Danielle Krage:

Today, I have John Vorhaus with me. John’s book, The Comic Toolbox, is one of the first books I ever read about comedy and I’ll be forever grateful for what a fantastically practical and encouraging introduction that was to comedy. And the same is true for all of John’s other books I’ve read about creativity and writing and sitcom. So I’m absolutely thrilled to have him on the podcast. But John, before we dive into all things craft, is there anything people should know about you and your connections to creating comedy.

John Vorhaus:

Well, I could say that I’m the only person in human history to have written for the American version of Married with Children and run the writing staff of the Russian version of Married with Children and developed the Bulgarian version of Married with Children. I think that’s a hat trick that’s unlikely to be repeated in this world.

Danielle Krage:

I think you can confidently say that. I love that. I’d like to start by asking you about your fiction work, because you’re also a prolific fiction writer. And I have to declare a vested interest that that’s also my chosen area of creativity. I’m writing fiction too. And what I’d love to know is when you’re creating fiction, what are some of the tools that you’ve created that you really love to use yourself, or you find yourself returning to?

John Vorhaus:

Well, I came to fiction writing from screenwriting and discovered that in fiction, I had a freedom I didn’t have in screenwriting, which is the freedom to write by the seat of my pants. I’m what’s known in the trade as a pantser, which means that I make it up as I go along. And so my approach is to put my character inside a mystery and then try and figure out the mystery alongside him or her. It’s not the most efficient way, but I find it’s the way that sustains my interest. Because if I know what’s going on too much, I tend not to really want to find out, which means that I don’t do the hard work of actually writing it. So that’s the approach I take. I just kind of dive into an area I’m interested in and explore it and see what happens.

Danielle Krage:

Yeah, that makes sense. I love thinking about it as a mystery that you’re setting up that puzzle that you have to solve yourself. I’ve been reading the Albuquerque Turkey over the weekend, one of your books, again, which is such a fun title. And if we’re taking that as an example, what was it about the premise that excited you and that you saw as being great grounds for comedy? So there’s so much play in it.

John Vorhaus:

Well, the Albuquerque of Turkey is the second in a trilogy of con artist novels featuring world-class con artist radar Hoverlander and his merry band. And in the first book, The California Roll, I was trying to teach Radar that it’s okay sometimes to tell the truth, which you can imagine is something that is foreign to a con artist. In the Albuquerque Turkey, I asked myself, what issues does he have unresolved and one that came to the top of my mind was his relationship with his father. who is himself a con artist, as you might expect, you know, family business, what not. So I went into it saying, I have the goal of putting Radar into contact and conflict with his father to see if they can resolve their relationship. So that was the stated purpose. It’s funny because at that point it’s nothing about the cons. I figured the cons, the money, the caper, all of that stuff will emerge from the exploration, but the emotional core… that’s something that I like to have going in. What I learned from screenwriting is that most happy ending stories can be thought of as a journey from denial to acceptance of a theme or proposition. In this case, Radar needs to go from denial to acceptance of his relationship with his father. And for me as a writer and for someone who teaches writing, I find that that clear understanding of the arc of the story gives you a platform that you can stand on, where you can do a lot of development work, without fear of negative consequences because you always know basically where you’re headed.

Danielle Krage:

That makes so much sense. And the characters are so vibrant. I can tell that you’re both having a really good time with them. And also that you say you’ve got them really grounded in this interesting conflict. When you work with writers, whether it’s fiction or sitcom or they’re writing films, what’s one of your favorite comic tools that you love to use to get them to really bring their characters to life? I’ve got a self-confessed two or three of yours that I revisit regularly. I’d love to know what some of your favourites are.

John Vorhaus:

Well, I’ll be interested to hear your two or three, but just playing off on what you just said. It’s clear that I love my characters. One of the things, this is kind of nuanced, but it’s very important, when I’m reading somebody’s work, and maybe I’m evaluating them for a job, something like that, I want to know, do they love their characters? Can I feel the author’s love for characters, even if they’re bad people? And if I detect that love, then I feel like the author or the writer has a good sense of what’s important in the work.

The contrary example would be a writer who’s kind of trying to solve the problem from the outside in. That is treating it as a puzzle to be solved rather than a character to be explored and enjoyed. So I would say the number one tip I can offer is, close the gap between yourself as the writer and the character that you’re creating so that the two of them are kind of Indistinguishable from one another. That’s a very effective place to do writing and meaningful.

