believe I would never knowingly defy your wishes!

Included here is a new song by Aesop Rock, who represents the other genre of rap music I was obsessed with as a youth. At the turn of the century, Aesop Rock made lyrically dense songs set to somewhat confrontational sounding beats. Not rap confrontational like M.O.P. but noise confrontational like Nine Inch Nails. I got really into the catalog of El-P’s Definitive Jux label (to which Aesop Rock was signed), in part because they put out a ton of good stuff and in part because I liked the ethos even when some of the music was too much for my gentle radio-trained suburban ears.

When you are fifteen, and a celebrity (or even just a non-celebrity artist you’re aware of) is twenty-three, it feels like an enormous generational chasm. But when you’re forty and the other person is forty-eight, that’s basically the same age. Isn’t that weird? We’re all just adults now? Eminem is fifty-two years old. What the hell?

I can’t quite tell whether Aesop Rock’s choice of beats has gotten a little friendlier over time, or if my ears have grown up a little, or both. Either way, I stumbled across this song and video on YouTube, and I like it a lot! It’s cool to grow together with artists you’ve known (or known of) for a long time.

And one more! As I mentioned, I have tickets to see Chris Farren (who is so good live!) this week in New York, and this new song is another classic mega-catchy melody with extremely depressing lyrics. I’ve never heard a song about this particular uncomfortable feeling before! It’s new! It’s great! Chris Farren!

And, of course, the new PUP album Who Will Look After the Dogs? is out now too! It is great, and I’m so excited to hear them play these songs live later this year!