wellRED podcast - #135 - Being a Man and Knowing a Thing w/ CHRISTOPHER MOORE!!

Episode Date: September 18, 2019

For this episode we are joined by one of our all time favorite authors, Christopher Moore! You don't find many novels that are absolutely laugh out loud hilarious, but Chris has written sooooo many (including the international bestsellers, Lamb, A Dirty Job and You Suck.)We discuss his writing process and talk about the similarities (and differences) in stand up comedy vs writing funny books.Praise for Christopher Moore:“Where has this guy been hiding?”— The New York Times“A very sick man, in the very best sense of the word.”— Carl Hiaasen“Habit-forming zaniness.”— USA Today“The greatest satirist since Jonathan Swift”— Denver Rocky Mountain News“Christopher Moore writes novels that are not only hilarious, but fun to read as well. He is an author at the top of his craft.”— Nicholas SparksThats just what a few people have said... check out ChrisMoore.com for more information and pick up some of his FANTASTIC work (also follow him on Twitter @TheAuthorGuy .... you will not regret it) Today's SponsorsBlueChew.com promo code RED for your first month FREE (just pay 5 bucks shipping)MDRNCBD.com promo code RED for 20% off of your first order and FREE shipping  We did not get to do a PO BOX segment today because we have been on the road for several days and the CHO aint been home to check it BUT if you wanna send us cool shit (Company hats, t shirts... we will pimp em! Also just whatever the hell you want!) you can use PO BOX 240 Chickamauga, GA 30707 wellredcomedy.com for tickets to come see us LIVE on the road.... LOVE YALL LIKE CHICKEN 

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They're the... They're old rednecks. They like cornbread, but sex, they care way too much, but don't give a thug. They're old rednecks that makes some people upset, but they care. We got three big old dicks that you can suck. All right, Corey, well, here we are. Here we are. I don't know.

This is going to be just, this part of the conversation, it's going to be pretty short because we've got an awesome interview with the one and only Christopher Moore for you all to enjoy. But we want to do a little intro thing first. Drew right here, Drew Don't Hit. Hey Don't hit. He doesn't hit you in studio. Drew's on an airplane.

He couldn't help it. I don't know that this is, I have not fact-checked this, and I'm not going to fact-checked this. That's not fun. Because I heard. this, want desperately for it to be true, and am thus making it true in my head. You know how that works. It's literally everything. How you operate with everything.

Yeah. So having said all that, did you know that the Fast and the Furious, the Fast and the Furious was originally entitled Race Wars? What? Wait, was it going to be the same movie? Yeah. They race. Are you fucking serious? I don't know how long it's been since you've seen fast and the Furious, but like the first one.

It's been a minute, like since it came out. And it hit for me real hard, by the way. Oh, yeah, it came out when we were teenage boys. Yeah, I loved it. Oh, my God. I went back to Thompsons and told him it was the greatest summer movie ever made. You may be right. I haven't seen it since then.

So anyway, there's a big plot element to that movie that revolves around this like street racing championship. thing that's called even in the movie that thing is called race wars which I actually think is like might be or was a real street racing thing yeah but so that's like a plot point

in the movie is them is race wars right and then but they were just going to call the movie that to begin with and again I don't know how far up the fucking line did it get before they were like I don't know because as I told you I didn't fact check it

I just heard that that was the case and I'm just going with it and wanted to get your reaction to that. Well, there is my reaction. What the fuck? Like, I could go, like, if that was just a working ha-ha title in the writer's room, like, we're going to call it Race Wars. Yeah, Race Wars is a drag racing event in the movie The Fast and the Furious, which describes the underground illegal racing scene in L.A. That they invent in the movie. So, yeah, it's a, which, and it's also, you know, I was like 16 or something. it came out and had really never even been out of salina or whatever at the time but i don't remember

that even like occurring to me no me either no i know it didn't it makes it makes sense yeah race war right never occurred to me so using that that was the working title of the movie before somebody was like oh hold on but can you imagine i'll say this uh i bet you that if it was called race wars my uncle would have went to see it with me yeah i don't think it would have hurt the you know the blockbust nature of the franchise. Because that's the thing, there's been like eight more of them. What if it had started out as race wars eight?

Yeah, race wars too. This time it's personal. Yeah. Fucking, I don't, yeah. I would have looked at, I mean, that's, Race Wars in Space. That's an example of like, man, the title really is super important because Fast and the Furious,

and I see the trailer and I'm like, I know what this is. But if you call it Race Wars and just leave at that, I could definitely see myself thinking like, all right, this is a double entendre of sorts. So this is such a funny intro to have to the conversation we have Christopher Morrill later, because none of this has anything to do with any of that. Sure. I just want to throw, there's a bunch of things I just want to throw at you.

Yeah, you often do that. It's like, let's see what this dumb fuck thinks. Yeah. And whereas there's also a bunch of things that Drew likes to throw at you, but I mean physical objects. Yeah. And reach to him. Yeah. Plates, cups.

Your shirts. He likes to throw things at your face. I don't remember where it was that he literally took a plastic to go plate and frisbee did point-blank range as hard as he could at my face. Less than two feet away from you. And then was real surprise. That was Boulder, Colorado. Like, this is the guy who all he does is brag about his accuracy on the field. But for some reason, when he hit me with a frisbee in the face at point-blank range, he was like, I didn't think it would do that.

And also knows I have the biggest fucking head on the planet. Yeah. All of those factors combined, his shock was, I don't know, it offended me. I can't really describe or, like, comment on that moment any better than you just did. But, yes, I remember it and we'll always remember it. I turned around and, like, y'all were on the other side of the room as me. And from my perspective, I just saw Drew pick up, like, a plastic plate and just frisbee style, just frisbeeed it right directly into your face.

And again, he's like barely more than arms length away from you. Like you said, point blank range, you have a colossal head. He throws it right at it from right there. It, of course, hits you straight in the face. Yeah. And as soon as it hits you in the face. Of course it did. Because, I mean, yeah, he did it hard.

Yeah. And as soon as it hits you in the face, he goes, oh, dude, I did not think that was going to. Like, what were you hoping to happen? And I was like kind of at first, I was like, I must have missed the, start of what that just was because based on what I saw what but turns out that's all that there was to it he just saw a plate saw your head hurled the plate at your head yeah apologized and you know pleaded ignorance that that was going to happen yeah something else what I was going to say to you is did you know that you can boil water in a paper cup over a

fire okay so we got to start recording these and I mean like on camera because like yo face is the reason I ask the question you know what I mean okay so like how the paper cup can't just be that close to the fire because it would burn no what like you can take a paper cup set it over a fire or like a gas range or whatever a heat source and the water will heat to boiling but how the water keeps the paper from igniting. Water and fire be that way. They, okay, smart ass.

Water and fire do be that way. I wouldn't have made a note of this fact if it wasn't wild to me when I first heard it too. It blew my mind too. So, I mean, I'm right there with you, but when you actually, I really think about it, it's like, how would the paper cup? When I think about it, I think that, like, the paper cup would start to catch on fire. Well, but then once it got to the water, it would, the fire would go out. But I thought that, like. Right.

It would burn a hole through it. And then... And then water would come out that hole and put that part of the fire out and then the rest of the cup would burn up and it'd be gone. Yeah. No. Not what happens. So I can just sit a cup on my fucking stove, paper cup, full of water. Yes.

Well, you've just changed ramen noodles for me because they can just stay... Okay, yes. Please now do this this way and this just also be total bullshit. You burn your house down. Yeah, right. You didn't research it. No. No, but I mean, for real.

Like, if I had like cup of noodle, I could just fucking sit it right there on the goddamn stove and then boom, there it is. That hits way harder for me because in the microwave, it just sits there stagnant, but in this situation, I could sit there and stir it and add little things to it and watch the butter melt in it because that's my favorite thing to do is watch butter melt, by the way.