Danielle Krage:

Yeah, that makes so much sense. I really love your writing around comic perspective and how that applies to both you as the writer, your particular comic perspective and point of view on the world, and then how you link that to your characters. I find that so helpful to think about that from your prompt.

John Vorhaus:

And to that, if people are wondering how to use that as a tool, it’s simply a matter of looking around and asking yourself, what is it that makes me funnier? What is it that makes people say, I’m funny? Is it irony? Is it innocence? Is it a bad attitude? Is it impatience? Is it bewilderment? And then just whatever you identify inside yourself as a characteristic that you know you have, simply apply the comic tool of exaggeration and push it to the limit… you’ll create a comic character. I myself consider myself to be very childlike, even though I’m in the third act of my life. In my mind, I’m like a perennial 10-year-old. And so I find if I channel my inner 10-year-old and just exaggerate it, then that makes it very easy to create childlike characters and put them on the page. Now, obviously that’s not the only filter or perspective that I have, but comic characters are driven by strong, clear, solid, singular comic perspectives. That’s what makes them funny. Characters in more dramatic settings or more nuanced settings, they have a broader perspective. But the easiest way to think about a sitcom character or a comic character is this. Real people in the real world will do things in service of their self-interest. But a comic character in a comic world will always do things in service of their self-image. And that desire to serve the self-image, the ego, if you will, is really the fuel that drives the comic engine.

Danielle Krage:

That’s perfect. And I love the way that you talk about ego in your work, in relation to both the writer and characters and how you also link it to that willingness to risk, to fail, to throw the critical voice out. Could you speak a little bit more to how, when you’re thinking about creativity and people just getting a draft down on the page, what role does ego play and what kind of tools do we have to use to keep it in its correct place.

John Vorhaus:

Ha. What role does ego play? Dozens of roles we can see and dozens of roles we can’t see. But the easiest way to look at it is this…. When we’re doing a creative act, whether it’s writing, comedy, art, anything, fundamentally we’re making choices, a series of choices. People are aware that they’re making choices, but they’re not necessarily aware of how much they’re investing in the correctness of those choices. They want to be right and they fear to be wrong. It’s the desire to be right and especially the fear to be wrong that engages the ego. It works like this, this is me… I’m at a cocktail party and I think of a joke and I say to myself, I think I might like to tell this joke. But then a little voice inside my head, check me if this is true for you as well. This little voice inside my head says, hang on a second. You know, before you tell that joke, you better ask yourself, is it funny? Because if it’s not funny and you tell it, they might not laugh. And then here’s where the ego ball gets rolling. And if they don’t laugh, they might not like you. Now the ball is rolling downhill. And if they don’t like you, you can’t like yourself. Now the ball is obviously out of control. Because if you can’t like yourself, you must experience full ego death and pass away. And so you see, we put the entire burden of our existence on a joke we haven’t even told yet.

Danielle Krage:

Hmm.

John Vorhaus:

On the face of it, it makes no sense. You’re not gonna know whether the joke works until you tell it. So you must be unafraid to tell it. The acronym that I’m using these days is DFBO, which stands for Don’t Fear Bad Outcomes. If you’re willing to make arbitrary creative choices and not too concerned about whether they’re the right ones or the wrong ones, then you’ll liberate yourself and get into the stream of choice making, and that’s where real writing takes place.

Danielle Krage:

That’s perfect. I’m going to have to listen back to this podcast myself to write down that acronym. I love it. That’s really handy.

John Vorhaus:

GFBO, don’t fear bad outcomes.

Danielle Krage:

Great. Got it. Amazing. And I feel like that is adjacent to your… the rule of nine in terms of how you think about quantity and quality. Would you mind, for those who may not have read your book, speaking a little bit to that, because I found that incredibly helpful and reassuring in terms of process.

John Vorhaus:

Not at all. This is kind of the bedrock of the comic toolbox. And it goes like this, for every 10 jokes you try, 9 won’t work. And at first that seems like a very bad outcome, like 90% failure rate. But here’s the thing. If you only have one joke, then you have to invest 100% of your ego in it. But if you have 10 jokes, then you only have to invest 10% of your ego in each one. So for the ones that don’t work, they hurt a little bit, but they don’t overwhelm and they don’t leave you crippled and they don’t leave you frozen to the point where you can’t do any creative work at all.

