How To Do Everything - Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

On our season finale, when a young listener has a question on behalf of her fifth grade class, we call up an old friend/chimp butt expert to help her out. And Saturday Night Live's James Austin Johnson walks us through his hilarious Donald Trump impression to tend to a listener's curiosities. Plus, Mike and Ian are stressed about some (cryptic) hate mail, so they call Patton Oswalt for some words of encouragement.You can email your burning questions to [e-mail]. And not to fear, we will be returning for season two. Follow @waitwaitnpr on Instagram for updates on how to stay in touch in the meantime.How To Do Everything is available without sponsor messages for supporters of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me+, who also get bonus episodes of Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! featuring exclusive games, behind-the-scenes content, and more. Sign up and support NPR at plus.npr.org.How To Do Everything is hosted by Mike Danforth and Ian Chillag. It is produced by Heena Srivastava. Technical direction from Lorna White.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Okay. So does this sound like you? You love NPR's podcasts. You wish you could get more of all your favorite shows, and you want to support NPR's mission to create a more informed public. If all that sounds appealing, then it is time to sign up for the NPR Plus bundle. Learn more at plus.npr.org. Hello. Hello, Patton. Hey. Hey, it's Mike and Ian from NPR's How to Do Everything Calling.

Hey, how you doing, man? We got a couple emails from you, our listeners, and we weren't exactly sure how to respond, so we're calling up comedian Patton Oswalt. So we're a how-to show. We get questions from listeners and we do our best to answer them. But we recently got a couple emails where we think we're being heckled. You think you're being heckled. We're pretty sure we're being heckled.

One of them is clear, clearly heckling us. The other one, uh, could possibly be a good faith question, but we think we're being heckled. Oh, okay. Well, let's hear these. Okay. The, the one we're not sure about is from Sky. And it says, Hey, Mike and Ian, just had a quick question. How do you end a podcast season? Looking forward to

the answer. Feel free not to mention my question and show by example instead. Thanks, Sky. Okay, that could be a case of them phrasing it badly and you guys being oversensitive. Okay. Yeah. That could be a guy just saying, oh, let's show by example. It almost has the tone of an elementary school teacher, but because entertainers like us are basically broken children at heart, we're super sensitive and we lash out. I don't think that that's

heckling. That doesn't feel like it. Okay. Okay. Well, that feels good. So I'll read you this other one. This is from Ed. What can you do to make your podcast funny? Like you would have a clue, Ed. That's definitely right. That's not encouraging. Okay. Yeah, that that is absolutely phrased as a heckle, but let me just tell you something. A lot of people, they wanna be your friend. Like they wanna already fast forward to the nagging stage

where friends kinda rib each other. So that could be somebody desperate for friendship by going, like you guys would have a clue, come on, we're good, right? Well, like that could have that, that almost has a feeling of loneliness to me, you know? You know, we break each other's balls, that's what we do, come on! So, treat them with, treat them with ball-busting kindness, if that makes sense, if that's achievable. Let me ask you this question then. Has anyone ever heckled you from stage and you've like, they were right? Oh yeah, well, I, it's at the beginning of I think my third or second to last special, I opened with a

story about how I was heckled and the guy won. And he was absolutely right, like he was absolutely friggin right, and it was like right in the beginning of my career. And here's what you have to do in those situations, okay? There are going to be nights where the audience wins or the heckler wins, especially when you're starting. And the most important thing to do is to wake up the next day and go, oh, world didn't end, it didn't affect anything, I have another chance to do it tonight. You can keep trying, you can keep doing it. Pete Okay. Okay. So, that's the attitude we should adopt when it comes to Ed and his, like you guys would have a clue, email.

Ed Like you guys would have a clue. Ed wants to be friends. He wants to be friends with you. Jared Of every comedian in the world, Pat, you're the most likely to end up hugging a heckler at the end of the night. I think that's my strength and my weakness. I can end up seeing my haters point. Yeah. Also, I tell people, your hatred of me is no match for my self-loathing. Don't even try.

I don't think you know what you're going up against right now. I think that's what we have. That is our ammunition. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. That's your impenetrable armor. Just terrible self-esteem. That's it, huh? Take that, Ed. This is How to Do Everything. I'm Mike. And I'm Ian. On today's show, the final show of this season of How to Do Everything. I'm Mike. And I'm Ian. On today's show, the final show of this

season of How to Do Everything, a fifth grader asks us to investigate how her substitute teacher made the whole class yawn. But first, hey, Mary, what can we help you with? Well, my question was, when I was a kid in the 60s, we watched TV all the time and there was this guy, Rich Little that did impressions and he was really famous. And even back then I had this question is like, how can he do impressions? Because everyone knows you can't hear your own voice like everybody else does. So how can he imitate people? Because he can't hear how he sounds. So how can that be possible? And I always had that question.