It does hit. No, you're blowing my fucking mind. I didn't know you could do that. Yeah. Well, you heard it here? What's not fair story? last somewhere in the middle uh yeah i'm about to have to get going because i got hit the road and i know chosen you know i'm going to sit here and just meander to himself although you do that

at the beginning of every episode out of necessity i know that right well hey while we're here well let's just do that that'll that'll save me so i'm trying put that at the very very beginning we'll see no now they won't have been able to fast forward through that shit we're going fucking trick them well read well but i don't want them to fast forward through our we need to you know, intro Chris, um, we'll go ahead. Okay.

And then, how about that? You go ahead. Okay. Yeah. If y'all, listen to every episode of the podcast, uh, you heard us,

what, two, two episodes ago? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Talking about how we think it's evidently far more difficult to be funny as a novelist than almost any other type of humorist. Because there's something about it. And we theorized on a lot of reasons, you know, because comedy is like an inherently more visual or auditory medium or what. We just got talking about it and we brought up. It's part of that discussion. One of the few authors, you know, long-form fiction authors who is laugh-out, loud, funny, in our opinion.

And his name's Christopher Moore, talked him up because he hits real hard. And we mentioned that he, you know, we're social media friends with him and it gone back forth with him, that type of thing. We talked about all that. And so that led into him coming on here and doing the podcast. So we've got an hour or more interview with Christopher Moore that we're going to get into here in just a few minutes. So, yes, one of the funniest long-form authors of fiction out there, in my opinion, Christopher Moore. Inarguable. Inarguable.

Right. It is objective. So enjoy that. But also go ahead. Also here, well-readcom. W-E-L-R-E-D-com.com. That is where you can find the rest. of our fall tour dates. This weekend, we're going to be in San Diego, California.

Then on to Lexington, Kentucky, where we recorded our critically acclaimed album, well-read, live from Lexington, then San Antonio, Texas, Dallas, Texas, Oklahoma, City, Oklahoma, Phoenix, Arizona, Charlotte, North Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina, Denver, Colorado, Raleigh, North Carolina, and then rounding out the year at the best goddamn comedy club in the country. December 19th through 22nd, we will be at Zanee's Comedy Club in Nashville, Tennessee, doing our homecoming shows, our Christmas shows, last shows of the year. Get your tickets at well-read comedy.com along with some sweet merch and our book, The Liberal Redneck Manifesto, Dragon Dixie out of the dark. Now, here is our interview with a much better author than us, Christopher Moore.

Well, here we are. Here we are. Corey, joined by the incomparable Mr. Christopher Moore, as we just informed the listeners, we would be talking to him today. And now we're already here, like a whole 30 seconds later. It's magic. Here we are with him. It's magic. Hey, Chris, how's it going?

Hey, by the magic of the internet. I'm here. Yeah, thank you for being here, man. We're both big fans, and this was, it was kind of interesting how this all started. I'd mentioned that one day I was on a plane reading Lamb, which is an amazing book that Chris wrote. And I looked down on my phone as I'm reading Lamb, and it said, Christopher Moore, or I guess that author guy started following me on Twitter. And it was kind of, it was a weird moment. I was like, ah, what a coincidence.

And then I was telling that story like on our podcast a couple weeks ago and in the middle of telling that story, look down and you had replied to something of mine on Twitter. And then like a maniac, I tried to express that story through Twitter and you're like, well, shit, let's do a podcast together. So this is a serendipitous moment. Yeah, it's all come together for me. My whole plan. So I wanted to open up with this question, which was that. I watched you give a talk. It was called Book Passage.

Was that in San Francisco? It was a couple years ago. Yeah, it was, yeah, it's in, what the fuck. Sound Refel is just outside of, it's across the bridge from San Francisco. Okay, right on. And in that, at one point, you're, and it was very great, by the way. I really enjoyed the talk. Oh, thank you.

At one point, you were, I don't remember what led you into this, but you were talking about how you like to make fun of hipsters, but not like generically. And you said, I only. like to make fun of the ones that wear tiny clothes. You know, these guys walking around where you think, man, if he was wearing this sweater in fourth grade, you'd think, oh, he grew out of it, and his mom didn't buy him another one. I call them tiny sweater guys, and that made me laugh very hard.

And it's also framed exactly like a stand-up joke. And so that leads me to my question, which is, obviously you're a funny guy. Your novels are humor-driven. At what point, when you first found out you were funny, how long into

that was it, I'm going to write novels, there ever a, I'm going to do stand-up or I'm going to do improv or I'm going to do sketch comedy. Like what was your, what was the genesis of all that? Well, yeah, I think I knew I was funny early on, you know, like like six, seventh grade kind of. Yeah. And I think and when I was, I don't know, about ninth grade, I think I wanted to be an actor for a while in between wanting to, you know, play pro football and other things that when you're a kid, you don't know. that you don't have any talent for. Yeah, you're invincible.

You can't do anything. Yeah, yeah, you can't. Yeah, I'm going to be a fireman or a pro football player or, you know, a premier of Russia. So I think that for a while I wanted to be an actor and I kept making stuff up. You know, like we were doing scenes from Shakespeare and I would make stuff up and you're not supposed to improvise Shakespeare. sure so I would you know because evidently he knew what he was doing

yeah Shakespeare famously precious with his return yeah I don't I don't think that I I don't think I ever thought I could make a a living being funny right I think what happened was I had gone to you know

gone on and off and done a couple of things and failed miserably and moved to California and I was selling insurance and not happy about it. And my girlfriend at the time said, look, there's this writer's conference. You said you used to write.

You should go to this thing. And so I thought I was a horror story writer. So I took my horror story stories to this writer's conference, and I read them in the workshops, and everybody was laughing at the way I turned a phrase. And I went, well, I guess that's what I do. And so, and I was approached by the guy who used to be one of the principal writers on Laughan back in the 60s. And he'd go, you've got jobs, dude.

And you should talk to Jonathan Winters, who was, who was sort of orbiting around this writer's conference at the time and all this stuff. And every time anybody says you ought to talk to somebody famous, I always think, what am I going to say to Jonathan Winners or whatever like that? Or like, how do you even do that? Yeah, like I compare that to somebody. telling me, you know, like, you know what? You ever thought about, like, you should have, like, a Netflix special? You ever thought about that? You know what I mean? You should. Yeah, I should. Totally. That'd be great. Oh, man, that never occurred to me before. Yeah, man, I've just been doing comedy thinking, I'll just stay in the bars. Yeah. You know, that'll be fine. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's like people coming up to me and say, you know, you ought to have a book on Oprah. Yeah. Right. Exactly. think should i do that um so yeah i so i guess i i i really went more toward writing and i just what i was good at was was writing stuff that was funny and and the distinction of that is as

you guys have talked about on on your show and and thank you for that is that there's not many people who are funny in print you know that can do it right well so so i didn't really have any other option of, you know, as a performer, I don't, I've never thought of myself a performer. I know a couple of standups. I'm friends with them. And, and that's what we always talk about at lunch is, is, you know, the difference between what I do and what you guys do. Okay. Well, so since you've already, you know, since we've already sort of treaded into that water, let's get into that some, because I was wondering, one thing I wanted to make sure and ask you, and I, you kind of just covered it a little bit was, I was wondering if how you felt from your perspective as a very funny novelist and print writer about the kind of difficulty of doing it or the absence of, you know, a large field of other very funny writers.

Because you just referenced it. Corey and I had a conversation on here a few weeks ago where we were talking about how like from our perspective it's exceedingly rare because we're guys who love funny stuff and also, you know, like we like reading. and I, you know, very, I can count on one hand, really, the number of books I've read in my life that actually made me laugh out, the number of novels that made me laugh out loud while reading them. Do you agree with that assessment, or do you think there's a whole world of funny writers out there that people aren't aware of or what? I don't think there's that many fiction writers who are funny. And I, like you guys, I would go to the bookstore, you know, and when that was still a thing, and I would, you know, go through them and I'd look on the covers and it would say, this is hilarious. And I, you know, maybe buy the book and get it home and I go, this isn't hilarious. You know, it's mildly amusing. Right.