Plus, if you realize you only have to be right one time out of ten, that gives you the freedom to explore and try and fail and try again with no real penalty to pay if it all goes wrong. Not only that, but if you think about it, suppose you wanted to write ten jokes for riding on the underground, or you want one good joke for riding on the underground. Well, if you come up with ten, two good things will happen. One is you’ll definitely come up with at least one that works really well. And the other is you’ll have the experience, the exercise of writing 10 jokes. That’s craft. That’s building your skills.

So even the jokes that theoretically don’t work or end up not being useful, they contribute to your body of work and they contribute to the practice of your craft. And I just can’t stress this enough. It’s not the immediate outcome that matters. It’s never the joke that matters. It’s always about building towards a better version of yourself as a creative practitioner. And I can draw on my own life experience to underscore this. I spent years, have spent years, struggling to write successfully. I think I’ve failed much more than I’ve succeeded, just in the sense that you could go through my hard drive and see tens and 20s and dozens, hundreds maybe, of ideas that started out with promise, fell by the wayside. I probably have whole novels or half novels that I got to a certain point with and I said, this just isn’t gonna go where I need it to go. Same with screenplays, same with everything. I used to think all of this was wasted effort, but now I understand every single minute I spend writing, every second I spend writing, makes me a better writer. So even if the work isn’t directly useful, it’s always indirectly useful, it always contributes to the better writer I will become.

Danielle Krage:

That’s incredibly encouraging. And how do you judge for yourself, with your work, when it’s time to just let something go and when actually it’s, it can be fixed in revision or when actually it just needs some tools applying to it. I know that’s not an easy question, but what are some of the ways you can calibrate that.

John Vorhaus:

No, that speaks to recent pain. For about a year now, I’ve been working on a book called The Book of Practice, How to Do Better, the Things You Want to Do Well, and this basically looks at the idea, this idea of what does it mean to be in practice? What does it mean to just focus on getting better at the things you want to be good at? And this can be anything from writing to art to business, enterprise, relationships, anything at all can be thought of as practice. So I wrote this big version of the book, and then I put it out to beta testers and a lot of them said, this is really hard to understand. And I went back and I looked at the text with a cold eye and I said to myself, you know what, they’re not wrong. I’ve over-explained almost everything. So I set myself a challenge. I’m going to go back into this text and I’m going to reduce everything to the barest bare bones I can. I’m literally not going to talk about any single concept for more than one page. And the consequence is that the text now has a much lighter and speedier feel to it, which I like…. I like little books. And I think that my audience likes little books. In this day and age. people don’t really want to read all that much anyhow. But it was a cold glass of water in the face to realize that I had vastly overwritten the book, and I was going to have to go back and squeeze out the stupid. Now that I’ve gotten the stupid pretty well squeezed out, I’m in this phase of the book where I’m changing the punctuation and the sentence structures in meaningles ways. I’m switching from isn’t to is not and back to isn’t. And that’s always a clue to me that it’s about time, as Winston Churchill once described it, of his own books. It’s about time to kill the beast and fling it to the public. So when I find myself making small meaningless changes, that’s when I know I’m about done.

Danielle Krage:

Yeah, that’s very sound advice. I love it. I feel like in your work, you’re both really great at creating tools that make things seem really simple and doable, and you’re also really great at putting your finger on really important questions. And one of the things that I noticed that’s kind of a combination of those two is… before I found your books, I would often work with a question of what happens next? In regards to plotting. And that led to some really poor results. And then when I found your books, and there’s the addition of what happens next… that creates pressure? Or what happens next…and what does the character feel about it? It was much more fruitful. So I wonder if you could speak to how you managed to hone it so those questions really work and why those additions are really important.

John Vorhaus:

Well, friends say that I have a gift for reducing complex concepts to trivial one-liners. And I’m prepared to own that gift. I think that I’m pretty good at figuring out the heart of things. So when I ask myself, what is the heart of story? And what belongs and what doesn’t belong? This is more true for television than novels, but I’ll lay it out anyhow… It seems to me that in a well-told story, really only two things matter. What happens and how people feel. If I take on board this idea that all that matters is what happens and how people feel, then when I’m writing, I have a pretty easy way of testing whether what I’m writing is on track or not. Because if I’m writing something that’s neither what happens nor how people feel, then it’s probably gratuitous coloration or unnecessary detail or scene setting or backstory or something that the story really doesn’t need. So these two questions. They feel like a really good way to keep story development on track and keep it from getting bogged down.

