Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - Holiday Mailbag 2021 PART 1

Episode Date: December 17, 2021

HELLLLOOOO QUESADILLAS! its another installment of our wonderous holiday mailbag, where our our wonderful hosts rely on YOU to make this podcast even LESS work.  ENJOY! And as always thanks to our sponsors. Thanks Honey, Shop with confidence — get Honey for FREE at JoinHoney.com/qq . Thanks to Jiminy's. To learn more and save 20% on your first purchase, go to jiminys.com/QQ and use code QQ20 at checkout. Thanks Skillshare, Skillshare.com/qq and one-month free trial of Premium Membership. Thanks BetterHelp.  Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/qq

so hello again and welcome to another episode of quick question with soren and daniel the podcast where two best friends and comedy writers ask each other questions and give each other answers i am one half of that podcast author of how to fight president staff writer for last week tonight daniel o'brien joined as always by my co-host mr soren buoy soren say hello hello everybody i'm soren buoy i'm a writer for american dad a gardener when it's going well, and a thrower of trowels and soil when it's not. And I'm also part of this podcast. That's great. I'm ignoring most

of what you said. We are at the end of our year of the lore of 2021, and as is our tradition, we will now do our mailbag episodes where we answer questions from you, the listeners, which you submitted either through our Patreon or Twitter or our email address. We are going to answer as many we can. We're going to split it up into two episodes, and this is part one.

Let's thank Honey for sponsoring this episode. These days, it feels like online shopping is the only shopping we really do. That's where Honey comes in. It's the free browser extension that scours the internet for promo codes and automatically applies the best ones available at checkout. Go to joinhoney.com slash qq. This episode is brought to you by Jiminy's, maker of sustainable dog food with cricket protein. Cricket protein is a superfood. Delicious, nutritious, sustainable, humane, and prebiotic. To learn more and save 20% off your first purchase, go to jiminy's.com slash qQ and use code QQ20 at checkout.

Thanks to Skillshare for supporting Quick Question. Skillshare empowers you to accomplish real growth. Do something today you couldn't do yesterday with classes designed for real life. Skillshare is an online learning community with so much to explore, real projects to create, and the support of fellow creatives. Explore your creativity at Skillshare.com slash QQ and get a one-month free trial of premium membership. Thanks to BetterHelp for supporting Quick Question. For 10% off your first month, go to betterhelp.com. Start living a better life today. His first question comes from Adam Shepard, who asks,

What's your favorite bit that you've ever done either for work or in your personal life and why? And part two of this question is what series either video or regular column did you most enjoy writing? Hmm. Okay. Do you have an answer for this already? Um

I think the series that I had the most fun it's we get similar questions a lot but as far like people often ask what I had the most fun, we get similar questions a lot, but as far, like, people often ask what series was the most fun to do. And so the brain usually goes to like, what was the onset experience like? Like Agents of Cracked was fun onset. After Hours was fun because we got like punchy and tired and exhausted and we're all really tight. But specifically focusing on which was the most what did you most enjoy writing is an interesting way into that question and i think for me was probably later to the second and third seasons of rom.com a crack studio show that i wrote the first one was was a lot of lonely work and a lot of like batting my head against the wall alone in the room trying to to write a narrative sitcom type show for the first time ever and so that was scary and there's a lot of self-doubt in that but then the show got up on its legs a little bit and and took on a nice little life of its own

and then writing it after that became a real joy because i i had characters to play with which were really fun a lot of the other crack stuff that we wrote didn't have characters so much as as a bunch of different characters spouting out essays and this way i had uh like people to put in a room and and with. And it made writing future episodes way easier and also lots of fun. Where it's like, let's take Elise and put her in a room with Blake. What happens when Max is paired with Rush? And I always liked using that as a way to get at the writing. And the other fun thing about ROM.com especially in season three was the show

just became an opportunity for me to to write fun quick guest parts for people to do something short we had one episode where there was like seven or eight representatives from different dating websites and that's seven or eight different opportunities to just like invent a new weird person and also give actors that we like a little fun thing to play with. I cannot believe how, how I'll just like at the top of head, the names of the characters from the show are for you.