That's interesting. Yeah, because, you know, people always say you sound different to other people than you do to yourself. And whenever you hear yourself on tape or, you know, on your answering machine or whatever, like it doesn't sound like me. It's like, that's not me. And yet, have you had that experience of hearing yourself

on tape all the time? Like whenever I hear myself recorded, it's like, that's not me. And yet, have you had that experience of hearing yourself on tape? Oh, all the time. Like whenever I hear myself recorded, it's like, that's not me. And it sounds like some strange person. Can you do an impression of how you sound when you hear yourself? Probably not, but I know it just sounds so weird. It's like, that is not me. And people are like, well, of course that's you. You might listen back to this episode of How to Do Everything and think, that's so weird. That person has the same question I have. That person who's definitely not me.

Exactly. I would be like, what the heck? We've got somebody online. I would say the perfect person. We have the perfect person online to help. James Austin Johnson does a bunch of impressions on Saturday Night Live. You probably know him for a Donald Trump. So James, what Mary was asking, is this something you think about?

Oh, I think about this all the time. I think about it all the time because I've always noticed that impressions people, I feel like we all tend to have kind of odd, I'm sorry, did you hear that? My wife's text tone is Chewbacca going, hmm. No. Did you hear that? Wait, do your Chewbacca. I can't, I can't really, I don't know what little vibrating glottal thing that is.

Yeah, that's tough. It's a melancholy Chewbacca. Yeah. But you were saying. Yeah, yeah. Well, Chewbacca is a melancholy Chewbacca. Yeah. But you were saying... Yeah. Well, Chewbacca is a melancholy figure. I was saying that voices people and impressions people, comedians, I find that we tend to

have pretty odd resting voices. I don't know what it is about needing to be limber or needing command of all the different little glottises and chords in our throats that allow us to do these contortions. I don't know what it is, but if you notice, it's like me, Melissa Villasenor, Maria Bamford. We all tend to have kind of honking, I don't know what it is, like a goose, there's some sort of goose-like resting vocal position that I hate the way that I sound. And any chance I get to speak in a smoother tone of voice, like I love newscaster diction,

so I'm always pitching newscaster stuff at SNL because this is just a, this is a little bit more comfortable. This sort of voice and coming up today, we're going to be looking at a few different, isn't there something that's so, it's just like laying down in a bed of heather, I don't know if heather's comfortable. I think about that a lot. And so Mary's question, you know, how do you know what something sounds like? Well, the voice memo technology that we all have on our phones now, that's really open things, wide open. So what's that process like then when you're when you're

honing a voice or an impression? Some of them just like arrive fully materialized and there's no process at all. I mean, that's something that I particularly love about working at this show is a writer will come to me and be like, Hey hey you are Jim Nance in this sketch I don't know a thing about sports in any way Yeah, I'm I am I'm learning about sports now at 35 to relate to other men because I'm just feeling like I'm left out of a major national conversation. And then with someone like Paul Giamatti or Adam Driver, I will, those take years.

Donald Trump took years. With Trump, does it change? Because he's a person who I first saw you doing five years ago now, four or five years ago. He's changed. Are there things about your impression of him that have changed that you're aware of? Yeah, I'm, I'm shocked sometimes when people, um, will sometimes make a comment. Um, you should never look at comments by the way, but, uh, I do sometimes and I'm shocked when

people are like, Oh, he used to be so much better at it. Cause you know, I go and look back at it. Because you know I go and look back at my Trump in 2018 or 19 and I think it doesn't sound like him at all you know it's more of the broad strokes caricature that it's the Trump that I think everyone was doing you know like these people are really awful you know just like everybody does. And then I think he's just I think he's just more tired these days. I think he's a little older and a little bit more exhausted. So most of what I do is Trump is, I just try to slow him down a little bit more

and there's a little burst of energy that he gets, but it comes back down to this exhaustion and wanting to lay down. I'm tired. I'm so tired. I tried to raspify it a little bit more. I think that the pitch, I don't know if the pitch gets higher. I'm not really sure what's happening. I really try not to think about it too, too much.

