It's a fact: John Hodgman is funny

By Edward M. Eveld - McClatchy Newspapers

As a “famous minor television personality,” John Hodgman is almost a household name.

We said “almost.”

You know him as the PC guy in the Mac commercials and as the “resident expert” on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” And you might recognize him by some of the adjectives the humorist has enjoyed on the road to his near-famousness: hapless, befuddled, nerdy, bespectacled and round-faced.

Hodgman is also a Yale graduate and writer, and his book “More Information Than You Require” was released this month in paperback. It's a follow-up to his previous book, “The Areas of My Expertise.”

They are books of fake facts and false history. This one covers such subjects as “How to Tell the Future,” “Gambling: The Sport of the Asthmatic Man” and “How to Remember Any Name, Especially the Name ‘John Hodgman.'” Plus: 700 mole-man names.

In his wry and dry way, Hodgman, 38, answered a few of our questions by telephone from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he had just picked up his youngsters from school. For privacy reasons, he didn't divulge much additional personal information, including the children's names, except to refer to his daughter as Hodgmina and his son as Hodgmanillo.

The conversation was condensed and edited.

Of you and Jon Stewart, Stewart is the actual famous one, so do people ask you what he's really like?

That's certainly a question that is asked. He's as smart and as funny and absolutely as good-natured and short as he appears, depending on the size of your television.

I'm reading your book and am reminded of the time my brothers and I tried to get my mom to watch Monty Python. She said, “Now that's just silly.”

That is a favorable comparison, to Monty Python, and one that flatters me but is not entirely deserved.

I am a fan of silly things, but remember Monty Python was not itself purely silly. Even arguably the silliest, the Ministry of Silly Walks sketch, was a brilliant take on bureaucracy and British conformity.

I think that where I endeavor to emulate Monty Python is certainly to embrace the absurd but especially to embrace the absurd when it has a point. I'm not a fan of the non sequitur, although I'm guilty of it quite a bit.

So are your books works of satire?

I have never been able to make distinctions or understand any of the many definitions of satire versus parody versus comedy. I don't think I endeavor to any particular category other than the estimable category of fake trivia.

Fake history can have comic and non-comic purposes and has a long precedence.

How incredible was it, for example, that Thomas Jefferson, a wealthy landowner who had nothing to gain but everything to lose by becoming a traitor to his country and a revolutionary, still did so?

History itself has never been fully able to explain that shift in Jefferson's character. So I think it was just as likely as anything that it was due to the tutelage of the Enlightenment ideals produced by the mole-men.

What about this part about predicting the future using a pig's spleen?

Now that is something that is actually done. You can look it up on the Internet, one of my favorite sources of dubious scholarship. Or in an old Farmers' Almanac. It's a traditional means of divination the old farmer would use to predict seasons, to take the spleen of a freshly killed pig and examine it.

I take credit in that I have refined pig spleen divination methods not only to predict the weather but also the coming global warming apocalypse — almost down to the day. I'm pretty sure of the day, but I'm not so sure of the year. It will be a Wednesday, though.

People seemed to like your gig on this year's Emmys telecast. Will you do more?

I enjoyed doing the color commentary for the Emmys very much. It was in some ways a very glamorous and in some ways a very unglamorous experience. I was secreted in the back of the back of the backstage, practically in a little wooden box.

I was watching the same way you were, while wearing a tuxedo. As the winners were announced, I had to very quickly look through the script and talk into the microphone, which no one in the audience of the theater could hear. I may as well have been a ham radio operator.

Will there be more books?

This current book is the paperback edition of the second book of my “Complete World Knowledge.” There will be a third book of “Complete World Knowledge,” as there is knowledge being generated every day. I'm pretty sure by the third book, I'll have it.