Clever. Even the guys you learn your chops from, you know, when you're doing what I do the same way you guys might listen to, you know, Richard Pryor or George Carlin and all those to, you know, even going back to Lenny Bruce and Sid Caesar and those guys, you might go, okay, this is, this is my tradition of what I do. Guys have been doing this for years. Well, I did the same thing and read, you know, James Thurber and Robert Benchley and, you know, going back to PG Woodhouse, who's Najee's books and those things. And those guys are kind of funny, but most of the time they're not laugh out loud funny. And so I, but modern writers, it's 90% of the time if it says hilarious, they're just not fucking hilarious. Right. That's the same one in stand up nowadays, too, just to let you know.

Yeah, yeah. So, so I guess I just try to do the best I can do, you know, and I don't have any, I don't have any standards. There you go. That's a good start. But I mean, I have no problem with making a squirrel joke or a dick joke or a waffle joke or a, you know, in the midst of a novel, I have no problem with one of the characters being funny. I mean, it helps if the narrative voice is funny, which is usually me, you know, whether I'm disguised as, as, you know, a high-minded narrator or fucking shay. experience something like that but but uh yeah i just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks

you know just trying to stay maybe out of the realm of being mean-spirited right well but but but you know so because my stuff's not contemporary then i don't really have to worry too much about hurting somebody's feelings right what do you think we because we talked about this um a little bit when we had the conversation originally but i'm very interested to know what you think that is about that relative absence of like laugh out loud, funny, you know, prose. Because I agree completely. I feel like a lot of times when it says something's hilarious, it's like, we have a version of that and stand up.

And I mean, I'm guilty of it from time to time. We call it claptor, which is basically meaning like, oh, that's a good point or, oh, that's a clever turn of phrase. You know what I mean? Like, oh, that's a nice thought. It's amusing. It's amusing, right. but it but it's not like so like you know they'll clap for it or whatever but people aren't like

guffawing and i feel like like you said most written like most literature that's supposed to be funny is more in that vein rather than like laugh out loud funny and i'm curious if you know why you think that is i don't think there's anywhere to learn it right you know i don't there's it's not like you can go to the clubs and and watch people do it and there's and as we've just said there's no books. I mean, you in the in the segment you guys did that I heard, you know, you talked about Catch 22 and Hitchhiker's Guide of the Galaxy and then one of my books. And that I, and this is not patting myself on the back. It's just saying I don't disagree with you. You know, the number of books that have made me laugh out loud are, you know, under a dozen. Right. And I do it for a

living, you know, so that's kind of the equivalent of how many, you know, comedy routines you guys have watched. Man, I'll be honest with you, it's odd to know that we were on to something because I fully expected when you came on here, you were going to rightfully shame us for not knowing about the huge world. That's kind of what I

thought, too. I thought you'd be, you know, and I was ready for it. I couldn't wait. Like, for you to be like, no, no, no, you got to check out these guys. You just don't know shit. But like, knowing that we were kind of right is, as usual, a bummer. Yeah. Well, and the other thing is you've just got to kind of change your standards, I think.

Sure. Yeah. You know, I'm, no, I mean, like, there's a lot of Mark Twain that's funny. Oh, without a doubt. Or Ambrose Beers that's funny, but it's a different kind of, does it catch you sleeping? Like David Sederis's stuff, you can sort of be reading along in his little essays, and you guys address this where most funny books are essays. Right, for sure.

Biographical, too. And you can be, yeah, and you can be sort of reading it along, and then he'll just blindsize it. turn a phrase in a way that I'll, you know, I'll be driving, listen to an audio book and just, you know, sort of shoot something out my nose. And, and that does happen more than, than putting it in a fictional context like I do. But, um, yeah, right. And that's the thing. Like we, we were kind of drawing that same line because it is different.

You can think of multiple examples of that, I think, like Corey said in that conversation, like a book written by a funny person, but it's not. not fiction, it's not a novel. It's like, you know, like Born Standing Up by Steve Martin. It's got some very funny parts in it, you know, or Tina Faye's book or that type of thing, Stephen Colbert's book. But in the world of fiction, though, it just seems way, way more difficult. Yeah, there is some stuff that Sedaris does that seems like fiction.

There's that short, I think it's in, let's explore diabetes with owls when he tells that story about getting that tumor on his back and he has the lady in Mexico cut it out for free and then he feeds it to a turtle. Yeah. I mean, God damn. I mean, that was hilarious,

but at the same time, that is just apparently something that happened to a very real seemingly lunatic that is David Sedaris. And I mean that, that's a compliment. I don't mean like, oh,

what a crazy son of a bitch. I mean, boy, he's something else, ain't he? Yeah. But yeah, that was just a little biographical essay, but like,

I don't know, man, it's just, that is nuts. And I know that my theory on it was that comedy is so often visual. And so, like, there's been so many comedy records that I've heard the record, and I thought this is funny. And then I went back and watched the special connected to the record and seeing the facial expressions and yada yada changed it so much. And also timing.

That's why when we wrote our book, we went back and forth with publishers on like, we spelled things the way that we wanted people to read them. Because, you know, in the South we have a different vernacular. And that was important. But as much as they gave us the leeway to do that, we still go back and I've listened to our audio book. And I'm like, man, the audio book's so much better because it was us telling it. So I don't know, man. It's just, I guess it makes it even more crazy how you're able to do it without all those little cheat codes. Well, you know, part of it, the visual you talk about, but the audible part of it is is definitely.

But when I teach workshops, which is infrequent. But when I do, you know, they've like put him in. he's master fiction workshop and people who show up to see me, you know, without just they're at this conference and it's their agenda. And so they're, you know, they feel they're at a level of they master. But if they show up to see me, essentially, the first thing I have to tell them is I cannot teach you how to be funny. I might be able to teach you comic timing. And the way I learned comic timing is listening to Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor and George Carlin and being able to hear it without the visual of how should is funny, of how should is phrased, and then being able to

put that in writing and put the commas in the right place or just a word that sounds funny. And like I said, throwing everything at the wall. So there's definitely a feedback going from stand-up to, you know, for me, to what I do on the page. And my first published story was about a guy, African-American guy who plays the three-card Monty with death and in like New York City, in Greenwich Village and so forth. And I had never been to New York City at the time I wrote it.

And I clearly was not an African-American guy. But I had listened to Eddie Murphy's album so much that I could do Eddie Murphy in my head. And so this character, this African-American character, was Eddie Murphy. It was the story, I think, was 1,200 words long, and it had 17 motherfuckers in it. And you're in good company on this podcast, but yeah. Yeah. And so the, but the cool thing about it is it was my first published story was published in an African-American men's magazine, which I have never to this day seen a copy of. but they sent me a check and it was and it cleared and uh and i was like well i must have passed

the test you know i i i've successfully culturally appropriated and uh which i do a lot of i do a lot of you know which is you know it's only been recently that i'm like wow can i not write ethnic characters i'm you know i don't maybe that's another rat hole that we can't go down. No, no, no, it's one that I would love to go down because I actually wanted to ask you about like with the we live in what people consider

the PC culture has taken over, I guess the entertainment. And I was just, I was curious like if that, because you see it on Twitter like you just had the Shane Gillis guy was just fired from Saturday Night Live for making racist jokes or whatever

about Chinese people. And you see examples of that kind happening on Twitter every day. Cancel culture, I guess is probably, that's probably more what I'm talking about. I was going to ask, like, in the book world, in your medium, is it the same as it is in mine

and even if it's not exactly that harsh, have you seen over the years it getting to where you're like, okay, I used to could write about this, but now I can't? Because I've never seen an author get canceled, but maybe I'm just not paying attention. Well, I think

I think it's accelerated so much in the last really two or three years. I mean, there's shit that you can't get away with that you could have gotten away with three years ago. And the rules change so fast. I basically, you know, I get up in the morning and go, I don't know if I'm allowed to do this. Now, that's a lot more relates a lot more to Twitter. Yeah, for sure. You know, like I tweeted something today about, thank God, we can still make fun of stupid people.

