Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

by John Hodgman

As you know, airports occupy their own country. Let’s settle this once and for all: if you have a stopover at an airport in, say, Phoenix or Berlin, you cannot say you have visited Arizona or Germany. You have only visited AIRPORT, a dimension outside the jurisdiction of not only literal local law, but also most unspoken social contracts about when it is acceptable to sleep in public, wear sweatpants, and drink and drink and drink and drink in the morning.

The people of Portland are nice. They all ride bicycles and scooters and make hand signals before they turn. If you go to a rock show, people at the show will not just go to the bar to get a beer. They will form a line, perpendicular to the bar, with great vacant stretches of bar on either side. They wait their turn, one after the other. And the rock show doesn’t happen in an empty crowded basement shoved full of people who are likely to die in a fire. Instead, the rock club looks like a ski lodge, like the Overlook Hotel, with vast woolen carpets, leather banquettes, and a roaring fireplace. And when the show starts, when people in other cities will stand up and move closer to the stage to see the act, a person in Portland will sit down, on a quilted ottoman, with a hot toddy, and that person will get angry at anyone who is not sitting down in the rock club, which is to say everyone else, and that person will grab your jacket, or I should say, my jacket, and tug on it. And then when you turn around, she will literally hiss at you and say, “I can’t fucking see.” So you see, it’s not merely that the people in Portland are nice: they are nicer than you and everyone else in the world, and so they deserve clear fucking sightlines, and you don’t. If this happens, do what I did. Just say, “Excuse me. If you would like my attention, just tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Excuse me.’ Don’t tug on my jacket. Treat me like I am also a human being. After all, I am from Park Slope, so ...

Mostly superheroes do not need cars because of webs and powers and so on. Even the Batmobile really only made sense back when it was introduced in 1939, because only about seven people had cars then. You could park a big black car with a bat on it anywhere then. But there is really no reason for the Flash to have a Flash car, unless the Flash wanted to go much slower that day, or he had a bunch of luggage to take with him while crime fighting.

It is better to say yes than no. Unless saying yes will hurt you or someone else, say yes. Don’t say no if the invitation is scary. That’s when you should definitely say yes. If a computer company invites you to be in an ad and you’re scared to say yes because (a) it will mess up your pickup schedule at your child’s school and (b) it will push you well past your comfortable limits of fraudulency and change your life forever, take it from me, don’t say no, like I did, and then get lucky only because they asked again. They won’t always ask again. And don’t say no, like I did, to appearing on Breaking Bad because you were afraid to live in Albuquerque for a while, away from your family. Do your work. Do the things you love. Don’t ask permission. The more work you make in the world, the more likely someone will ask you to do some new thing, some bigger thing, or at least some interesting thing. And when they ask, say yes.

I had no idea why I was doing this. Sometimes I wondered if it was all a Yale Psychology Department experiment to see how long they could trick a student into standing by himself on a corner, counting meaningless things, and writing those numbers down on a sheet of paper that would never be read, but simply thrown into a trash can full of fire in some graduate student’s cubicle. I wondered if they were watching me from some nearby window, if they were waiting for me to figure out that the job was stupid, to give up and go back to bed, warm and refreshed and untricked, just like every other test subject had done after a single pointless morning of clicking clickers in the cold. But they didn’t know who they were dealing with. They didn’t know that when you give John Hodgman rules, he follows them all the way, day after shivering day. This is not a virtue. There is the slimmest line between doing a good job for its own sake and following orders to your own frozen death (or someone else’s).

The reporters asked if Donald Trump running for office meant the end of satire. Jon said no. They asked if Donald Trump were elected president, would Jon come back to television? Jon said absolutely not. I understood how Jon felt, or at least I knew how I felt. A few years earlier I had changed my persona on The Daily Show from the “Resident Expert” to the “Deranged Millionaire.” I did this in large part to make fun of Donald Trump. Because even back then, Donald Trump was appearing on cable news channels to peddle conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s religion and place of birth. It was 2011. The Apprentice was winding down and struggling. Like anyone, Donald Trump wanted to stay on television, so he was trying out some new ways of doing so, such as musing about running for president and/or just wandering onto cable news sets to tell obvious lies without any credentials other than that he was a (supposedly) rich white man who wanted to talk right now. I told The Daily Show that we should have our own entitled, wealthy, lunatic white male monster, and that person should be me, and they agreed with me.

Jon, here, is Jon Stewart.

My comedy, such as it is, had always been based on taking existing fact and stretching it out to its most absurd possible iteration. But Donald Trump was already doing that. He had been doing it his whole life. By the time he launched his actual, no-joke presidential campaign by gliding down a golden escalator to accuse Mexico of rape, I had realized that there was no joke I could make that could keep up with the long-form improv Trump was laying down every hour of every day. Because of course we now know the no-joke campaign was a joke. He never expected to actually be elected. He just wanted to launch this new, lucrative hate-and-fear-based entertainment product called the Trump Candidacy. But then he became president, and the joke was on him, because he did not want that job. But the joke was still mostly on us, because he is terrible at it, and he makes us all a laughingstock.