And the other thing you mentioned is about pressure. The truth is revealed under pressure and it’s an interesting thing about pressure. It generates comedy because pressure equals tension and when tension is created, tension is stored and the release of tension is something that we call a laugh. But truth also drives character changes. A character will not enter a new self-understanding unless her or she is put under pressure. So if you want to drive a character to a new understanding, take a character on a journey from denial to acceptance of a proposition or theme, then you really need to push that character through pressure. You need to put a lot of pressure on them until they ultimately break, and when they break they will explosively transform into a new understanding of themselves and understanding the truth.

And you need only look at moments like Luke Skywalker accepting the force in the climactic attack on the Death Star as an example of an explosive change from denial to acceptance of the theme. But if it’s true that characters won’t embrace change without pressure, then it’s required that we put a lot of pressure on them. This creates a problem for writers. Writers as a class are kind of conflict avoiders. I always say, if you weren’t a conflict avoider, then you’d be doing some job that lets you engage in conflict. You know, boxing or diplomacy or selling cars, something like that. But writers like to hide out in their rooms by themselves, controlling their worlds and not creating conflict for anybody. That’s fine in the day-to-day living of life, but it’s useless in writing because conflict drives story, pressure drives story. You really need to make your characters suffer in order to make them funny, because the thing isn’t funny to the person it’s happening to, only to the people watching. And you need to make your characters suffer so that they can experience growth. So, what I like to do at the end of the day is to love my characters and then lovingly attack them mercilessly, always seeking to make their bad situation worse. To me, that’s what drives a good story.

Danielle Krage:

I love that. And I have written on a post- it many times, because I need the reminding, from your work, Comedy Equals Truth Plus Pain. I’m curious if you think there’s any areas of pain that you just wouldn’t go near in relation to comedy? Or if you think any area of pain in skillful hands can be transmuted into something funny.

John Vorhaus:

That’s a great question. As you know, I’ve recently written a book on stand-up comedy without too much expertise, but with a lot of self-proclaimed authority. One of the things that I noticed in writing about stand-up is.. comedy has all kinds of different powers. But broadly speaking, it has the power to lift up or the power to knock down. And both of those powers are valid powers. In society, comedy is used for both of those things regularly. If you’re the sort of person whose brand is lifter upper, as I am, there are a lot of topics you won’t go to because they’re breakdown type topics. But if you are an iconoclast by nature, and if your brand is, I will be a destructive force in the world for the good of the world, which is a perfectly valid place to take your comedy or any kind of writing, then you give yourself much more freedom to address topics that other people can’t quite go near.

There’s another answer to this question that I think is a little bit cleaner. When you are directing your comic vision at others there are a lot of things you can’t say because they will be attacks on other people. But when you direct your comic vision at yourself, you give yourself a lot more freedom because you’re not dismissing or being disrespectful of the topic, you’re only gauging your own reaction to the topic. I’ll give you a great example: the creator of Everybody loves Raymond, did a documentary about the making of Everybody Loves Raymond in Russia. It’s called Exporting Raymond and it’s quite good, you can get your hands on it. I was there in Russia at the time and I saw my Russian colleagues being very afraid that Phil Rosenthal would come in and make fun of them and attack them and make them look stupid. But he very cleverly directed all the comedy at himself. It wasn’t that the Russians were acting strange, it was that he didn’t have the capacity to understand why they were acting the way they were acting. And this inward turn, this focus on… strange things are happening and I don’t quite know what they all add up to.. that’s the kind of move that a creator can make to give oneself much more freedom to operate in what we call dangerous spaces. When you honor your topic and respect your topic, you never really have to worry about going too far. That’s my sense.

Danielle Krage:

That makes total sense to me. Thank you. That’s a really helpful way of thinking about it. You’ve mentioned Russia a couple of times, and you also mentioned Bulgaria and that amazing hat trick at the beginning. I’d love to know, because you have worked in so many countries, and with writers and all kinds of people in those countries, what’s the perspective on comedy that you think that has given you, that maybe someone like myself who’s mainly been based in the UK, or someone who maybe has quite a US-centric view, might not have?