You know, but I don't know how long that's going to last. You know, these might be the golden days of making fun of stupid people. Well, the only good thing is that when you're making fun of stupid people, the stupid people don't think you're talking about them. Yeah. That's the only, that's the beauty of it. They're like, yeah, fuck them. They're dumb.

It's like, all right. Yeah, yeah. So, so I think that, and this goes back to your earlier question about, about, why don't why doesn't anybody do it? The thing is the people that teach writing don't teach what I do. There's a few that will teach, and I was fortunate enough to have a teacher who teaches you how to who teach how to be a professional writer. In other words, how to write books that people want to read, like, you know, whatever is your taste, Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton or, you know, that kind of thing. But most of the people who end up in like college MFA programs who teach writers who

take themselves seriously or young writers who take themselves seriously. They're not teaching you how to write shit that's paced in a way, you know, like a action film. They're teaching you how to make literature. And the reason they're teaching is because they've failed in 90% of the cases. They've failed at writing commercially. And they probably failed because their teachers also were trying to help them make literature. And that's just, too fucking hard. It's, you know, it's like your odds of being published and making a living as a writer, I don't know, pick a number one and a thousand if you're, if you start out talented, you know, probably similar odds to making it as a stand-up. And your odds of, and so it,

it propagates down, but that's also, that academic culture is also more of what the, cancel culture has gone into and lazy reviewers will you know one of the things that I started doing years ago is putting an afterward in the book going look the reason that the bad guys in this book are Japanese is geography because the place where the book takes place is closer to Japan than any other technological society and so the gangsters ended are fucking Japanese so shut up right and because at that time in the mid 90s it was like a big deal about Japan bashing which was something, incidentally, that the Japanese started. Because they were like, no, our cars are awesome.

We're like, yeah, they actually are. And Michael Crichton even wrote a book back in those, I can't remember, I think Rising Sun was the name of it, that was about sort of organized Japanese batching. But so I started doing these afterwards in my book, just go, just fucking slow your role. I'm not making fun of, you know, differently abled people or people of Native Americans.

and, you know, I'm not doing that. I'm telling a story and this is the context. And what it does is it diffuses lazy reviewers because the PC is the easiest, laziest way to approach something. If I walk into something going, oh, look, I can identify that as PC. I can identify that as non-politically correct. I don't have to do any work and think about the material. Sure. I don't have to have a visceral reaction to whether your shit is funny or not or whether it's social commentary is relevant.

All I have to do is go, oh, ding, ding, ding, you triggered me. And 90% of the time, and this is, I don't know how your experience is, because you guys work so much closer to the edge on this. But 90% of the time, people aren't triggered. People just recognize a trigger. Right. And they go, oh, look at me, I'm important. Well, you know, the phrase I use on social media all the time is, you know, it's a, it's a terrible burden to be a man and know a thing, you know, and it's, which means, you know, I've like, oh, fuck, I got to, I know a thing and I have to say it now, you know. That's so goddamn funny.

I also maintain that, like, when everyone says, like, oh, comedian makes joke, everyone outraged, I'm like, there's really probably three people who were outraged. And one of them has a blog and now this is just a thing. Yeah, people, the discussion surrounding the outrage, I feel like every single time is like infinitely larger than the actual outrage itself really was to begin with. Without a doubt, I guarantee you at least, I don't know, 60% of the people who are honestly probably more than that, who are commenting on the Shane Gillis thing in Saturday Night Live, didn't even bother to watch the shit. Right. They just saw, he may, and by the way, I watched it, it was not flattering. It wasn't funny, but that's neither here nor there.

I guarantee you, people are just like, everybody's mad, what for? A comedian did something? Okay, here we go. In your medium, though, like, a lot of times we can get away with certain things, I feel that you may not be able to because we're able to, like, when we say it, it's the way we say it in our voice, or like, we give a little smile, or we do it in a character, we change our voice. When you're doing it, it's just, it's on the,

page, here it is, it's written verbatim, and I feel like that can be taken out of context way easier. Do you have, is there like an example in your life of where that's happened? Have you gotten a bunch of hate mail for some sentence you wrote in a book? Because I can assume when you're writing such things as, you know, Lamb, where you're, you know, the best friend of Christ. And it gets, it gets pretty hilariously so, by the way, blasphemous immediately, which is great. So I assume you've probably dealt with shit like that. Well, you know, be quite honest. with you, I've dealt with it more in social media than I have in my books, because the people who read my books, it's self-selecting.

First, motherfuckers got to read. Right. You know, that knocks out like 60% of the people that are going to be upset. That's pretty good. And second, they've either got to go to the library or spend some money. So that knocks out another 30%. Yeah, and everybody, and you guys are not alone on this, everybody assumes that I took all kinds of flack about lamb because it's about, you know, the sort of rascal friend of Jesus,

childhood friend of Jesus that's written out of the Bible for being a rascal. And so there's a lot of, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that you went into it holding your rosary. You probably would, you know, you would have been upset. Sure. But I would say that book will be out, I think, 18 years this year. No, I've 16 years this year. And, um, I've had maybe four or five negative emails. And my email's been on the book since it came out. Really? Yeah.

And tens of thousands of stuff that, you know, we love this. I'm a pastor and I love it. I've used it in the pulpit and stuff like that. And the reason is it's self-selecting. The people that are pissed off, they're never going to read that book. Right. I mean, I know exactly what you mean because we deal with a version of this. all the time. And now, of course, you know, I operate heavily on the internet and everybody

knows how the internet works. I mean, like you said earlier, you had it way more on social media than with your books. And I mean, the reasons that's to why are obvious because that's almost, it seems sometimes that's what social media is for. But like, but we get, I get asked a lot. We get asked a lot like about, uh, like doing our show in the south, you know, and people are like, how does that go? You know, like they, you could, tell they expect it to be bad and or like you know were there protesters there how do people in the south respond to this stuff you do shows there you know and like you were saying we have to tell them it's like i mean they're not there like the people that hate uh or that are even aware of us that hate us

they are not spending twenty five dollars on you know on a ticket to leave their basement to call us queers you know like they're going to do that they're going to do that from the keyboard and that's it like they're they don't show up the people that show up are on board so it goes great you know and right people that hate it they're not they ain't coming and don't get me wrong right thankfully like i'm glad and that's yeah that's how bill mar is playing oklahoma right and you know Nebraska and alabama and shit like that and kathy griffin is and right yeah i i mean i i i get that i I think I've had one incident in Atlanta a few years ago. Somebody, I said something.

I don't know what it was. And I think it was about baseball or something. And somebody in the back went, well, y'all are in the South now. And I went, is that your lovely wife and sister you're with right there? And the crowd who were all from Atlanta loved it. Oh, yeah, yeah. Which I'm sure is a similar, it's a very small experience to what you guys get i mean that's the thing i get on book tours i get to go out and pretend i'm doing stand-up

but i don't have to actually be funny because right bar is so low for authors well we had the opposite experience when we wrote a book we got to be comedians who wrote a book and we're like well i mean as long as it's decently funny they'll be like well i'm sure on stage these guys are great well i had a friend uh i have a friend who was kind of a big rock star and uh and he uh you know tours internationally, you know, with, you know, two arenas and stuff like that. And he did a book and he said, it's the most humiliating experience I've ever had is going on book tour. You know, like doing that six in the morning, how you do in Denver and like half of the people watching are incarcerated? As a big rock star, he hadn't dealt with anything like that.

We went to, we did a book event at Harvard. Like one of the libraries, I don't know why whose idea that was. but we were like but we were set up in there it was cold and rainy outside it was in the fall and we'd already done a few book events and you know some of them some of them were totally fine totally okay some of them were you know nightmarish and now we're at harvard and we're like i don't know about this man and we walk in there and like it's a small crowd because it's a small space but like there were some people in there they were listening and also there was a pretty good group of people more than we were getting at that point who were like engaged like asking questions that we thought were good questions or whatever and so we were

like pleasantly surprised by it we talked some of that some of that group afterwards to you know tell them we appreciate them coming or whatever and found out that they had no idea who we were what the book was anything about it they were uh mostly homeless and came in there because it was raining and cold outside and just wandered into the back of this thing and then ended up being some of the better audience members we'd have. I was but say, and if that tells you anything about what our fans typically are, they just fit right in. We were just like, these got these stinky motherfuckers, get it.