I barely remember the names of the shows we made let alone the characters in them but you're like let's see what happens let's see what happens when russian bam bam are like in a fucking room together i was amazing um i think the the thing that i enjoyed doing the most was um we did uh stories to get scared by one year i think one of the last years we were at cracked which was we a bunch of i think cody dan michael and i got together and we said we need um we need to make a horror series it would be really fun to have something that's horror and maybe everybody could just do they could all be independent they can all be self-encapsulated where it's just it's an entire horror story told in like a short film and we decided on these premises and the one that i

got to do was um unfinished business which was a story about a ghost haunting an actual office yeah and they're all their unfinished business was literal business it was like really boring awful tedious business work and uh it was so much fun to write. And it was one of those ones where the minute that the premise was given to me, I was like, oh, there's like six jokes just on the top of my head that I think would be really great for this. It would be very fun. And in the writing of it, I felt like it was very dark.

It hit this tone that was really fun that was dark and still funny um which is just like that sweet spot i love uh and then in the direction of it as well adam ganser directed that and some really great people were in it daniel vitzigore was in it and john millhiser was in it and uh carmen who else worked with was in it and i loved everybody in it too like i there were some rewrites that have to happen along the way but it was every single part of it was so enjoyable and i was like this this is what it should be like this is everything you ever write should be like this it shouldn't ever feel like such a slog or like you want to pull somebody else's hair out right which isn't

to say that like so much of other cracked writing was torturous, but it's so refreshing. Uh, once you get to step out of that and, and the only problem that you're trying to solve is, uh, move the story forward and make people laugh. It's great. Yeah. Yeah. I'm without maybe intentionally, but it became the brand of the site or the flavor of the site was that you're writing for the smartest people that would be in a room. you're writing for these people who know a lot and they've got a lot of previous information and the way the story is driven forward is through these like random little

bits of trivia and to not have to deal with that was so liberating and fun yeah uh thank you adam our next question comes from rebeccaagan. I think I know of a Decembrist song that Daniel might not hate. It's called Benjamin Fucking Franklin. I know the song and I can only find live versions online. To be completely honest, it's the only the Decembrist song that I enjoy. So if he still doesn't like it, it might be a lost cause. Rebecca, I know this song and you can find recorded versions of it that aren't live. It's on the Hamilton mixtape. Really? recorded versions of it that aren't live it's on the hamilton mixtape really yeah after uh after hamilton came out lin-manuel miranda dropped a series of hamilton mixtapes where some of it would be different artists covering uh songs from the show some of it would just be songs inspired by the show some would be remixes and i think on the very first drop was the december's benjamin fucking franklin i love that song is there a lot of is there some other narrative in there like of the comings and goings of ships in new york or anything like that that's not really it's it's it's very broad broad strokes okay and it's about what a cool guy cool guy benjamin franklin is he was cool yeah and it's i would say

that it's it's probably one of the more straightforward rock songs the decemberists have done according to me a person who's heard three december songs and hates them all it's the holidays i've done uh i'm gonna say 90 of my shopping online and i know i'm not alone in that we all shop online. And we've seen that promo code field that taunts us at checkout. Thanks to Honey, manually searching for coupon codes is a thing of the past. Honey is the free browser extension that scours the internet for promo codes and applies the best one it finds to your cart.

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there a celebrity or a famous adjacent person that you had a crush on enough that it translated into liking someone in your real life? I like that question a lot. Okay, so I've stared at it and puzzled over it. I don't totally understand it. I think she's saying that you have such a crush on a celebrity that when somebody in your other life, your real life, reminds you of them

or maybe has some six degrees of separation from that celebrity, you immediately find them attractive. Okay. It's such a weird thing to like, I was thinking purely visually, which is a strange thing. It's a strange question to me because it was like,

yeah, I had a crush on Sarah Michelle Gellar from Buffy. Even if I hadn't heard of Buffy, if someone showed up in my high school who looked like Sarah Michelle Gellar, I bet I'd still have a crush on her completely separate from the show. Yeah. Yes. But I think if it's like,

you can't unsee it once you see it in somebody. So like, for instance, I had a big crush on Ariana Richards. If you don't know Ariana Richards is she was in Lex from Jurassic park. Yeah. She, that's her most famous role is, she was in... Lex from Jurassic Park? Yeah, that's her most famous role, is that she was the young girl in Jurassic Park. So I was like 47 when I saw that.

