#94 Chappell Roan and You

Good luck (sincere, not sarcastic like in your song)!

Aug 26, 2024

Hi everyone,

As you may have noticed, I’m running a little behind on today’s newsletter because I had a very nice weekend away from my computer, and I spent this morning driving back to Brooklyn from the wilds of Long Island. Maris and I went to a lovely party out that way with lots of friends (and way more very nice strangers) and then stuck around to go to the beach and generally spend a night or two away from our very demanding dog. Bizzy the Pug was home with a generous and capable sitter to whom we owe our lives for stepping up last minute!

Everything about the trip was a blast, but I want to highlight two especially nice little moments…

For some reason, my phone’s GPS voice (which is probably the same as many of yours; I don’t have some kind of hip indie cell phone or navigation app) emphasizes the “TURN” in “U-TURN” (instead of the customary emphasis on the “U”), so when it says “Make a U-Turn!” it sounds like someone with an Italian accent saying “Make-a you turn!” So we had a lot of fun with that.
Just before we left the party on Saturday night, Maris and I got to catch up with our friend Alanna who lives very close to us, but for some reason we had an easier time meeting up with nearly 100 miles from home. Alanna is in the midst of an exciting career change, and she talked about it with so much enthusiasm that our conversation stuck in my brain and crowded out a little of the crusty industry pessimism that had taken hold. It is good to remember that our professional futures are our own, and if we don’t like what’s going on, we can shake things up without anyone’s permission! (I’ve gotten to do SO many fun things this year, but I’ve also felt a little creeping pessimism about the state of tv and comedy that maybe I’ll write more about in the future.)

On Sunday night, or as you may call it “last night,” Maris and I sat on our hotel’s little patio and had a drink and enjoyed the mostly-deserted ambiance of a vacation destination after the bulk of visitors had scuttled back to their real lives. Then this morning we enjoyed a low-traffic drive back home, as two people who do not have rigidly structured professional obligations at this moment.

Oh and! Last Thursday I got to see my friend

Myq Kaplan

record his new standup special, which was really lovely. So many comedians came to see the show, which is the mark of a beloved member of the community imo, and Myq’s new show, which he co-wrote with his girlfriend Rini, is so warm and sweet and generous and funny and WILDLY intricate in its construction! I’m excited for people to see it when it’s available to be seen! After the show, a very nice newsletter-reader came up to me and my friend Gary and said some nice things, which I will NOT be passing along, but I wanted to say here that it was nice of her to do so!

I’ve got a bunch of standup in Florida and also Atlanta coming up in a couple of weeks on the Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me standup tour! And I’m also doing live radio tapings for Wait Wait THIS THURSDAY in Minneapolis (which might be sold out) and 9/26 in Kansas City, which probably isn’t yet!

Wait Wait Date Dates! (Atlanta is 9/8!!!)

I’ve got some fun New York shows percolating that I’ll hopefully be able to say more about next week as well! And I’m realllly psyched to be in Denver 9/19-9/21 for the High Plains Comedy Festival. Oh plus a few dates after Thanksgiving that I’m very excited for but can’t say much about yet where I’ll get to work with very cool people!!! How’s that for a teaser?

Oh! One last thing! I’m telling just a few minutes of jokes on a fundraiser for the Movement Voter Project over Zoom this Wednesday evening!

PEP TALK FOR CHAPPELL ROAN

A midwest princess. — Stop bothering her!!! Photo: Ryan Clemens

If you don’t know who Chappell Roan is, I imagine you don’t know any people under thirty, or lesbians, (or of course lesbians under thirty). Over the past year she has rapidly ascended to the stratosphere of a group I don’t know if I can pull off calling “the pop girlies,” thanks to opening spots on Olivia Rodrigo’s tour, festival bookings, and a very fun album! Taylor Swift is rumored to be on the verge of releasing a collection of audio recordings of times she’s called to order pizza in hopes of bumping …Midwest Princess down the Billboard charts. (Just kidding, Swifties! Taylor doesn’t do things like that, and by that I mean order her own pizza by phone!)

Recently, Ms. Roan (if you’re nasty? does that work?) posted two videos and some text calling out fans for invasive behavior like stalking her family and touching her in public. My friend Kelsey McKinney wrote very thoughtfully about this already!

I am just chiming in to say: Chappell Roan, you are right! Being famous seems bad, and thanks to modern technology, it’s become bad in new and annoying (or evolved and annoying) ways! This is different from being rich, which seems fun as hell and has mostly (as far as I can tell) remained pretty enjoyable continuously throughout history with brief downturns for scattered beheadings or attempts to become culturally beloved and, say, host Saturday Night Live or be the president. (But the second thing is more about fame being bad than about money being not fun to have.)

