Interview with Bob Odenkirk

By Jerry GorinNovember 20, 2014

Interview with Bob Odenkirk


JERRY GORIN: The title of your book is A Load of Hooey. What is hooey?


BOB ODENKIRK: Balderdash. It's that simple, right? Shenanigans. Literary shenanigans. A bunch of claptrap. Silliness. Which is what it is, I mean there’s nothing in here of any substance.


I did some research and learned that hooey might be a derivative of fooey, which apparently comes from foo, in the way my Yiddish-speaking grandmother used to say "foo" when something was objectionable.


Oh I didn’t know that. You’ve studied it more richly than I have.


You start the book with a warning to not read it on the toilet.


I thought people were probably going to read this on the toilet, so we should write a warning to not read it on the toilet. But it’s only for the ladies.


Do you think this will enter the canon of great toilet literature?


Oh yeah. I think for the toilet this is high literature. This is like Flannery O’Connor for the toilet. I mean, you’ve got your Onion books, Paul Reiser books, Bill Cosby books, Vanity Fair magazines —but this is a book! I think this will provide hours of laughs while you’re doing your business. But you've got to put it away and come back to it. I mean it, you can’t read it all at once. It’s like eating a whole tub of ice cream at once—it just doesn’t have any flavor after you eat the first six scoops. So just eat two pieces at a time. You know what I mean? It’s too rich with goofiness, and I think it becomes meaningless when you do that.


Last question about the toilet. What’s the longest you’ve ever read on there?


See, when my kids were little, the toilet became a safe place. It’s where you can go and not help—the husband or the wife is like, You’ve got to help me! Help me! But if you’re on the toilet then you’re working, and it’s the only place in the house where you can go and be left alone. So I probably sat there for up to 45 minutes, reading, because I love to read, and when my kids were little, you know, you don’t have time to read. So I’m going to guess around 45 minutes. Which is a crime, because it’s so bad for your body.


You lose feeling in your legs, that kind of thing?


Yeah, you have to stand up, turn around, stomp your feet, get the blood going. But let’s not focus on that too much, yeah? I mean, there are some ideas in this book.


Sure, let’s talk about them. Where do most of these ideas come from?


You’re just walking around and you think of something stupid, you know, and it makes you laugh. Like Martin Luther King Jr.’s worst speech ever, that’s a funny thought. He probably did—well, one speech of his was the worst one he ever did, by some measure, and it probably was nowhere near as clumsy as the one I’ve written for him, but it’s a funny thought. And there’s not many places to put that thought, except a book like this.


You’ve written a lot of sketches, where you usually get to edit the writing based on the performance, based on how the jokes land. Is it tougher to write stories that aren’t meant to be performed?


Well I read them out loud, that’s one thing you can do. Another thing is that I’ve let these stories run on, meaning I would have made some of them shorter if they were intended for performance. But this book is more for people who are already fans of my work, who already know my voice from things like Mr. Show, so I felt like I could dig in a little and add two or three more beats to stuff.


And you’ve published some of these in other places over the years, is that right?


Well, I sent some of this stuff to places like The New Yorker, who’s published two or three of them. And I’ve written for Filter Magazine, I had stuff in Vice for about a year and a half, but that stuff was different and had pictorial components so I didn’t include those in here. Most of this stuff, though, I never gave to anyone, because it had nowhere to belong in the world. The New Yorker can’t publish things that are too dicey, they have too wide of an audience, so I sent them things that I thought were appropriate, but the rest just sat on my desk. They made their way to Dave Eggers’s desk, and he said, I want to make the book.


I was really floored by one of the pieces in here, "My Manifesto." It quickly made me think of that recent Christopher Dorner manifesto, do you remember that?


I didn’t know he had a manifesto.


He did! And like yours it seems to start very reasonably. He’s upset with the LAPD, about things like their code of silence, and racism on the force, and of course LAPD doesn’t have a great reputation. But then the manifesto gets progressively unhinged, to the point that he's addressing people on TV, and who should or shouldn’t be dating whom, it’s insane.


I think there have been quite a few manifestos written by crazy people and they tend to be all over the map. The guy in mine threatens not to kill anyone, but to remain a part of society and die of old age. That’s how he will exact his revenge. But yeah, different complaints are spoken of in a crazy way, but maybe not entirely crazy. He’s mad at technology, but mostly because of the new iPhone. He’s mad at the infrastructure of society, but mostly because of potholes, or the reverse of a pothole, where the pavement gets pushed up. His belt is too long, and that’s bothering him. And he likes the electoral college, for the reasons that the founding fathers put it in place. And then he declares that he will participate in society quietly until he dies of old age.


His voice reminds me of the voices in the internet reviews you've written, like the one of the King James Bible.


Yeah, it’s just like that one. It’s just a person ranting, and being overly familiar, and having a lot of attitude. The internet is letting people broadcast a lot of stupidity. It was always there, but there was no place to type it up. When I was growing up, you’d still see people tape up little creeds on lamp posts, like “You are all going to hell” or “You will all burn in a lake of fire” and that kind of shit. So the internet is a place to put that up and the whole world can read it.


Does all this internet culture have you licking your chops as a comedian?


I don’t know, I don’t think people are any dumber or crazier than they were 30 years ago. I mean, people voted for Nixon twice. It’s more crazy when people do logical things. When people vote Obama in, I’m like, really? There’s that many people thinking clearly?


While you find great ways to make fun of dumb people, I like that you also make fun of a really brilliant person, Paul McCartney.


Yeah, but I didn’t really. I made up a McCartney, I made up a voice for him that he does not have. But the idea of him lording it over the other Beatles that he wrote “Blackbird,” which is like a crazy perfect song, and which, if you’ve ever read about them, came to him in a dream and came out like, Boom, here’s “Blackbird.” The idea of McCartney coming in and using that to beat the other Beatles about the head is really funny to me. Because he’s the sweetest Beatle, right?


Um, I used to think that until I saw the documentary Let it Be, where he kind of comes across as you’ve written him here. So I found your essay particularly funny.


Well I think he kind of has a right to be a dick. They were all frustrated with each other at that point. Since then I’ve only seen him be really nice regarding that whole experience, and he’s just incredibly generous and forgiving.


Last question, and you can look right into the camera for this one. If not the toilet, where should people read this book?


Take it with you on a family vacation. You won’t have a lot of time to read, and these are short pieces. Or on a holiday vacation to visit your family. Again, not a lot of time to read, you can’t sit on the toilet for an hour. No, come on out, talk to grandma, come on out and talk to your uncle, and then you can run off and get a good, maybe slightly angry laugh, and you can get that out of your system and go back to being the Mr. Rogers version of yourself with your family.


¤


Jerry Gorin is the director of the Los Angeles Review of Books' multimedia division.

LARB Contributor

Jerry Gorin is a writer and filmmaker in Los Angeles.

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