John Vorhaus:

That’s a great question. If I use with you the phrase cultural cringe, you know what I mean, right?

Danielle Krage:

Hmmm.

John Vorhaus:

Do you? How would you define cultural cringe?

Danielle Krage:

Well, I’ve got an…I’m assuming, but I might be wrong, tell us.

John Vorhaus:

Well, here in America where I live, it’s really not commonplace for people to feel like they don’t belong or they shouldn’t strive or they shouldn’t try. Americans are taught kind of from birth… Anything you want, it’s yours for the taking, go ahead and grab it, be unashamed in your goals. My experience of traveling around the world is that this is not a common feeling in a lot of cultures. Many, many cultures have the attitude, you’re not to boast, you’re not to rise up, you’re not to attempt. And if you do, other members of your society will kind of knock you down. So I found this, what I call cultural cringe, to be a block in a lot of places. And I’ll give you a little bit more color. As you know, I’ve just returned from Germany. And the questions the Germans always ask is, why aren’t we funny? I think I finally know the answer. Because a colleague of mine said, Germans culturally are not encouraged to experience… Let’s just dwell on this phrase for a second…. Germans are not encouraged to experience emotional intensity. Well, what is comedy if not emotional intensity? It’s fire, it’s desperation, it’s cruelty, it’s truth and pain, it’s taking your feelings that are deeply buried and lifting them up to the surface. Well, if you have programming that has a taboo around experiencing and voicing emotional intensity, that’s a block you’re going to have to get over. So a lot of my work when I’m kind of…not teaching the American method that’s never what I’m about… but just recognizing that there is a level of personal liberation that I enjoy by accident of birth that others might not enjoy by an accident of birth. But they can claim for themselves just by saying I choose to be free. The best way to put it is if you must fail, and you will fail, fail big When you take on the fail big mindset that kind of overcomes all those problems at once

Danielle Krage:

I love that. And if there’s people listening that think, that sounds really scary. How do I start with failing big? What’s a step that you might encourage them to take this week if they’re wanting to increase their tolerance for failing and working up to failing big?

John Vorhaus:

That’s a great question. The obvious answer is by all of my books, of course, but..

Danielle Krage:

Yes.

John Vorhaus:

I will move past the obvious answer as quickly as possible. What’s happening is that expectations are improperly set. We say to ourselves, I want to write a screenplay, as an example. Well, that’s a huge undertaking, and it’s a huge expectation. And the expectation is so large… It’s like staring up the face of a 1,000-foot cliff. The climb seems so steep that you just can’t even make it. You can’t start. If you say to yourself instead, I’m going to spend 15 minutes just hacking around on the page, not with any intention of getting good outcomes or even any outcomes, but just for the sake of experiencing it, this act of resetting your expectations, literally lowering your expectations, will go a long way toward freeing up the creative possibilities.

So, here’s the best way to set expectations. Whenever I’m entering a writing day, or public speaking or teaching circumstance or going up on stage in stand up, my expectations are always this. Do your best, have fun, because I figure I can always do my best and I can always have fun. Therefore I’ve set a very, very low expectation for myself that’s easy to exceed. Once I’ve set this low expectation it’s much easier to get into the actual practice of doing the thing that I’m trying to do. So for somebody who’s looking for homework this week in the joke telling realm, I would say… set the goal of writing 10 jokes based on today’s news. Don’t set the goal of writing 10 good jokes or great jokes, just 10 things that look like jokes. And then go back and ask yourself of those 10, which one do you like best? Find the one that you like best and take the win of that. You wrote one joke that you like, without too much effort and without much ego investment, simply by lowering your expectation, treating it as an experiment, not a test, and giving yourself permission to fail. What I just said, treating it as an experiment, not a test. When scientists conduct experiments, they’re not looking for positive outcomes, they’re looking for outcomes that lead to greater understanding. Same with us as writers… If we go into it saying, I have to write this perfectly or I’m a loser, then we’re investing in the outcome. We are banking on a good outcome. But if we say to ourselves, I’m going to go into this work on the level of pure experiment, not even to see if I can do it, but to see how it feels when I do it. Then I no longer care about a good outcome or a bad outcome because I’m treating it like an experiment and it doesn’t matter whether the experiment is quote-unquote successful or unsuccessful, it’s just another piece of information, a contributor to my growth as a writer and a practitioner. So that’s the best way to do it. Don’t treat it as a challenge, treat it as an experiment.

