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
I think in American culture, we put value on economic success but tell people you don't have to be economically successful to be happy.
It's not a secret family like I have a beautiful, gorgeous wife in Tokyo; I have another mom and dad. I'm the kid and I have another mom and dad in Atwater Village, Los Angeles;
What I collect? Interesting jobs. Always to my thrill and excitement, but ultimately to my exhaustion, I collect interesting jobs. If an interesting job comes along, I take it; that's why I do so many things. I'm lucky to be able to.
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.
I say, if you're going to eat a creature alive, you have to expect some screaming. That is the carnivore's burden.
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.
I don't wish to brag, but I'm very intelligent.
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.
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.
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.
So much of creativity is the feeling that you're either getting a gift from some other dimension or some other part of yourself.
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.
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.
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.