And I don't go seek it out because it just, it's going to find me, you know, the new Trump video will find me. I don't need to go sit down and tinker with it. I, he's, uh, you know, having, being able to do that is such, it's such like a, right now it's such a necessary, uh, impression to say that we need on Saturday Night Live and in the world. Do you have like, do you have any absolutely useless impressions that, you know, you've been thinking about or working on? Oh, man, all the time. I would say that that is 95% of what I bring to the table at the show is stuff that we have zero use for. I mean, I've really

done it too many times at the table, but I really love the Rolling Stone writer David Frick. I personally think that he is just a really sweet and funny rock guy. I like rock music and I love watching rock docs and he's in every rock doc. You know, he is at the beginning of every rock doc laying it out for everybody. I'm Paul McCartney. I'm fresh out of the Beatles. You know, I have a number of moog synthesizers. My wife and I were making music in the studio. What music are we making? We're making the first Wings album. Like this... That's David Frick doing Paul McCartney? David Frick talking about Paul McCartney. I've pitched it from a few different ways and I just don't think I can get the hot young people I work with to think it's funny.

I got lucky that Bob Dylan is in the zeitgeist in a big way, thanks to Timothy Chalamet. So I was able to get my Bob Dylan on, and it was important to me because the Bob Dylan impression, the stock one that everybody does, you know, the, the fans are blowing in the wind. I had grown really tired of hearing people do that.

And as a Bob Dylan fan, I was like, I wanna hear theme time radio Bob Dylan. I wanna hear the show that he did for a couple years on Sirius XM. Well, it's wedding season. It's time to start picking out your flowers. Maybe you're gonna ask one of your nieces and nephews to hold a ring, walk down the aisle. Maybe you're gonna ask one of your nieces and nephews to hold a ring, walk down the

aisle. Maybe you're gonna have a golden retriever do it. Here's muddy waters. Muddy waters knows a thing or two about getting married. I love that guy. I go see him live still. Jared Sussman Oh, that's great. Well, James, thank you so much for talking to us and for helping Mary out. James Dixon Yeah, you got it. Mary, at the end of the day, helping Mary out. Yeah, you got it. Mary, at the end of the day, living in your own head, you're in a professional recording studio and what everyone else hears is a crappy little car radio. We're just going to sound thin and crappy, even though we sound beautiful in our own heads. I wish it was different, but that's acoustics. James Austin Johnson is a cast member on Saturday Night Live. SNL returns with an all new episode this Saturday and will celebrate its 50th anniversary with

a primetime special on Sunday, February 16th, live on NBC and on Peacock. Do you have Peacock, Ian? I don't know. Yeah, me neither. Okay, thanks to the many, many of you who painstakingly counted dinosaur moans in our last episode. The winner, the first one of you to get us the answer, was Alicia from Pennsylvania. And it was painstaking. The range we heard when it comes to the guesses, was as many as seven or 21 moans. Or whatever Alicia said, great job, you have a ear for dinosaurs.

And you'll soon have a t-shirt rewarding you for that dinosaur ear. This is, of course, our last episode of this season, but we're still, our email box still works, so if you have questions, you can send them to us at howto at npr.org. We will still be reading those emails. And in the time between seasons, we are going to we're going to try something new with some of you. Keep your eye on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me's Instagram feed. It's at Wait, Wait, NPR. We'll have some announcements, some details about a little thing we're going to do between seasons.

Yeah, for those of you who like this show and also like Zoom meetings. Matt Wilson spent years doing rounds at children's hospitals in New York City. I had a clip on tie. I wore heelies, size 11. Matt was a medical clown. The whole of a medical clown is to reintroduce the sense of play and joy and hope and light into a space that doesn't normally inhabit.

Ideas about navigating uncertainty. That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast from NPR. Hey, it's Robin Hilton from NPR Music. Many years ago, I helped start the Tiny Desk Concert Series. Right now, NPR is looking for the next great undiscovered musician to perform behind the famous desk. Think you've got what it takes? Submit a video of you playing an original song to the Tiny Desk Contest by February

10th. Find out more and see the official rules at npr.org slash tiny desk contest. Hey, Clementine. What can we help you with? I wanted to know why yawning is contagious. Why yawning is contagious? I wonder this all the time. Where does this question come from Clementine? Um, from school.

