Over at my good friend Melanie's blog OxfordFilmFreak, she has posted up an amazingly wonderful interview with John Hodgeman. Mr. Hodgeman, as you'll recall is the gentleman who plays the PC in the Mac & PC commercials by Apple. He's also the Daily Show's resident expert, as well as an actor, radio personality, former literary agent and author of two books full of fake facts. He's also an suprisingly good singer and ukelele player.
The interview covers many different areas of Mr. Hodgeman's life, such as how he got to be on the Daily Show, how the Mac & PC ads have affected his life, what he's working on now and many other topics. One thing I found truly entertaining though was the conversation he had regarding factoids (i.e. fake facts that sound or appear to be true).
Q: But isn’t that where great fiction comes from, something bigger than the truth but grasps the idea of truth?
A: The point of fiction is that truth is stranger than the fiction but never as strange as lies that are not true. It is in part inspired by the feeling one has when you have been lied to and discover it. The lie is always much more elaborate and the motives are often completely understandable.
For example, I used to sub-let my apartment in New Haven after I moved to New York. And when I would run into the guy he would say everything was great. But it wasn’t. He wasn’t paying rent and he was a monster, like that movie Pacific Heights. The landlord turned over the letters that the deadbeat would leave as excuses for why he couldn’t pay rent. The letters were more than apologetic. He had every right to be a monster and just not pay the rent, I mean, that happens. But he wanted to maintain the idea that he was a good person so he began to lie.
The flip side of that worn coin is that fiction is a kind of lie that does illuminate a certain truth. Truth does not have human motivation, it just is. But a lie reveals something about the teller and the world they live in.
The interview really is a good and in-depth conversation with someone whom I believe to be one of the most unique and humorous people working today. It's a great read and I am highly jealous of Melanie for getting to interview Mr. Hodgeman. She did a much better job than anything I would have possibly come up with though, so it's a good thing she's the one who got to talk to him. I would have just acted like a giddy fanboy and the interview would be five minutes of me telling John Hodgeman how awesome he is before he got annoyed by me and left.
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