Granted, fame, at least in terms of lots of people being willing to pay money for your art, gives you the ability to make more art, often in the way you want to make it. But if you don’t need a following to make a lot of money, the dream would be to be wealthy for doing something so boring no one ever wants to talk publicly about it or you. I imagine whoever owns the underground parking structures in New York City rakes in so much cash they could topple the federal reserve on a whim. But I don’t know who those people are. Because they are smart. Or at least lucky enough to have inherited valuable real estate beneath the earth’s surface, and savvy enough to not jeopardize that by letting us know who they are.

Being rich, while not a moral good, is more enjoyable than being broke. But being famous is not necessarily better than only being known by the people who you know back.

All that is to say, Chappell Roan, you make cool art. And people are willing to pay money to hear you perform it. But that doesn’t entitle them to grab you in public or go to your sister’s job and take pictures of her. Anyone who thinks it does has probably never stopped to consider that other people, even famous ones, are people. And they definitely have not had anyone grab them by surprise in an airport.

One spring while I was in high school, Sherman Hemsley and Pat Morita were starring in The Odd Couple at a small theater in my hometown. One of my teachers ran into one of the stars out and about in town and exclaimed: “George Jefferson!” Sherman Hemsley frowned and said: “Right now, I’m Sherman.”

It’s beautiful to connect with art. It’s nice to appreciate the people who make it. But outside of that context, it’s good to let them just be Sherman.

PEP TALK FOR A READER

This request has been edited slightly for anonymity and to remove a nice compliment about me that I feel weird sharing as part of it!

My wife could use a pep talk as she heads back to school. This will be her 13th kindergarten class at an East African charter school in Minneapolis. She still loves teaching, and has become close with a lot of the families, but the administrative side of the position has become cumbersome and induces anxiety.
Still can't believe my governor has been Wilson from Home Improvement this whole time.
- Class Ack!

I’m not sure how many readers know this about me, or how many will just say “That makes sense!” when I divulge this piece of information, but I used to teach Pre-K for several years. It was a great job, and I only quit because I moved from Boston to New York to try and do full-time comedy type things! (Spoiler alert: It worked!) I really really appreciate and admire people who are career teachers. It’s such an important thing to do, which I mean in the least self-serving way possible given the previous few sentences, especially given how poorly we fund schools and how many absolute clowns are constantly trying to stop teachers from telling children anything about how the world actually is, and forcing them to pretend it’s the same world their parents pretended to live in 50-100 years ago.

I don’t know how helpful this pep talk will be, because it sounds like the non-classroom side of your wife’s job is a real hike up a muddy mountain, but her work is super, super important. And the fact that she likes half(ish) of the job is a true opportunity to exercise glass-being-roughly-fifty-percent-full optimism. Her job allows her (sometimes) to make meaningful connections and improve people’s lives. Some people never get that! They spend their entire professional existence denying people healthcare or telling kids where not to skateboard.

When I was teaching, our program was year-round, so the fall didn’t QUITE feel like a new beginning, and I did have a little bit of “here we go again” malaise every year, the same as when I was a student. But that feeling always dissipated once I met the new class of kids and got into a groove. Or as much of a groove as you can get into when the kids are still young enough that someone might still poop in the middle of the floor from time to time. There’s a good chance that at least SOME of the administrative stress will burn off when it’s just WORK and isn’t DREAD.

It is a shame that good teachers often get assigned more out-of-classroom work because they’re good with kids. It’s very much like the old Mitch Hedberg joke about “you’re a great cook…but can you farm?” And I don’t want to discount the fact that maybe a change of scenery would be helpful, but it’s not my job to suggest that kind of thing, and you didn’t ask for it! So, just know that I know that other jobs may exist. Cool?

Hopefully your wife’s school year will be more in balance than her work life has felt lately. But MORE than that, I hope that she’s able to cordon off the annoying parts of her work the way you set up a paper towel barrier on the table when there’s a spilled pitcher of juice. Even if the figurative glass is only 40% full (possibly because of some kind of metaphorical spill), that’s better than an Arnold Palmer of lemonade and rat poison, you know? Like, the good parts are good, and maybe she can skate by without the bad parts infecting them with their badness. What you’re she’s is good and important, except the parts that are annoying and important. And she deserves to feel good about it!

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
Stevie Wonder - “Superstition”

A classic, obviously, but last weekend this came on at a party and my friend declared it her favorite song ever, and I thought why not show respect to an all-time groove in this week’s newsletter? So here it is!