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Don't wait. That's MDRNCBD.com code red. Now back to the podcast. I've been there. My first book signing in San Francisco was two drunk homeless guys that came in off of the street and two people who worked at the bookstore because they had set up an event at 8 o'clock on Thursday night at the height of Seinfeld happening.

And that was before TiVo was a thing, you know, DVR was a thing. So basically, yeah, it was like I have done my quote readings. unquote to homeless and unconscious people. And I get that. But on Harvard, I found out Lamb at one point that Lamb had made it, was on the recommended reading list for Harvard Divinity School. Oh.

You know? And I was like, they wouldn't let me mow the lawn at fucking Harvard. Right. Yeah. And all of a sudden, wait a minute, they're teaching,

you know, and they're teaching it at Emery, divinity and all these different colleges and stuff like that. And I'm like, huh, colleges I could never get in. And they're teaching my book. So it's kind of a, you know, I don't know if you guys experienced that at all, but were you kind of like, how did I cross that barrier, you know?

Oh, yeah. I mean, I definitely had with, you know, I mean, held us being there that in the first place or like I did this Forbes 30 under 30 thing right after I first popped and was opening, like they had me open up the stage for like this big, round table discussion hosted by Michael Dukakis and then Michael Phelps came out and talked about being a champion

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That's mindovermarijuana.com. Sponsored by the California Department of Public Health. like started out as a courthouse in Boston, you know, like this. It was just very like, very highbrow type shit is what I mean. And it was very much one of those things. It's like, what am I doing here right now? And not only that, you were doing that. And I was in a cranberry bog simulator next to Chrissy Tegan at this same event.

Like it was very wild. Our table was right next to Chrissy Tegans. You won't believe this, Chris. She had way more people in her line. Yeah. But yeah, man, no, for sure. And I felt, I felt that way at Harvard. I was like, dude, I couldn't even got into state school, let alone fucking this.

And, you know, but luckily the homeless came out, so it was good. I'm sorry. No, no, no, no, you go ahead. Go ahead. Didn't Drew go to Harvard or something like that? No, you would think so to hear him talk, but no. He went to Boston College. By the way, I don't know if he had tweeted it or anything like that, but he got, I think,

his wires crossed on the date or something and is on a plane right now on his way back to here, which is the only reason he's not on here and he's very upset that he's missing it, but, you know, whatever, to hell with him. No, I just figured anybody that went to college in Boston is fucking fancy, and I don't know. You know, I mean, by the standards of where we're from, he's by as fancy as it gets in that way. Yeah, he won't admit it, but he is a, yeah, he's as close to a Yankee as I know to tell you the truth. He's going to love all this.

He ain't going to listen to this shit. He might because of Chris. He does drop his accent, doesn't he? Yeah. All the time, man. He's very, very fake. I'm kidding, Drew. I was just going to say, Corey, I want to, there's one thing I'd want to make sure that we cover at one point, but it's more kind of like technical stuff. I didn't know if you had, if you had something teed up, you were about to ask.

No, go ahead. Well, I'm just wondering about, and I hope this is interesting to our listeners, but I want to know for myself. In terms of process, like, I have to imagine that. That was literally my next question. know what you're about to ask. So go ahead. You're crushing it. Well, I just like, I know how I write a stand-up bit, you know. And I've done some, like, some, you know, we wrote the book. I've written some articles and stuff like that. But I have never done really any long-form fiction that wasn't a script, like a feature screenplay or whatever.

Right. But I know how that works for me, you know, the genesis of an idea from the very beginning to ultimately a finished product. or for me at least 90% of the time to the ether, you know, nothing at all. Which is because it's fine, because sometimes you think you have an idea and you don't really. But for a novelist, like, or for you specifically, how does that process generally work from, you know, taking, is it genuine inspiration? Do you sit down to, like, think up potential ideas? And then how do you track which one you're going to try to see through to the end? and then how's it go from there now do you mean for the whole novel or for the comedy part of it well i mean i kind of mean the whole thing like the you know the idea itself and then because i'm assuming and tell me

if i'm wrong please get into that too that the comedy part of it i would have thought came like organically as you were writing the story and getting to know the characters and all that because you're a funny guy and a funny writer um but if you think about the comedy side of it separately from the story side. Yeah. Let's talk about both those things in order. The whole thing for a book can come in a lot of different ways. Like, you know, my first book of Practical Demon Keeping, which,

Trey, you were talking about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Yeah. The title Practical Demon Keeping is completely based on that. It's completely based on it sounding like a how-to book. Yeah, right. And how you pick it up and it isn't a how to book at all. And so it was just sort of trying to draft Douglas Adams.

But that one was really kind of calculated in going with what they teach you your whole life, which is right what you know. And then deciding, you know, and what I knew because I didn't have any money to travel or anything was this little town in central California that I was living in. And then, you know, the idea that you had to shake that up and that was bringing a monster to that town and and then everything else was figuring out how do you get a monster to this little town and then how do you get rid of it that was literally the genesis of that of that story and then and trying to solve a problem the same way you would try and

solve an equation and then make it funny and that's always the thing that you add at the end of my books and like and then make it funny and when I've had to do and when I've had to do like outlines for for Hollywood you know how they make you do a treatment for script or something like that and they'll and they'll go well is it funny and I'm like have you ever read a funny outline right is that you know is that you know one sub a sub one a ever been hilarious oh man I know I run into that specific thing all the time because like in trying to get a TV show made or one page you're like Jesus you have to go through that whole process starting with like a story document which is you know it even smaller outlined then to a full-fledged outline and And my stuff, it's always, this is a comedy show, you know, ostensibly. So, yeah, everything you just said, I know exactly what you mean because it's. Yeah, and you have to be anecdotal about it. And if you're not, it isn't going to be funny. You have to step out.

Even now when I do, I have to do a proposal for my books so I don't end up going down some rat hole they don't want, even though I'm sort of under contract. But, you know, there's always anecdotal stuff in it. And that shows it's funny. But the process of picking a book and making a story is sort of taking shit you know or in my case shit I want to know about. Like I wanted to, well, I didn't have any money at all until I sold my first book. And Disney bought it for a film, which is never going to get made, but they gave me a buttload of money. So I was able to quit my job as a waiter. And then I had money and I could do all the stuff that people who lived normal grown-up lives had been doing like travel and, you know, have furniture and shit like that.

And so I thought, well, shit, I want to scuba dive on sunken ships. And so I got to write a book that takes place someplace where there's sunken ships. And I had, when I was a waiter, it used to be this guy that came into the restaurant bar all the time that was shipping t-shirts to Micronesia by the container load. you know and he'd get like you know all the losing super bowl t-shirts from that year that are already made in advance you know but they didn't know they were going to lose and he ships them to micronesia and sells them for a quarter apiece to the to the kids there and um micronesia is as you might guess in the middle of fucking nowhere guam is part in micronesia and then plow but but it's you know like a it's like a studded belt across the equator kind of and um and so he said on truck island he would tell him all these funny stories about that happened on truck island and the other thing that truck had was 60 Japanese ships that were sunk in in the lagoon and I was like well shit that's where my next book takes place and now I'm going to go and scuba dive 60 sunken Japanese ships and take it out my taxes and then I came up with a whole different story what the fuck was that sorry um and then uh sorry I had a ticking a lot I hope you guys can edit that out no it's no problem normally I'm in studio today this is cool I'm in studio today, but more than not, I'm in your position where I'm having to call in. And I've had more than several screw-ups with the app and have dropped my calls. So the fact that you've been on here for 40 minutes straight without completely fading out,

you're doing better than me, so don't worry about it. I know. And this always happens. It's like you guys go in and say, and he's very funny. And then we do an hour podcast and everybody's listening and is going, this is the most unfunny fucking thing I've ever heard in my life. Well, our fans should be used to that by now. Yeah, please, please don't worry.