It was on Monday when I had to substitute because my teacher was in a meeting. So, she, my substitute yawned, then it passed to the whole class. And then it went to the other classrooms because we have glass walls. So you could see the other kids yawning? Yeah. How many kids do you think were infected with this one yawn? Clementine A lot. Pete Yeah. Clementine Probably the whole fifth grade. Jared Oh my.

Jared Wow. Pete What class was it, Clementine, that was so boring that the teacher yawned? Clementine Probably writing. Jared Uh huh. Jared Did you, were you one of the yawners, I guess? Yeah. Have you, have you had, have you had this experience before where you've seen someone yawn and then you yourself have yawned?

Yeah. Oh, really? Do you, when else has it happened? I make my mom yawn all the time. Yeah. And is, is your mom there right now? Did she hear you say that? And did she yawn? No, but she did hear me say that. Yeah. Has she yawned at any point during our conversation?

She's been holding back her yawn for the last two minutes. I really want to figure out this too. So we are going to do our best to help you out, Clementine. And I guess we're going to do our best to help the entire fifth grade. Okay. And if you're tired now feels like a good time to take a nap, really for any of us. Yeah, it does. I think it's a good, it's a good idea.

We should give you the opportunity to nap right now. You don't even have to press stop. Yeah. We'll bring in some soothing music. Hina, can you bring that up? Perfect. It's unsettling, really, to think about our thousands upon thousands of listeners who have all fallen asleep at the same time around the world.

It all makes sense. It makes sense. There is so much yawning that happened a few minutes ago that it's natural, it feels natural to take a nap. Those of you who listened to the show while driving, we're sorry about the accidents we've just caused by forcing you to go to sleep. Pete Slauson Double check your insurance. Hopefully, it covers collision. Pete Slauson Okay, I feel like this has been a sufficient nap.

Pete Slauson That's good. All right, we have looked into this and we discovered someone who has researched yawns. It's Mariska Kret, who we actually talked to a few episodes ago. She's the scientist who discovered that chimps recognize each other by their butts. So Dr. Kret, why are yawns contagious? Yawns are contagious because yawning is an evolutionary, very relevant behavior. When people yawn, they literally cool down their brain and people can become more attentive. And this is actually why humans are not alone in yawning. Many, many different species yawn, even fish yawn. So if in a certain situation it's good to be attentive, for example, you can see animals yawn in stressful situations a lot, and then, yeah, you very often see that those types of behaviors are copied, are mimicked.

Yeah, so I'm not surprised that this has been spreading in the classroom. Actually, when I talk about yawning and also scratching, I also study contagious scratching. Especially the scratching is really annoying when I discuss with my colleague or when I present the results, people always become really itchy. Yeah. No, I'm the top. When we started talking today, when we started talking about yawning, I had to stifle a yawn just from talking about it. And just now when you started bringing up scratching the top of my head itches and I've been resisting. You start to sense that you're wearing those headphones and that maybe they're a bit itchy and yeah, it's really very contagious.

Wow. I feel like it has been hard for me not to yawn during this conversation. If you out there listening, find yourself having to yawn, let us know. I'm curious if this is contagious across a podcast. Yeah, email, send us the time where you first yawned. And we're gonna keep track of all the yawns that we've

created here among the audience. Maybe we'll find like a peak yawn moment in the episode. Also, let us know where you are because I want to see the furthest away yawn that we are personally responsible for. Oh, we can map it out. Yeah, we'll do a yawn map. And we can create a global yawn map. Is it like, yeah, I mean, I guess like in a pack of animals, if there was a danger, one would wanna send the signal. Yeah, so it's that. So emotional expressions in themselves have benefits. So for example, well, I already told you,

when you're yawning, you cool down your brain, so that has an advantage for yourself. For example, the already told you, you know, when you're running, you cool down your brain. So that has an advantage for yourself. For example, the expression of disgust, you close your eyes, you close your nose, you stick out your tongue, you do everything to protect your body actually from potential poisonous information. So this has also benefits for yourself. But if there is someone standing next to you and sees that expression on your face, it also has benefits for the other individual to mimic that expression. So for example, a poisonous disgusting gas or rotten egg smell or something. So you close off your senses. You

prevent this material to enter your body and harm your body. In fear, we actually do the opposite. You open your eyes, you open even your nostrils. There has been researchers actually showing that in fear, when you do the opposite of what we do in this, discussed. Darwin was actually the first to report that. So in fear we open our eyes, we open our nostrils, we breathe in and we do everything to take in information. And research has actually shown that by opening your eyes you can, yeah, this has perceptual benefits for the visual field, I don't know. So yeah, some expressions, not all, but some expressions have direct benefits for the expressor. That's so interesting.