Danielle Krage:

That’s amazing. I love that. It’s such a helpful frame. And I’d love to know, because you have this really playful way of engaging with the page and playful way of teaching and communicating that as a writer…when you’re out and about in the world, what kind of like vision goggles do you think you’re wearing in terms of how you look at things? Like I’m really curious, what’s it like when you go to a cafe? What’s it like if you go to a museum or the cinema or you’re out and  about and you’re seeing a dog? What kind of comedy glasses do you think you wear when you’re out and about in the real world?

John Vorhaus:

That’s a very, very good question. People who follow me on Facebook will know that I’m always taking a picture of abandoned furniture. I go out on long walks in my neighborhood and people throw stuff, weird stuff away on the curb. Toilets. I saw a coffee pot yesterday, bookshelves, loungers, chairs, crazy stuff. All of that stuff is clash-of-context comedy because they’re taking stuff that belongs in the house and putting it outside the house where it doesn’t belong. So I’m always drawn to that. I’m always drawn to stuff that doesn’t belong. I am drawn to irony and I’m drawn to unintended comedy. Give you an example. I was in a Prague airport last week and I noticed they had big signs in English. In English, mind you, in the Czech Republic, saying friendly reminder, 10 p.m. is quiet time in Old Town Prague, please be respectful of the neighbors. This is in the airport, in Prague, in English. It is a clear message to visitors from the UK, Scandinavia and America who are pouring into Prague all day every day for cheap booze. Hey, be quiet after dark! That sort of sign requires me to capture it because I find it hilarious I find the hidden meaning of it to be ironic and kind of delicious.

So in that sense, I’m always generally tuned in to what’s going on around me and I’m always ready with my camera, or my phone to capture funny things that I see. But specifically, in circumstances where I’m engaged in the development of a property, I find that my vision of the world changes. I’ll see if I can state this a little bit more clearly…. If I’m working on a situation comedy, and I have a very clear sense of who the characters are and what they find funny, I’ll actually go out in the world and view the world through the lens of those characters and through the lens of the world of my story, and what I find is, when I’m tuned in that way, story ideas just come flying at me from all directions because the link between what’s going on inside my head and what I’m seeing through my eyes is so clear. When I am, I’ll put it in the simplest terms… When I am alive in my mind inside a story that I’m telling, I find that the real world gives me a steady stream of information that I can directly apply to the world of my story.

Danielle Krage:

Oh my goodness, that sounds such a fun way of approaching things. I’m going to have to try that. I love the idea of going out and thinking about one of the characters and looking at things through their lens. That’s incredibly fun.

And what kind of things do you think you’re drawn to in relation to people? Maybe you don’t photograph them for obvious reasons, but when you’re looking at people, because for example, you mentioned clash-of-context for objects, and noticing things that don’t belong,  wonder what details capture you about humans.

John Vorhaus:

I’ve got a couple of answers to that. One is, that I’ve known from an early age that if I tell a joke and someone responds to that joke, not just laughing at it, but kind of understanding where it’s coming from, then that’s probably somebody I’m gonna have a good relationship with, because we see things the same way. We vibe comedy the same way. You might have had this experience yourself. If I go into a room and quote a Monty Python line and somebody across the room quotes the next line, I know we’re gonna get along just fine because we have a common frame of reference. So I’m always on the lookout for fellow travelers, you might say, people who find funny, what I find funny and respond to the same things that I respond to. Those are going to be my new best friends. In later days, I’ve discovered that those are mostly people who have a higher level of self-awareness. They know who they are, and that’s the kind of people that I’m drawn to.

But in terms of finding comedy from people I’m watching, I’m always looking for hypocritical patterns of thought and action where people will say one thing and do something else I’m always poking fun at that… inconsistencies, lies, nonsense (Donald Trump as a perfect example)…

John Vorhaus:

Uh… People defend their egos. Everybody everywhere in the real world defends their ego in one way or another. But when people are caught out defending their ego, trying to save face, that’s when I find them funniest and that’s when I’m likely to say, oh, that’s a point of view that I can attack.