This is another one of those things. It's like, it's hard to be, you know, funny, like, over the course of an hour long, genuine conversation with a person. Do you know what I mean? That you didn't, like, devise to be fun. And it's just, that's just the way it is. And I think, you know, hopefully people understand that. Yeah. And I always want to talk about craft.

I love talking about craft. I don't have anybody to talk about craft. with you know I know I'm with you you know particularly you know particularly compare and contrast to you know you guys doing stand-up and me you know sitting in a room by and myself and hoping this shit will be funny 18 months from now when it comes out but anyway so so I guess the short answer is the books start with just a really a gram of an idea and just you know what if a guy who was a hypochondriac got the job of being death and that's the that's the sort of the the sluggles

line for my book, A Dirty Job and the follow-up to that secondhand souls. And then you just figure out how to make that happen. And then as I'm coming up with it, and this goes to the second part of the question, not that you asked, but that I wanted to answer, which is about, you know, how do you make it funny? And it's just, well, this, this shit is funny. And it occurs to you, a lot of times I'll be doing research and something. And I think I react just instinctively that I look for the funny thing, even in something that's sad or, you know, I mean, you all know, you just did a thing about somebody's me, Maude Diane, and, and Corey's dad having a heart attack. That was actually like your last two episodes, right? Yeah, yeah. I'm like, well,

this is, this is uplifting. But, but that's, but that's the thing is that that's your, your, your default way of reacting to the universe is just funny. And so the way I come up with it for a book is I'll just go, I'll do the research and everybody's like, wow, you do all this research and so academic. And it's like, no, I'm not. I'm looking for shit to react to. And then I'll come up with something that's funny. And then I'll be able to plug it into a book.

And I might not even know, like the first thing that was written on Lamb was the line, blessed or the dumb fucks from the beatitudes. And I didn't know anything else about it. But I also knew that that wasn't going to happen until about four-fifths of the book was through. But I just plugged that into an outline and went, yep, somewhere along there, someone's going to say, blessed are the dumb fucks. I'm going to have to figure out what that is. And so that's how, you know, that's how you, you know, you don't, you're right, Trey, the, the, the comedy you come up with in sequence can be because you've developed these characters that if you're lucky, they'll say funny shit.

Right. And you can put them in positions where they'll say funny shit or their attitude will be funny. But the other thing is just, you know, you're reacting to the world and going, you see something on the street and you're going, well, that's going to go in the book. that's right and then and when that happens right what you just said because that's that that was sort of related to the next thing i was going to ask was like i don't know if i'm sure you have and i also wondered whether you even agree with it the notion of there being uh basically two different kinds of writers the like the way i've heard it described the architect and the gardener that whole thing the architect plant note has a blueprint by the time he actually starts you know

knows exactly how many rooms there's going to be in the house and i and right how it's all that and and a gardener plants a seed, knows what kind of seed it is, knows what kind of plan. He's hoping to get out of that seed, waters it, cultivates it, but allows it to grow like along the way. And I personally feel like I'm more of the former than the latter, but I also feel like it kind of gets muddied some because like you just said, you see something like, oh, that's a good idea. That's not going to be in there until even near the end. And I'm nowhere near that part of writing it right now. But you go and you commit it to paper, you know, you put it in the outline or whatever.

Right. Are you also like actually writing, you know, passages and chapters and stuff along the way, like out of order like that? Or do you have an outline like you mentioned that you sort of build until it's ready to go and then sit down and write the whole thing or what? Well, I will, I'll have not big passages. You know, the transitions are usually the hardest for me, you know. And so I'll have dialogue, you know, like I'll have a funny line. And so I may have a five or six line dialogue exchange that goes on between characters that, you know, I'll write three years before the book is done. Right.

And I'll plug it in. And then when I write the book, I write it beginning to end. You know, it's chapter one, paragraph one, and then I go. But I'll have this sort of, you envision it as a timeline. rather than an outline the way that you would submit it to somebody. And I'll just go, well, somewhere around there, this is going to happen. And the great thing about that is it sort of acts as a mile marker for you. Right.

You go, okay, I don't know how the fuck I'm going to get there, but we've got to get to the point where Bob says this shit. And so it's, and you can imagine how much I'm gesticulating as I'm saying that. I'm letting my hand up and down a timeline like I'm playing the piano. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And so it's a little bit of both. Right. And I think that your experience with, and scripts are so rigidly structured.

Right. That they are, they're much less forgiving as you probably know than a novel is. I mean, if I want to go down some rad hole about toast and just write a whole chapter about toast, I can do it. You can't do that shit, especially in a 23-minute comedy show, you know. And I've never worked in a situation where you have a writing room where you've got 12 funny people and they're all trying to sell their ideas into a script that's, you know, about a birthday party. You know, I can't even fucking imagine. It sounds like it actually would be fun and I'd never get anything done.

Right. Well, there's elements of both of those things. Yeah, it definitely is fun for sure. But a lot of those people that do that, like day to day, We've done some of that, you know, again, like writing a pilot, a sitcom pilot that ultimately didn't become a series. So I haven't done it full time, but I've done some of that writer's room atmosphere. And, I mean, your instincts are correct. It is fun.

I do feel like you get less done maybe, but it also is, you know, like you said, you're sitting in a room. You're like, God, I hope this is funny in 18 months when someone finally reads it. You know what I mean? But if you're in a room with those funny people bouncing ideas off of each other, you hopefully. come out of that with at least something of an idea of this is at least funny to us and we have a collection of funny people together you know so like that's something well there's another thing that you don't get to do that we get to do which is like when we're not let's not talk about scripts just stand up and for instance like so similar to how you said you'll have like okay blessed

or the dumb folks that's going to go somewhere that's that's pretty similar to how i'll write a joke like i'll think of a line a funny line and i'm like well i can't just walk on stage and say the funny line, but I know this line is going to get a huge pop. Now I have to create some sort of story where this is the last line of that story. Like this is, you know, where one of my buddies said this, boom, jokes over. Now the beauty of that is I can go on stage. I'm like, all right, I know I've got the line. So I'm going to talk until it starts maybe not being funny.

And then I'll say the line and there you go. And then the next night I can go, all right, what was not funny last night? I'll cut that out. And I can kind of edit on the fly. And after about six months, I'm like, this is how the joke is supposed to be. it's getting a pop and I'm going to put that on an album. You don't get that. You write, right, right, and it's funny to you and you don't.

And I know that you have, you'll probably have some people you trust that read your work, but it's not, I don't think that you get the blessing that I get to actually go out and see it live. This doesn't work. I'm not going to do this. Is that extremely frustrating? Because I know it was for us when we were writing our book. I think that it's really the thing that I talk about with comedians is the fact that you guys get to work. material you know i i watched that uh that documentary about signfeld going back into standup it came

out a few years ago comedian he was gonna he was gonna he was gonna take a year to put his act together and i'm like fuck me yeah you know you can try your shit out for a year before you call it done you know and um and you know when i go on a book tour it's 30 days and it's usually 28 events and 30 days and i And I don't read. I go talk for 40 minutes. And I'll come up with, you know, sort of an outline and sort of like you were saying something that I hope is funny. And at the end of 30 days, I may have retained 10% of what I started with.

Sure. Because people react to other shit and you, you improvise something. And that's way funnier than what you wrote when you were sitting in your hotel room or on the train or whatever. And I'm a little bit envious of that. also, you know, the fact that when you're done, you're done that night, you know? Right. Sure. Yeah, when you write books, you're never done.