Do we know what Darwin was afraid of? Well, maybe women. I don't know. He did say some things I didn't like about women. For the rest, I'm a big fan. AC It's that I realize vomiting is also contagious. When you see someone vomit, you often have to vomit. FH Yeah, that's an extreme version of the disgust expression. AC Yeah. And it makes sense because I guess if like someone in your pack had ingested something poisonous and threw up, you would probably be eating with them. And yeah. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Is yawning contagious between species? Like if my cat yawns and I see it,

am I likely also to yawn? There has been done very little research as far as I know. I would have to check, but I know that there is at least a study looking at dogs and their owners. Yeah. So there is a lot of mimicry going on between dogs and their owners. I think, or no, I know that there is also a lot of individual differences. Some people are much more susceptible to the yawns of other people than others, so we know, for example, people with high psychopathic traits are less susceptible to these yawns.

Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. I wonder, would that be a good way, if you're on a date with somebody that you're just getting to know and you want to see, is that a good test to yawn and see if that person yawns and if they don't yawn, there's a pretty good chance they're a psychopath. It's funny that you asked. So we did do blind date studies in my lab. Really? And we did studies where we looked at the effects of ya young contagion on trust. We didn't look at yawning in the in the blind dates. That didn't really happen. People really prevented yawning

in that corner. They didn't yaw, yeah, okay, that makes sense. They were smiling a lot and doing a lot of things. In the blind dates, what we found was that actually only the synchronization on the physiological level, on the level of heart rate, was predicting dating success and maybe a certain type of smile. Not every smile, but the shy smile. A couple that on their first date, if their heart rates synchronized, they're more likely

to, I guess, want a second date? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Especially when it comes to finding a partner, people can be so picky. This other person has to have, I don't know, black hair and this and that and blue eyes, and I don't know, this whole wish list and then the person that you actually click with can be completely different.

Yeah. And then we find this really strong correlation between physiological synchrony, that's how it's called, and yeah, and dating success. Well, that does it for this week's show. What did you learn, Ian? Well, I learned that yawning has a real function. Yawning calms your mind, makes you more attentive, so you're more ready to deal with danger. The theory is we evolved to spread yawning around so that it shares those benefits with

our friends and family around us. But it seems antithetical to a threat coming that you should yawn. It seems cocky that while a lion was approaching you, you would be so bored by it. You're sending a message that you're not afraid to. So not only does it calm your mind, but it also gets in the head maybe of the person who's coming at you. Yeah, if you want to make a lion feel bad, just yawn in its face. Right before it eats you. I learned also that the faces we make, the expressions on our face, they serve a purpose. Like when you

scrunch up your face when something's gross, you're actually closing your face holes to keep gross things from getting in. Yeah. Or when, you know, when your eyes get wide and your mouth agape because you're scared, that's actually so you can get more data about the scary thing to help fight it. That makes so much sense.

I'm going to try that, like, the next time I go out to eat, right, or I'm at a bakery and I can just get that smell and just go all out, just wide-eyed, open my mouth, just suck it all in and see how that enhances the experience. It would be a great idea for any anybody out there starting a bakery right there at the counter. just have an axe murderer. He doesn't have to murder anybody. He just has to scare people so that they are ready to take in the flavors you've worked so hard to create.

How to Do Everything is produced by Hinesh Ravastava with technical direction from Lorna White. Our intern is Monica Turner. Monica, great job with the dinosaurs. Once again, get us your questions. You can send them to us at howto at npr.org. And keep your eye on the WaitWait Instagram feed at WaitWait NPR for details on ways Mike and I and Hina

are gonna be popping up in between seasons. Hi Mike. And I'm Ian. And there's Hina. Hey guys. Thanks. On NPR's Wild Card podcast, comedian Michelle Butoh says she's glad she ignored the people who told her to lose weight.

I'm just gonna show you what it looks like to love my body, my double chin, my extra rolls, okay? My buckets of thighs. So it's on the side you can't afford it. I'm Rachel Martin. Michelle Butoh is on the Wild Card Podcast, the show where cards control the conversation. For every headline, there's also another story about the people living those headlines. On weekdays, Up First brings you the day's biggest news.

On Sundays, we bring you closer with a single story about the people, places, and moments reshaping our world. Your news made personal every Sunday on the Up First podcast from NPR.