John Hodgman
John Hodgman
John Kellogg Hodgmanis an American author, actor, and humorist. In addition to his published written works, such as The Areas of My Expertise, More Information Than You Require, and That Is All, he is known for his personification of a PC in contrast to Justin Long's personification of a Mac in Apple's "Get a Mac" advertising campaign, and for his work as a correspondent on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionComedian
Date of Birth3 June 1971
CountryUnited States of America
hurt cult-of-personality massachusetts
By the way, if I have my own cult of personality with my own geodetic dome in western Massachusetts, I will have a hurt yurt for anyone who crosses me.
alive burden carnivores
I say, if you're going to eat a creature alive, you have to expect some screaming. That is the carnivore's burden.
magazines enjoy copies
I naturally own a lot of very old magazines. And I enjoy going to old magazines because the advertisements in those magazines tended to have thousands of words of copy in them.
intelligent wish brag
I don't wish to brag, but I'm very intelligent.
real creative panic
Panic is an incredibly catalyzing creative force. And almost out of sheer necessity, I found I had to talk about myself and my real life as it is effectively lived by me.
writing creative missing
You know, I began my life as a creative person writing true things for magazines and telling some very honest, straightforward personal essaying for This American Life, but until someone forces you, with a deadline, to really observe your life - unless you're motivated to do it yourself - there's so many stories that you miss.
littles stuff attention
I really wouldn't censor myself. But because it was on such a slower scale, I would throw things out, and I indulged the personal stuff as little flashes of truth. Little in-jokes for anyone who was paying particular attention.
creativity feelings dimensions
So much of creativity is the feeling that you're either getting a gift from some other dimension or some other part of yourself.
writing mind connections
When you're sitting down and you're blocked and you just start writing and something in your mind just clicks, you start seeing connections and so on, you really do feel like you're channeling something else.
religious real feelings
I'm not a particularly religious person, but that feeling of getting transmissions from someplace else, even if it's from your own consciousness, is very, very real. To me, at least.
comedian rooms prepared
This is something that the nimblest standup comedians learn, over time, to handle gracefully. They'll go between prepared material, then they'll respond to what's happening in the room and weave it back into the prepared material and so on.
jobs character interesting
One of the things about crowd work that's so exciting is when you discover a character in the audience who's interesting or funny, who you can vibe off of. If someone's got a weird job that you can make reference to throughout, or you can bring that person onstage - humiliate them, or celebrate them! You can put people in conversation with one another. The best is when something that they're doing can reflect back on something that you're doing.
kids reality talking
That catharsis is really the core of the incredibly personal comedy of Louis C.K. or Marc Maron or whatever. And look - I find it fascinating that I'm sitting here talking about some of these things, and not to low tones, and my kids are in the other room. I have to trust that if they hear what I'm saying and they have questions about it, I'll be able to answer it, and that's fine. But that's part of the scariness of it - the reality of opening up my own life and my own feelings.
careers long creative
My whole creative career is a product of the Internet. ...I'll take that back. To some degree. My fascination with cultural esoterica and trivia and so on was well-formed long before I got my first AOL account.