Obviously, I was a child. She had been in other movies before that. I was actually most excited about Jurassic Park because she was in it. I was at some sort of burgeoning age where I started to really like the idea of celebrity and had one that was like, that's mine, that is my celebrity.

She was in Spaced Invaders before that and Tremors. She was the girl on the pogo stick in Tremors. And oh boy, did I have a crush on her to the point where I would fantasize that she might come to my small town sometime and come to one of my baseball games and see how good I was at baseball. That never happened, obviously. But there was a girl who lived in Basalt,

which is a nearby town to where I lived, and her name was Greta. And Greta had the exact same hair and the exact same eyes as Ariana Richards. And I couldn't unsee it. And I liked Greta so much, like to the point where it was very uncomfortable to even talk to her or to try to talk to her, where the minute I started talking, I was immediately just thinking about my mouth is moving and she's looking at me. This is amazing. And what I was saying didn't matter anymore. It was being starstruck by somebody who was not a star by any means. by somebody who was not a star by any means. Yeah, I think, okay,

then I do connect with this question because I couldn't connect it to like having an actual actionable crush on someone because of the starstruck element. Like there was, brag alert, I was a natural helper. Soren, did they have that the the pit that you were educated in a natural helper yeah no i have no idea what that could even be it was something in middle

school i'm sure if i googled it now i i might learn something else about it but in middle school it was uh you were picked you were voted by a combination of um i think peers and teachers where like students would it wasn't even uh there weren't elections held or anything like that names were just submitted every grade of who you thought fit the description of a natural helper which was just like someone who was uh i guess for lack of better description kind and helpful and like just just just being a good buddy they pick a few from every grade every year and then you're a natural helper forever and you go to meetings with the other natural helpers and you uh organize like community drives and uh environmental cleanup

stuff it's a thing that that in middle school is like, oh, this is just like another group that I can belong to that I could put on a resume when I'm eventually applying to college. It's going to feel good. Thinking about that in middle school is rough. So I was a natural helper. And one of the cool, none of that really like,

like the community stuff wasn't super exciting as a kid as much as like it felt like a status thing and also very crucially natural helpers a couple of times a year got to miss school to meet with the other natural helpers from the other three schools in our county or our area whatever so there was like my middle school and then two other middle schools. We would go together and meet at a park and have like leadership training and other skills, other weird. I'm in talking about this. This is the first time I've thought about natural helpers

in probably 15 years. And now I'm thinking, what the fuck was that? What were we doing? There's a lot of like icebreakers and just like free-flowing discussion about things just like critical thinking and i don't in hindsight know what the purpose of it was anyway i'm at natural helpers we're all there my school two other schools and there was a a girl who was a few years older than me who looked exactly like sloan from ferris bueller's day off

so much so which was like at that time in my life and i guess probably still here in the present maybe the most beautiful person on the planet and i see this person and i'm she looks like her so much that i know immediately well i am never going to talk to this person ever and and true to form i just didn't i just like observed this person and uh and then we both lived our lives this is probably would have been one of the better like ends to talk to a new person because like hey we're here in this this strange uh bizarrely elitist retreat for kind people that's some common ground but instead i just i i hid from this gorgeous sloan woman this i i at some point i do want to hear way more about this fuss buster group you were

it's called the it sounds to me like a bunch of narcs. And they were like, let's give these narcs a taste of their own medicine. Let's force them to hang out with each other. It was, this will be damaging to my brand, but it was like bizarrely a popularity contest. Wow. Why did the teachers institute that whole thing what could they possibly gain from that because those are not kids they have to help them those are kids

that are doing fine yeah uh was that strange all right yeah good good enough um this next question is from melanie manning she says plan a hypothetical birthday for each other what would your friend's favorite no budget limit birthday be like would it be a big party maybe it's a spontaneous trip or a dream becoming a reality i have yours you do yes no okay i want to hear it oh let me sit back do you do you have mine i wonder if we're gonna have the same one yeah i've got one for you okay mine is you you have the easiest thing for this is that i would give you taskmaster birthday oh my god oh i should have thought of taskmaster i would i know that you would love to create the tasks but but it would be a surprise so you wouldn't be able to do that