I’m also constantly on the lookout for grammatical errors and what I call apostrophe catastrophes. People misuse apostrophes and it drives me banana pants crazy, I can’t stand it. It makes me literally sick. Now that’s partly my problem, because I’m a fetishist about proper grammar, punctuation and usage… and talk about a losing battle in the 21st century. But nevertheless, when I see somebody putting an apostrophe where it doesn’t belong, it fills me with a frisson of superiority. So I’m likely to capture something like that and gently mock it a little bit. I know it’s unfair and my higher mind should probably not go toward it, but in the sense that I’m a naughty intellectual schoolboy and always have been, I guess I’m still drawn to what I’m drawn to, which is if you make a mistake and I see it and it’s in my wheelhouse, I’m gonna mock you for it. It’s just the way it is.

Danielle Krage:

Yeah, probably very kindly knowing how you do things though, so that’s probably the best way. We kind of get the correction, learn it, and have had a good laugh along the way. That’s lovely.

John Vorhaus:

I’m also willing to… I was just gonna say… I’m also willing to turn that lens against myself. If I see myself doing ridiculous things, I try to catch myself and remind myself… you’re not behaving according to your higher mind right now.  You know, this is not being in acceptance. You’re not where you want to be. Just yesterday I was in a doctor’s office,  just a routine checkup, but my god.. two and a half hours waiting. I was so impatient, and I just reminded myself… You can hold on to all this impatience where it’s not not going to do you any good, or you can let it go and move on with your life. So I just tried to do that.

Danielle Krage:

Amazing.

John Vorhaus:

Sorry, I interrupted you. Go ahead.

Danielle Krage:

No, not at all. That’s perfect. Just a couple more questions for you before we wrap up. I could ask you a thousand, but I’m going to ask you two. So, you mentioned irony. Could you speak a little bit more to that.. about what intrigues you about it and how you tend to use that, for example, in your works?

John Vorhaus:

Well, I could talk about irony, but I’m not really sure I understand it.

Danielle Krage:

That’s why I’m asking you, because I’m not really sure I do.

John Vorhaus:

Uh… In Star Trek, they spoke of a rift in the fabric of space. Or maybe Star Wars, I don’t know, something like that. In the real world, you detect this rift in the fabric of space where people are saying something or doing something that’s clearly counter to the reality around them. That’s where irony exists for me. When I catch people trying to get reality to conform to their expectations, rather than just letting their expectations conform to the reality that they encounter, that tension between what we perceive as reality and what we want reality to be, that’s where I find irony.

Danielle Krage:

Oh, that’s such a lovely way of putting it. Thank you. That’s much nicer than me looking in a dictionary and being like, do I understand it? And I think that’s one of the reasons that I love comedy and find it so comforting is in that place where reality is not matching up… but at least you have comedy to go to as a space to be in, rather than just being livid or disappointed. I love it.

John Vorhaus:

And if you look at any decent stand-up comic, you can really track their relationship between expectation and reality. I was looking at a clip this morning of Kathleen Madigan, who I’m a fan of. She’s out with her mom, and one of her mom’s friends is drinking at nine in the morning. And she says to her mom…you know, that woman seems to have a problem. And her mom says, oh, Kathleen, we’ve disconnected from time. I don’t, I didn’t land the joke as well as she did, but the idea is you expect people to behave according to your understanding of what is appropriate and correct, i.e. not drink at nine in the morning. But other people have their own rules and standards that might make perfect sense for them to drink at nine in the morning. I always say, I never drink before the sun is over the yard arm, but fortunately the sun was over the yard arm yesterday.

Danielle Krage:

Amazing. That’s spinning my brain in three different directions at once. I love it. Great. And so I’ve got one more question for you and then we’ll wrap up a little bit of advice. And the question is that… I find your books so incredibly inspiring. I return to them frequently when I’m feeling stuck, when I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing, which is frequently. And I feel like anything that I’ve seen of you online as well, you’re just, you have such a joyful nature and such a great way of making things seem doable that lots of comedians, including writers like myself, leave feeling inspired. So what do you do when you need to feel creatively inspired, when you’re feeling a little bit flat? Like who’s the John Vorhaus for John Vorhaus house who picks you up and makes you want to get working again?

John Vorhaus:

If I’m writing and my writing breaks down, I go do some art. I find that is my go-to solution because my artwork engages different parts of my brain, different kinds of creative problem solving. It just refreshes me.

