Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

hodgmania

On Tuesday night, I went to a reading by humorist John Hodgman, perhaps best known these days as the nerdy P.C. guy in the recent Apple commercials. His book of made-up trivia, The Areas of My Expertise, just came out in paperback. In advance of the show, Hodgman did an entertaining live discussion on washingtonpost.com last week (though his constant repetition of the phrase "That is all." got a bit old after a while).

Hodgman also makes occasional appearances as a "resident expert" on The Daily Show. This clip, in which he explains net neutrality to Jon Stewart, is one of my favorites:

(For folks viewing this via RSS, the video embedded above is available on comedycentral.com (click on "Net Neutrality").)

Anyway, the show / booksigning on Tuesday was a lot of fun. The event was held at The Warehouse Theater, a venue so "intimate" that the front row of chairs was right up against the stage. Folks arriving just a couple minutes late (like, erm, myself) had to do a walk of shame onto the stage to be able to get to the seating on the other side.

The opening "acts" were an essayist who read from a funny series of letters between a father and son as they negotiate an allowance increase and an antiwar cartoonist who showed a fun "animated" cartoon via an overhead projector.

Hodgman, in full "resident expert" persona, came up to the microphone with his own "troubadour", in the form of indie folk musician Jonathan Coulton. The readings were entertaining -- the ones about hoboes seemed to garner the most laughs -- though, eerily, I had read a couple of them on my way over to the theater that evening.

Coulton played accompanying music and occasional corresponding songs (i.e. "Big Rock Candy Mountain" as a hobo anthem), and then closed out the show with two songs of his own. I'd recognized his name from the shockingly good country/folk cover of "Baby Got Back" that he released last year. His final song has become one of my new favorites; appropriate to this time of year, "Re: Your Brains" is a ditty about an office worker-turned-zombie, complete with an audience singalong during the chorus. It was hilarious.

Afterward, I stood in line to have Hodgman sign my book. I had twenty minutes in line to formulate a decent question, and all I could come up with when I shook the man's hand was, "I've never been to a reading where the author had his own troubador." His gracious reply to my silly comment: "Well, it's a dying art." After he asked me how to spell my name, he signed the book's title page and drew a little hobo sign with a "y" in the center (from "Alyson") instead of an "h" (which, in his book, stands for hobo world domination).