No. Well, I was going to ask about that also. How much rereading, revising, rewriting do you do? And while you're doing that, do you ever run into, like, feeling like you think something isn't funny anymore or it's not funny to you? And when that happens, are you like, this is, I'm only feeling. that way because this joke has been in here for a while and I've been over it a bunch of times now and I'm you know but it still is funny it's funny the first time because that's the thing with stuff that's funny it's never as funny as it is the first time how do you determine what should stay

in versus what you know could be funnier well you know that that that's almost mystical to me because I don't do a lot of rewriting and I don't cut a lot of stuff out right um the the thing is that the, you know, there's these, the same way that you have to pace your act, you know, so I, you know, I, uh, I bought y'all's a comedy album and I was looking at how it's, how the set list is put together. And I mean, it's like every 20 seconds, there's a new bit. Well, first off, thank you. I'd have sent you one for free, but that means a lot. Oh, that's, yeah, that's all right. I had to have it by the time we got on on the air. And, um, and, um, but, but, but, but, so, but when you got a novel, there's a certain, you know, there's a certain number of balls that I want to keep in the air.

And it's got to the pace. The plot's got to go and the suspense has got to go and the characters have to develop and all that stuff that every other novelist has to do. And then appended to that is, and it has to be funny. But the thing that often will go is, you know, I can't stop to be funny. It's got to be funny in the course of everything doing all that other shit. And so usually, I can't hammer shit in just because it's funny, although I will do that.

I will write a toast joke or a frog joke or something, even though it has no place in the book, just because I thought that shit was funny. But you can't do that too often. And you definitely can't workshop it to see if it's, you know, how it works with a crowd. I just have to hope that it does work. and I'm not, you know, by contrast also, I'm not dealing with the energy of the crowd, which I know you guys do, you can do the same material, you know, 60 miles from where you did it last night, and it killed last night, and tonight it bombed and you're like, what the fuck happened there?

I mean, am I wrong in that? No, hell no. It happens, you know, like I'll be on. We were just talking about that. Just, I mean, all comedians have, are never more than 48 hours removed from that conversation about how that happens. and what a, you know, motherfucker, that whole thing. Yeah, I mean, it's rough. You'll literally have it down.

You're like, oh, man, all right. This act that I've been working on for six months is now, man, it's ready to go. I can't believe it. I'm so proud of myself. I haven't missed with it. And then you go do Buffalo one night and all of a sudden you're just like, well, I fucking suck. You don't even think about the six months of just killing every night. It's the one bad show.

And now, well, this act just is completely off the rails. Oh, yeah. You know, the equivalent of that for me is reading like Amazon reviews. You know, there might be 900 reviews and 899 of them are like, this is the best book I ever read. And there's some woman that goes, I didn't like the girl in chapter two. And I'm like, fuck, I have my failure. Yeah. That's reassuring in a way, because, I mean, yeah, we're the exact same way.

I'm the exact same way. Yeah. And I, you know, and I sort of envy you guys that. What I don't envy you is that you have to figure out, oh, well, there's going to be, you know, 100 plus people looking at my dumb ass today. which a lot of times I'm like, I'm really glad I don't have to get out of my PJs to do my job. Sure. But I don't sometimes for the record. Yeah, but comedians, you know, different comedians are different about that.

But generally speaking, comedians have to worry less about that particular aspect of it. You know what I mean than most people who get in front of people. Like, yeah, Corey will wear pajamas, sweatpants, fanny hats, basketball, jerseys. He's a cartoon, you know, and it's always fine. It doesn't matter. Like sometimes I will. dress up. Yeah, I'm sorry. No, no, no. I was that like, we did Austin City Limits two nights ago or whatever, and I felt the need because it's such a prestigious venue to wear nice colored jeans and a

collared shirt. And it's funny because I was saying, I was FaceTime with my wife before the show. And I was just wearing a regular button down shirt. That's nothing special about it. And she goes, you look really nice. Oh, my God. And I was like, oh, thank you. And I was talking to Mom earlier on FaceTime. And she said the same thing. Like, they were just got, I was like, this shirt's pretty regular and she just goes, you know, I think it's just that it's a shirt. Yeah. That's, you know, she's like, and I was like, yeah, that's fair. She's like, because normally, you know, you wear the basketball or the Hulk Hogan's sleeveless

thing. You just look really nice in clothes. So, yeah, we don't have to worry about it as much. You need a burka, man. You can cover that shit up. I know, yeah, something. Incredibly handsome. Something.

Oh, God damn it. Well, one thing I wanted to ask you about before we leave, because I I think this relates to not only me and Trey and Drew, but our audience at large. In that talk that I mentioned earlier that I watched you give, you were discussing going to, going back to Ohio, correct? Right. For your best friend's funeral. And you quipped in there. You said, which, and I'm paraphrasing, so I'm probably going to butcher.

You said, which I found is lately the only reason I ever go back to Ohio is for a funeral because I feel like I escaped. And then, of course, the California crowd laughed. Ha, ha, ha, fuck Ohio, yada, yada, you know, that shit. So that made me, like, I sometimes, even though I still live in Georgia, I'm not really there all the time. I'm more on the road. I spend a lot of time in California. And I think we, as Southern liberals, not living there as much anymore, we sometimes have that thought of I escaped. So I just wanted to know what it was like for you initially growing up being the funny,

assumedly liberal weird guy in your high school in Ohio because I want to see how similar it was to the actual South. Well, I don't think that, and I think I sent a note to Corey saying, you know, my mom's from Val Dosta. Right. And so I spent quite a bit of time in Georgia and northern Florida and my grandfather, paternal grandfather was from Tennessee. So, you know, I'm not a stranger to that. And the town I grew up in Ohio, we had a neighborhood called Little Kentucky. Because even though we were in Northern Ohio, we had all these migrant Kentuckians coming up to work in the steel mill. You made like a Chinatown, but for Kentucky? Sounds like it's amazing.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It was like, I don't want to go into the cliches, but it was everything you guys have ever thought about, you know, a Sunday at Walmart. Right. And you drop into that, you drop into an accent really fast because people you went to school with had Kentucky accents, which as you know is this about a fucking banjo accent as you're going to get. Sure. And so anyway, culturally, I don't know, it was, guns were a big deal. I don't, I left before politics were relevant.

And I, I'm the boomer generation that we came to. I came of age just after Vietnam, but right during the time of Watergate. So, so everybody was apolitical. You can blame us for like disco because it was like we don't want to have to think about anything. My dad, my dad was that same kind of generation, but also like I tell people all the time because they'll ask about growing up in my hometown in Tennessee. Even when I was a kid, like in the 90s, my hometown, my little hometown in Tennessee, I tell, I say all. the time, I would have, I would have described it as mostly apolitical. Likewise. Like people didn't, a lot, very Jesusy, all that, culturally all that was there.

But in terms of actual politics, they thought they were all full of shit. They didn't really talk about it. And that's why it's been wild to me. It's like, you go there now and it's Trump signs all over the place, you know, and it's wild, but it ain't always been that way. And that's a relatively recent phenomenon, really. And I mean, I blame it on social media. People are like, you know, like you said earlier, like these, well, Trey mentioned, uh, people aren't just going to share their opinions with you to your face, but they're very, they'll do it on the internet real fucking quick. So like back in the day, I don't remember when I was a kid, people talking too much shit about Bill Clinton or Bob Dole. It was just like, eh, one of them's

going to win and they're all the same at the end of the goddamn day. But nobody, you know, it was always like, we just, we keep who we're voting for to ourselves. And now it's like, that's such a qualifier in who you are as a person. It's like, hey, who you voting for? And then yada, yada, yada. So, I mean, do you feel it's, you mentioned earlier, you get more shit on social media than you ever did for your books. I mean, is that what we're, because now the boomers that were fucking apolitical are maybe the most insane on Facebook, no offense. Well, I left Facebook except for putting up book event announcements about four years ago.

I just couldn't, I couldn't do it. I, you know, but there was just people that were just getting triggered by any fucking thing. And I just, I don't have time for it. I mean, if I'm on social media, I'm at least going to try to be entertaining and funny, you know. and that means that somebody's going to take a hit depending on how sensitive you are. And I just couldn't do it on Facebook. I could make a joke about fruit bats and people from the bat anti-defamation league. You can't say that about bats and they'll hurt their feelings.