But the other thing I draw on for inspiration a lot is just sharing what I know. And I teach this, you know, I tell people, look, if you’re in a class of mine, with all due false modesty, it’s likely that you’re going to feel a certain rush of revelation. It’s my job to make you feel this. I want to give you information and inspiration. I want to leave you feeling inspired. If you want to sustain that feeling of inspiration, one great way to do it is to share it with other people. The more I teach, the more I’m out there sharing what I know with other people, the more I feel alive in my own mind, in command of my creative powers, and really well situated, comfortably situated in the place that I am meant to be.

You can imagine that as a writer, who’s also a teacher, I’ve heard the phrase, ‘those who can’t do teach’. And there was a certain time in my life where that idea was kind of a burden to me. I was afraid that if I devoted myself too much to teaching that I would stop being a writer. But a student of mine very early on said the following revelatory words, ‘how about those who can do.. do both?’ And I realized that’s my path. When I’m writing and I’m going well, I’m just going to keep on writing. But if the writing starts to fade, as it will, I can just go and teach, and the teaching will refresh the writing. And then the writing will refresh the teaching, and the teaching will refresh the writing. And I go back and forth, feeding the two necessary sides of myself, in a way that I have built into a really, frankly, quite a fulfilling practice of life. I’m where I want to be in service of my work, in a clear understanding of what my mission is. And with full determination, and without any self-consciousness at all A full determination, a good steward of this thing that is my life while I have it to enjoy.

Danielle Krage:

That’s absolutely beautiful. What a wonderful way of looking at things. And I’m so glad that you do do both. I think you’re incredibly generous and I love that they feed each other. That’s awesome to know. I’d love to wrap up with any advice that you’ve been given by any creative that’s stuck with you, or that you find yourself applying.

John Vorhaus:

I was transformed by the works of the novelist Tom Robbins, specifically his novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. You’re reading the Albuquerque Turkey. It owes a tremendous debt to Tom Robbins because that was the first American comic novel I read. It came out in 1973, I think. It goes back a bit. But it’s the first time I read a novel, and I said to myself, well, there’s room for serious stuff and funny stuff in the same pages. I didn’t know that was possible. And so I realized for the part of me that wants to be serious and story driven and the part of me that wants to be frivolous and fun, here’s a model that I can follow. So yeah, when I’m stuck, I’ll pull Tom Robbins off the shelf and read a few pages just to remind myself what really great writing looks like.

The other thing that I’ll do, this is kind of tricky, but this is one that people might find useful. If I’m frustrated with what I’m writing now, I go back and look at something I wrote before. Something that I know worked. Because I find that it reminds me, hey, I do have writing capability. I’ve written things in the past that work. And this feeling I have right now that I’m never gonna solve the problems that I’m facing. I’m never gonna finish this manuscript. It’s never gonna work out. Very common feelings that lead to writer’s block. I can purge a lot of those just by reminding myself that there have been times in the past when I’ve been a very effective writer. And there will be times in the future again when I will be as well.

Danielle Krage:

Perfect. Thank you. You’ve shared so much advice so generously. For people who want to find out more about you and your work, where would you like to point them to? And of course I will make sure that these links go into the show notes.

John Vorhaus:

Well, if you know how to spell my name, which you should, because it’s right there on the screen, oh, you might be listening, it’s J-O-H-N, John Vorhaus:

V as in victory, O-R-H-A-U-S, or as my sister put it, V is in virgin, O-R-H-A-U-S, as in still. So if you know my name, you know my website, JohnVorhaus.come, you can also search on Amazon, for my Amazon author page, and between those two resources, my own bookstore and the Amazon bookstore, you’ll get pretty much everything you need.

Also, dear stranger listening to this podcast, I invite you to contact me directly. If you know my name and you know the word Gmail, you can probably figure out what my email address is. I invite you to reach out directly to me. I’ve made it my practice ever since I started teaching to keep a real open door to people who send inquiries to me. There’s a lot of stuff I can’t help people with, but there’s a lot of stuff that I can help people with. And I consider it part of my practice and part of my mission to be in direct service to people who reach out to me. So feel free to do so. It’s good for you, it’s also good for me, because that just means there are more people out there in the world thinking about my work and responding to it and being drawn to it and using it. And what more can I ask for?

Danielle Krage:

Thank you. It’s been such a pleasure having you today.

John Vorhaus:

My pleasure.