I said at the top of this episode that I didn’t want to call Josh Gondelman a comedian, because the word does about a third of the required work.
Here is the CV, and I have since checked it against his actual bio rather than my memory, which is a courtesy I extend to guests and to no one else. Five years at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, first as web producer and then as staff writer, where he collected four Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards and three WGA Awards. Head writer and executive producer on Desus & Mero at Showtime. A contributor to the final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Two stand-up specials: People Pleaser (2022) and Positive Reinforcement (2025). A book of essays, Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results. Co-creator of the parody Twitter account @SeinfeldToday. A regular panellist on NPR’s Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me!
We first met about ten years ago at Union Hall, doing Picture This, the show where cartoonists draw live while comedians perform and everyone pretends this is a normal way to spend an evening. I have two deeply unemployable skills: cartoonist and comedian. My parents are thrilled. Picture This is the only place on earth where both of them are load-bearing at once.
Josh’s read on it was better than mine:
“You’re watching something that’s never happened before and will never happen again. Everybody is kind of on edge seeing how the artists will interpret the comedy and how the comedians will react to the art. It’s perfect.”
We also remembered a show where the comic on stage was working a long stretch about diarrhoea, and I, being a professional, had no choice but to render it. Gratuitously. Backstage was a convivial disgrace. We were crying.
That’s the whole show, really. Backstage is better than the stage. (Don’t tell the box office.)
The Overnight Success That Took 9 Years
I confessed that I had followed @SeinfeldToday for years without ever once registering that Josh was behind it. He co-created it with Jack Moore in late 2012: log lines for Seinfeld episodes, were they to exist in the present day, and present day was 2012 into 2013… which is now a period piece.
The numbers are fucking absurd:
“By, I would say, 48 hours later, it had like 100,000 followers... Never had anything like that happen to me before or since. It was like as close as I had to being Hawk Tuah.”
The Sunday night the account was formed, Josh had dinner with a friend who worked as a manager. She told him, gently, that she loved working with him and would keep helping him out, but that her boss was after clients with a slightly higher profile.
Two days later, the boss wanted a meeting. And to sign him!
“I’ve never seen something turn on a dime like that in my life before.”
He had samples. He’d been doing stand-up for years. But he didn’t have the bulletproof script sitting in a drawer waiting for the world to finally notice him. He had drafts that were “all kind of a little rough.” So the lightning struck, and he spent the next year converting it into late-night writing applications, one at a time, like a man turning a lottery win into a mortgage.
The heat arrives whether or not you’re ready. It doesn’t wait while you tidy up.
The Taste of a 57-Year-Old Father of Three
Nice Try is a collection of essays, and I have described it, to Josh’s face and now to you, as being like “A Kind David Sedaris.” He took the compliment the way he takes everything, which is to say he immediately turned it into an admission of ongoing inadequacy:
“We moved into a new apartment last week and I was just shelving my books and I saw my old copies of Naked... I haven’t looked at it in years, but it was like, I’m chasing that still as a prose writer.”
Same. The personal essay has a king, and we are both loitering outside the palace.
There’s a bit in the book about a childhood library trip and discovering R.L. Stine, and a line about having the taste of a 57-year-old father of three.
“Books were kind of the place where I could have more adult taste. My parents were a little more protective with movies and TV and even violent video games. But with books, it was kind of whatever I could get my hands on.”
Which is how a child ends up with real, considered positions on prime John Grisham. The Rainmaker. The Client. The Firm. He said “prime Grisham” the way other men say “prime Coltrane.” That truly is 57-year-old-father-of-three behaviour.
Writing in Someone Else’s Mouth
Here’s the thing about Josh’s writing that I’ve never been able to get past. Him on stage is him on the page. The voice is identical, and it’s completely unique, and yet he spent five years writing in an acerbic British one, and got four Emmys for it.
How?
Below: how you make an atrocity funny without becoming a ghoul, the word Gary Gulman put in my head that I can’t get out, the pumpkin quiche incident, and why the meanest guy in the room in 2007 was never the one to copy.