you would just be one of the five contestants and the other contestants would be your funny friends and like from the comedy world and also like contestants would be your funny friends and like from the comedy world and also like elsewhere your other funny talented capable college friends uh i would be the alex horn i would be devising these these challenges for you taskmaster that's the thing that i'm really struggling with is who would be the arbiter who would decide and judge everything uh i am leaning towards your brother or someone like similarly very close to you but i also dark horse i think our mutual friend abe epperson brings like a strange chaotic energy that would be and he's like not trying to to please anyone or curry any favor ever if you

just told him you are the you're you're the big swinging dick here. You're the top brass. Your say is final. You are the one who decides who wins these challenges. He would take to that and do something really interesting with it. He's also very good at isolating little tiny details that no one else notices.

Yes, yeah. The only other person I would suggest for that is Adam Ganser, only because Adam Ganser also, we've played fantasy football with him at one point, and he just, these organic narratives started to develop among the group. Yes. That he decided on that were so wonderful. Like these long running jokes.

Nobody was participating. No one like fed him this. He just decided what everyone's team's personality was. It was wonderful. And he was not wrong. Like people like started playing into them it was great oh i like taskmaster i would i would have you compete in a series of uh challenges and contests and then i guess i guess that this would be like a we couldn't do

it as long as like an actual taskmaster series um but it would still be like a two-week birthday involvement yeah that i yeah because you got to do the all of it you have to record it and then you want to have you had the playback for everyone to watch together oh that's a really good one mine can't compare to that so i generally on dan's birthday i have a very specific thing i do which is i i force dan to celebrate his birthday and force other people to celebrate his birthday generally on Dan's birthday, I have a very specific thing I do, which is I, I forced Dan to celebrate his birthday and force other people to celebrate his birthday. And then, um, I try to make him angry, but in a way where at the end, it's clear that it was all for him and there was nothing but affection and love there. And he has nowhere to put that anger and just has to sit on

it. I don't know why that that ideal piece appeals to me but i i love it yeah and just so everyone knows uh my birthday is is january 6th so last year it doesn't always come together perfectly soren's plans i feel like this i this most recent birthday the prestige was missing. Oh, I thought you were hinting at the fact that I had orchestrated January 6th for your birthday. Yes, I am. As like, okay. All right.

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And I hate that. And so I force him to celebrate it. But I like to hurt his feelings a little first somehow. It's like punishing him by making him focus on his birthday. So I think what I would do is I'd try to trick Daniel into getting on a plane. I would tell him that we had to go do something like we were selected among a bunch of podcasts for our specific ad reads that we were doing such a good ad read job that we had to go to a conference and talk about like the best way to do ad reads something that i know dan would be like

no i would i would be so mad but like it's it's just the right stroke of my ego that I would be like, of course they did. Of course they love my Jiminy's ad reads. Yeah. So they're having a conference in Marriott in Salt Lake City and we have to go. And Dan would be like, what? And he'd be so mad the whole time.

He would be complaining about it for weeks. Of course, he'd also be packed for weeks. And then we would get there and I would have an entire backcountry trip planned where we would go through like Slickhorn Canyon and we dip down into the Mexican Hat River and there's all kinds of like cool pools to swim in along the way.

And the rest is just these sandstone canyons that are so rad. And there's like the sun uh the sun hits that canyon it's just the right way that's all this really cool red rock it's all very visually appealing for a desert and uh it's a nice long trip but it's an easy one the weather's always really temperate and nice and i think i could really convince him to go on a trip a surprise backpacking trip that he didn't anticipate. And that would be great. That would be great.

