Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! - HTDE: 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 won't live in this feed forever. If you like what you hear, scoot on over to their very own feed and give them a follow.Both How To Do Everything and Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me! are 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

Peter Tate Hey y'all, it's Peter. This week we are bringing you the season finale of How to Do Everything, but don't worry, from NPR. They started off as like kind of annoying roommates that constantly made me eat weird stuff. But in the end of it, we kind of became, you know, brothers in arms. Sausages all packaged together in the same variety pack, if you will. And some good news, How to Do Everything has some surprises for you to stay connected in between seasons. Make sure to follow the Instagram page at WaitWaitNPR for more information that'll be coming soon and now enjoy the latest how to do everything our thrilling season finale hello hello Pat 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 listeners, and we weren't exactly sure how to respond. So we're calling up comedian Patton Oswalt. So we are a, 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 Could possibly be a good faith question, but we think we're being heckled. 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 Hmm Okay, that could be a case of them phrasing it badly and you guys being oversensitive Okay. Yeah, that could be sky just saying oh Let's show by example 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 echoing. That doesn't feel like echoing. 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- That's a heckle, right? That's not encouraging. Okay. Yeah, that is absolutely phrased as a heckle, but let me just tell you something. A lot of people, they want to be your friend. They want to already fast forward to the nagging stage where friends kind of rib each other. That could be somebody desperate for friendship by going, like you guys would have a clue. Come on, we're good, right?

That almost has a feeling of loneliness to me. 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, 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 gonna be nights where the audience wins, or the heckler wins, especially when he's 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. 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. Like you guys would have a clue. Ed wants to be friends. He wants to be friends with you. Of every comedian in the world, Patton, 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, 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, it was 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, you know, how he can't hear how he sounds. So how can that be possible? And I always had the question. Pete That's interesting. Yeah, because, you know, people always say you sound different to other people than you do to yourself. Julie Yeah. And whenever you hear yourself on tape or on your answering machine or whatever, it doesn't sound like me. It's like, that's not me. Have you had that experience of hearing yourself on tape?

Oh, all the time. 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. The perfect person online to help. James Austin Johnson does a bunch of impressions on Saturday Night Live. You probably know him for 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 going, hmm. No. Did you hear that? Wait, do your Chewbacca. Hmm, hmm. 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, it's really. But you were saying. Yeah, yeah, well, Chewbacca's 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 cords 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, in a bed of Heather? I don't know if Heather's comfortable. I think about that a lot. 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 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, you are Jim Nance in this sketch. And I don't know a thing about sports in any way. 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, those take years. Donald Trump

took years. With Trump, does it change? Cause he's a person who I first saw you doing five years ago now, four or five years ago. He's changed. Do you, 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 I do sometimes.

And I'm shocked when people are like, oh, he used to be so much better 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 the same thing everybody does. And then 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 try 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. He's, 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, to that we need on Saturday night live and in the world. Do you, do you have like, do you have any absolutely useless impressions that, uh, 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. 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 I'm my wife and I were making music in the studio. What music are we making? We're making the first wings album like this album. Like this, he's... 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, I had grown really tired of hearing people do that and as a Bob Dylan fan I was like I want to hear theme time radio Bob Dylan. I want to 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 going to ask one of your nieces and nephews to hold the ring and walk down the aisle. Maybe you're going to 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. Oh, that's great. Well, James, thank you so much for talking to us and for 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, 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 we'll have some announcements, some details about a little thing we're gonna do between seasons. Yeah, for those of you who like this show and also like Zoom meetings. This message comes from Wise, the app for doing things in other currencies.

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I wonder this all the time. Where does this question come from Clementine? From school. It was on Monday when I had to substitute because my teacher was in a meeting. She my substitute yawned, then it passed to the whole class and then it went to the other classrooms because we have glass walls. Really? 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. Pete Oh my. What class was it, Clementine, that was so boring that the teacher yawned? Clementine Probably writing. Pete Did you, were you one of the yawners, I guess? Clementine Yeah. Pete Have you had this experience before where you've seen someone yawn and then you yourself have yawned?

Yeah. Oh, really? When else has it happened? I make my mom yawn all the time. Yeah. And 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 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 idea. We should give you the opportunity to nap right now. You don't even have to press stop. 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 listen to the show while driving, we're sorry about the accidents we've just caused by forcing you to go to sleep. I double-check your insurance. Hopefully it covers collision. Okay, I feel like this has been a sufficient nap. 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 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 or 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 said 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 going to keep track of all the yawns that we've created here among the yawns. 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 want to 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 rolling, 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, 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, we get disgust. 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 fields. I don't know. So yeah, some expressions, not all, but some expressions have direct benefits for the expresser.

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. Is that, I realize vomiting is also contagious. When you see someone vomit, you often have to vomit.

I guess like- It's an extreme version of the disgust expression. It makes sense because I guess if 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. 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. 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 yawn contagion on trust. We didn't look at yawning in the blind dates. That didn't really happen. People really prevented yawning in their court. They didn't yaw, 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, 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, you know, 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. And then we find this really strong correlation between physiological synchrony, that's how it's called,

and yeah, and dating success. ["Dating Success"] Well, that does it for this week's show. What'd 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. It 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 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. I'm Mike. And I'm Ian. And there's Hina. Hey guys. Thanks.

Hey it's Robin Hilton from NPR Music. Many years ago I helped start the Tiny Desk Concert Series and 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. 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 going to show you what it looks like to love my body, my double chin, my extra rolls, okay? My buckets of thighs. Sauce 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. What's in store for the music, TV, and film industries for 2025? We don't know, but we're making some fun, bold predictions for the new year.

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