John Hodgman: Febrile Genius, Famous Minor Television Celebrity
John Hodgman is a writer and humourist who, like Stephen Colbert, has created an alter ego of himself with the same name. It’s as if Bruce Wayne decided to become “Bruce Wayne Man” instead of Batman.
The DiggNation interview below (scroll down) amply shows that Hodgman, in both his egos, is charming, witty and personable, at least when he is not kicking bottles of Fresca off people’s heads.
He describes himself as a famous minor television celebrity, but it is worth noting that he is being modest: after all, Barack Obama opened for him at a recent speaking engagement. And with the current state of TV, even “stars” are minor celebrities. Let me put it this way : appearing on Dancing with the Stars or Celebrity Big Brother would be beneath him. He is just that popular and successful.
On This American Life, (the world’s greatest radio show in history in space in the universe) he produced many of my favourite stories, including the the story on the show Superheroes (Flight vs Invisibility: Which power would you pick?
Hodgman apparently possesses an astonishing superpower of his own: many of the stories he made up about his alter ego started to come true. He wrote a book of fake trivia – The Areas of My Expertise, (an audiobook which I have listened to several times) and parlayed it into appearances as:
- An in-house expert on everything on The Daily Show,
- the PC in the Mac – PC ads for Apple, and
- cameos in Tina Fey’s Baby Mama, the “Bowie” episode of Flight of the Conchords, Battlestar Galactica and Ricky Gervais’ The Invention of Lying.
You can also download his excellent podcast Today in the Past (Free) or buy The Areas of My Expertise OR More Information Than You Require at iTunes. I particularly enjoyed the sections on crabs and on attack ads in the former. The latter has even more excellent cameos.