And at some point, I would still be able to give my presentation on ad reads, right? Yeah. Like I worked all damn month on it. Once we go to the plateau where, you know, you can shout down into the canyon and you get that good echo. I think you could get some really good reverberation on a speech there. and you get that good echo, I think you could get some really good reverberation on a speech there. That would be a great birthday and also might completely shatter my relationship with Bacon because if that's the scenario, the one you just described, if that's what's happening, then unbeknownst to you, I would on a private channel complain to bacon daily probably multiple times

a day probably late at night and write really long emails about how how valuable my time is and how we didn't discuss this like i would make i would make bacon feel bad. Yes. In real life. Right. Try, because you had to go do this thing. Yes. That would be, I mean, that's like icing on the cake for me. Because then the entire time on the trip, you're thinking about that and how you're going to apologize to bacon. Yeah. As soon as we get to the canyon, I'm going on Amazon like, what's a, let me just send

something to his house right now let me send something really nice can you get flowers can i post mates flowers to bacon's house yeah this next question is from shannon clay hi guys i just became a patron and was hoping you could each message me nope we're saying it out loud in public your favorite book so i could buy it for my husband jesse for christmas uh spoilers jesse jesse's clearly not a listener to the show does not share your taste in podcasts he adores your podcast oh no oh no yeah uh thank you so much and i hope you feel better dlb oh thank you i do feel better um and jesse you're listening to this.

Your partner, Shannon, is going to buy you whatever books Soren and I say now. So there's a lot to be said for Mein Kampf. That I want to... I don't think I've made any. I think I've talked about my favorite book on the podcast quite frequently i i love martin amos i think he's probably the one of the best living writers although he's become a bit of a right-wing curmudgeon in his elderly life but uh he's written two books that i love one is called london fields and one is called money and they're both like the best books i've ever read they're very funny they're he's just a

amazing wordsmith that he's got this any it's this type of person who you think that they have every word at their disposal and they know the perfect word at every single moment he's just wonderful i highly recommend money it's much funnier or london fields which is more thought-provoking. I feel like I've plugged Lamb by Christopher Moore on this podcast. And like any time anyone else ever asked me for book recommendations, it's definitely very funny and taught me a lot about writing comedically and not like dialogue. But because I've mentioned that so many times, I'm going to talk about a new book

that i'm currently obsessed with i don't know if jesse is a writer um but you don't necessarily need to be for this book it's by george saunders who's a short story writer but this is actually a departure for him it's called a swim in a pond in the rain and he was teaching a class on russian short stories at syracuse for 20 years and this is his attempt to bring the lessons of that class into a book form to make it more accessible for people. So it's seven short stories by Russian authors followed by essentially like his post-read discussion, what he would be having with his students.

And it's not as academic as I've made it sound right now. And it's not necessarily just about story. It's about stories. It's about writing. It's also about life. He's just got a very romantic way of talking about writing in a way that makes it feel very accessible and charged and electric. And even if you ignore all the lecture parts of his books, the short stories in here are great.

They've got this one short story by Gogol, who's a famous Russian author I've never heard of until this book. And I'm obsessed with him. I bought all of his shit now because he's got this short He's got this short story called the nose and I, and I love it so much. It's one of the, the, it's a crazy thing where like, if you've ever been, if you ever watched like a bunch of modern sitcoms and liked them and then went back and watched cheers for the first time, a light bulb goes off and it's like, Oh, that's where they all got it from like cheers or soap or something like that that's where they all got it from i've had my comedic writing influences norm mcdonald jay pringleton george saunders uh others others others and my my style is like a trickle

down of their work and now i'm reading gogol and that's my that's my cheers moment that's my light bulb oh this this dead fucking russian a hundred plus years ago or a thousand i have no idea uh soren when was russia uh i mean pretty much always okay uh so way back then this this guy was using this style that I've been doing a three generations removed pale imitation of for my entire writing life. This guy, as far as I know, invented it. And he's great. And I found him in this book by George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. And that's enough of an endorsement of a book, right? Yeah, I think so.

Okay, well, that's going to do it for our mailbag episode. This has been a lot of fun. It's nice to finally hear from all of you. I should really take the time to listen to you all more often because generally when I see that somebody has tweeted with quick question in the tweet somewhere, I'm like, okay, here we go. And that's not fair to any of you.

I think you're all genuinely nice people. And I think the people that like this show are people I would generally get along with. So my Christmas, let's call it a new year's resolution is to be more open-minded about the people who respond to us and, and want to actually take the time to tell us how much they like the show. I think that that's a very nice thing you're doing, and I don't give you enough credit.

Mine's going to be to sing in public more. To not be afraid of wolves. All right, everybody. Thank you very much. Hope you have a happy holiday.