And I'm like, I'm pretty sure they're not reading. I mean, I honestly God, I think I made a joke about Amish and people are like, you're going to offend the Amish. And I'm like, the Amish should not be on the motherfucking internet. that, you know, if there's anybody we can make jokes about and not offend them, it's the Amish. But, you know, so anyway, I'm done with that. I'm with you on that. Like, I get some of the groups, like, you know, we don't make fun of this and that anymore.

And, like, I can get it. But, like, the day we lose the Amish, I'm quitting. Right, right. And I'm, especially the motherfuckers being Coke dealers and shit. But anyway, that's another thing. But my dad was a highway patrolman. And he was, which meant in the 1960s, he was doing. riot control on college campuses for anti-war riots.

Right. And he was at Kent State when the shooting, oh, he just left Kent State. When the, when the students were shot, you know, I remember him coming home and sitting like in our TV room and just shaking his head and go, you just don't shoot people for throwing rocks at you.

Because he had stood there for 24 hours in line, being hit by rocks from students. And that was his job was to contain the crowd. But, you know, you just, you know, Then they sent a bunch of 18-year-old National Guardsmen in it. They didn't know what the fuck they were doing. But the point I wanted to get to is going through all that and, you know, Martin Luther King being shot and Bobby Kennedy being shot and, you know, all of that.

I could not tell you today if my father was a Democrat or a Republican. Could not tell you. He died when I was 21. But the point being that's how much how political things were. And my dad was a fucking cop. Right. So, you know, you know, but dear. hunting was a big thing and i drove to san francis or drove to california with 15 smith and wessons

in the trunk of my car and you know that shit was happening um and uh but so yeah it's changed a lot it's changed i i even had a friend the guy that i went to the to the funeral for that i'm talking about in in that thing you saw um he i talked to him maybe six months before he died and he was really concerned that his wife was like listening to rush limbo at work and you know this was before Trump so he didn't have to see that but you know he was really concerned that his wife who was a dental hygienist at work they listened to to rush and and Hannity and all that shit on the radio and he just like didn't he was his wife was scaring him with all this shit because you know he had been apolitical his whole life you know so i yeah

it's way more expressed when i when i did go back I went back to do a gig at the Thurber house because there's people you don't say no to. And if the, you know, James Thurber House says come and talk to us, you come and talk to them. Like when the Mark Twain house says come and talk to us, you go, yeah, okay, I'm fucking going. Sure. And when I went back to do that, what I found was that all the guys that when I was in high school were wearing tie-dye and saying, we got to blow shit up, you know, and take over for the man. those are exactly the same guys that were in militias going, we got to blow shit up.

And, you know, they had just, you know, their whole thing was not whether they were left or right. I realized in having that 30-year perspective, it was they just wanted to blow shit up. Right. And it kind of didn't matter what the cause was. So anyway, that, yeah, it's changed a lot. And even in, in Ohio or, or any place that I grew up,

been in Michigan and so forth. The crowd is self-selecting. Now, I did one event in Grand Rapids on a book tour. I think it was two books ago. And it was in 2015,

but the campaign had already started. And I was going all over the country. And I was doing jokes about how fucking stupid the wall was. And just, you know, and I, my stuff isn't political, but you couldn't ignore. It was like, this is just so blatantly. fucking dumb you gotta call it out and the only place people didn't laugh was grand

rapids michigan and then i later found out that this was like betsy devas's thing and it was one of those corporate you know like where you know morgan stanley buys a table i'm sure you guys have done that kind of shit yeah um we did grand rapids at a place called the pyramid and we were told that it was uh named like to make fun of betsy devasas because of her advocate shit that's what that's what that's what that's what that's what the dude yeah that may have Yeah, well, I was totally blindsided. I had no idea, you know, because I was put in with three, with two other writers and, and, you know, their shit was serious. And I was in there trying to make death jokes. And it was, uh, everybody was uncomfortable. And I, you know, I called my PR person. I went never again. We're never doing this again on book tour, you know, because it wasn't, it's not like as a paid gig. Right. It was like, well, I got a check or anything like that. So, well, that is, like 2015 was, I was living in New York. You. York and you know as the primaries were starting Trump was starting to get some some serious heat and I've never really considered myself a political comedian but I was doing Trump shit because I

thought well I mean everyone will think that he's a fucking lunatic and this isn't politics this is just we've been making fun of Trump for three decades he's literally been a laughing stock for three decades and then all the sudden I just I get down where I'm from and I start saying some stuff and I'm like oh my god they're really fucking on board what happened did I just wake up McComa and Donald Trump is not a goddamn lunatic. I know, man. Because I wasn't back. I was long gone from my hometown by that point.

And I just saw it on Facebook and social media. I started, it became clear to me that he was like, like sincerely, unironically, their guy, you know. And it blew my fucking mind, man. Like, like, honestly. Like at this point, it's like everybody knows it and it's whatever. But like, I mean, I was stunned by that. I went on multiple Facebook tirades. pointed at people from my hometown like, are y'all fucking kidding me?

Yeah. Like, this guy, really? I blew my mind. And it wasn't one of those cases where I was like, really, you vote Republican? No, I never gave a shit about that. Like, I remember. Right. And social media was, it was very much a thing during the Mitt Romney Obama run.

But I don't remember, like, I, dude, now don't get me wrong. I did see some racist bullshit about Obama, but that'd been happening. And that's to be, you know, you expect that. But, like, it just wasn't that big of a deal. I remember I was like, yeah, Mitt Romney's got the, was it, binder full of women, that's kind of fucked up. But I never once was like, man, I'll tell you what, if Mitt Romney wins, we're fucked. I never thought that. I didn't want him to, but I never thought that.

But then the Trump thing, I'm like, what the fuck are we doing here? Yeah. But listen, because we could talk from hours and hours more on all of that. That's true. But we do, I think, need to wrap it up. I mean, but again, I could do this all damn day. But I think we need to start putting a bow on it. And the first thing I always do when we get to this part of any interview is I want to make sure, Chris, it would give you an opportunity to let people know exactly, you know, how they can find you and, you know, get your stuff and all that.

I mean, you know, you just go to a bookstore. But, you know, also there's the internet. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm at chrismoor.com, which is my website that gets updated every three, four, five years. and I do hear a lot from web developers going like, when did you put this together in the time of Gutenberg? And then I'm on Twitter at the author guy, all one word, and I think you can just search Christopher Moore on Facebook,

although I don't post there except for events, but you can go there for events, and that's about it. And, you know, my email addresses on all of the, all of the books. And I answer every email, even if it's like, well, that's fucking weird. But thank you, guys. This is, this was great. I'm so, I got to tell you, I'm so flattered. Being a guy who only knows he's funny because he's sitting in a room by himself for 18 months

at a time, you know, writing books, to have people who are funny for a living, acknowledge what I do. It's amazingly flattering. And I know I sort of, you know, put my foot in the door to do a podcast with you guy, but I was so flattered when I found out you were following me or that you thought it was anything at all. Well, believe me, that last part in particular is very much reciprocated. You know, like I said on that segment where we talked about you on the podcast, when I saw that you had shared some stuff of mine and followed me, I was like, holy shit. It also was like, I was like, man, I need to start taking that stuff more seriously because it was like an article I had written or whatever. You know what I mean?

I was like, I was like, damn, I wouldn't even thinking about like Christopher Moore reading this shit. You know, like, but anyway,

it was a big, so yeah, I mean, likewise, we're huge fans and have been since well before the podcast or any of that stuff.

And, yeah, this is great. And if you ever have anything that you want to rant about or a new book comes out that you want to to plug,

open invitation to come back on the show anytime you want. Absolutely. Thanks, guys. This is great. I really appreciate it.

Well, thank you, Mr. Christopher Moore. Everybody, go check him out. put it in your Google machines, get all this book, spend as much money as you can. And yeah, there we go.

Thanks, Chris. Thanks, everybody. Yep. All right. Thank you all for listening to The Well Red Show. We'd love to stick around longer, but we got to go. Tune in next week if you got nothing to do. Thank you, God bless you, good night, and skew.