Episode 408: Trevor Moore, Brian Broome, Steven Hall

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• From Sketches To Late Night: The Journey Of Comedian Trevor Moore

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  If you pull back on Trevor Moore’s career, sitting behind a desk hosting a late-night comedy show seems inevitable. Moore — who helms Comedy Central’s popular web series, “The Trevor Moore Show” — told WPR’s “BETA” he was always obsessed with the format.

  “When I was a kid, I loved David Letterman,” Moore said. “He was still on NBC and I would set the VCR to record him because I wasn’t allowed to stay up and watch it. But I’d watch it when I got home from school the next day.”

  Moore would actually work for NBC later in life. After being selected for the prestigious NBC Page Program in 2002, he ended up with a recurring bit on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

  “I was like a correspondent for them. So, I had two different bits and twice a month I would go out and do a man on the street kind of routine for them,” he said.

  Moore grew up as the son of Christian rock singers. He said his conservative upbringing blocked a lot of comedy influences that many people are nostalgic for. Moore feels this helped him forge his own rebellious comedic voice and to aim for timeless content.

  “I couldn’t watch like ‘He-Man’ because it had magic in it. I couldn’t watch ‘Smurfs’ cause it had magic in it,” Moore said. “And so there’s a lot of stuff from my childhood that people are nostalgic for now that I’ve never seen. Like I saw ‘Ghostbusters’ for the first time when I was like 35.”

  “I try not to be too pop culture-based in comedy. And maybe that’s a defensive mechanism,” Moore continued. “I definitely think that because everything was very conservative and had to be very clean that pushes you in the other direction. Like ‘The Whitest Kids U’ Know’ was constantly getting flack for being a very dirty, very kind of blue sketch show. And I think that’s just kind of natural teenage rebellion.”

  ‘The Whitest Kids U’ Know’ — or WKUK — was the sketch comedy troupe Moore formed in the late 90’s with Sam Brown — who is also a part of “The Trevor Moore Show” cast. WKUK found a lot of success on comedy circuits and at comedy festivals eventually landing their own TV show.

  It was here where Moore’s conceptualized comedy found a great outlet and actually became a focal point of a landmark Supreme Court case. In a sketch he wrote and performed titled, “It’s Illegal to Say…” Moore has wordplay fun with the United States law prohibiting threats against the president.

  “I called the ACLU and I was like, ‘Hey, am I getting in trouble for this? Is this fine? Can I do this bit?’ And they’re like, ‘We can’t advise on that kind of thing,” explained Moore. “But they did say, ‘If you did get in trouble, we would defend you.’ And I was like, ‘Well, OK, that’s enough for me.’”

  The twist came when a man who was harassing his ex-wife on Facebook posted the entire bit replacing “president” with his ex-wife’s name. The man was arrested on threats, but argued that a social media post isn’t a threat because it was satire and his other threatening posts were his own rap lyrics. That led to the 2015 Supreme Court case Elonis v. U.S. that was the first to deal with freedom of speech in the social media realm.

  “The thing that makes me laugh is that all the Supreme Court justices had to sit and watch our dumb sketch show,” Moore quipped. “And they ended up ruling that it was satire and it was comedy and the guy couldn’t get in trouble for that stuff. So, I don’t think it’s a good outcome or a bad outcome, but that’s what happened.”

  In 2018, in an effort to promote his comedy special “The Story of Our Times,” Trevor convinced Comedy Central to let him do a 24-hour telethon leading up to the airing. The event pitted Moore against sleep and featured an ongoing rotation of comedians, guests and callers and laid the groundwork for “The Trevor Moore Show.”

  One of the comedians who was booked for the telethon was Blair Socci. She caught Moore’s attention and ended up landing the Andy Richter/Ed McMahon role on his show.

  “Blair is just a hilarious comedian who I had never met until she came on the 24-hour show. Every hour in the show, we would do a different thing. And we were talking about the singularity and like A.I. and whether or not A.I. will overtake mankind in 2045, which is what Ray Kurzweil has predicted,” said Moore. “And Blair was on, and she just made the whole hour hilarious because she just didn’t care about the computers. She just kind of cut through it all. She was just making jokes all the time.”

  “It just kind of worked so well that when they asked me to do this thing regularly, I was like, well, what about having Blair as the co-host? Because she’s hilarious,” he added.

  In addition to continuing his show, Moore, Brown and the rest of the WKUK troupe are working on creating an animated movie. They have been crowdfunding it through performing sketches on Twitch TV.

  “It’s about a couple of billionaires race to put a city on Mars,” Moore said of the film. “That’s the kind of line that we like to hit where it’s like, alright, we’re not talking about Elon Musk, we’re not talking about (Richard) Branson or (Jeff) Bezos or any of these guys, but we’re going to talk about this. What’s happening in society right now is like all these rich guys are about to start colonizing the moon because we think that’s still going to be an issue 20 years from now. It’s not going to age itself out quickly.”

  All episodes of Seasons 1 and 2 of “The Trevor Moore Show” are available to stream on Comedy Central’s YouTube channel.

• Writer Brian Broome Shares His Experiences With Blackness, Masculinity And Addiction

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  Reading Brian Broome’s memoir, “Punch Me Up to the Gods,” may make you feel like you’re reading his diary. It’s an incredibly intimate experience. At times, you may feel like you’re invading his privacy.

  But fortunately, Broome had the courage to share his life story. In the book, he revisits his childhood and his formative years growing up in rural Ohio. Along the way, Broome reveals heartbreaking stories about his status as an outsider trying to become part of the “in” crowd. We learn about his efforts to soothe his soul with random sexual encounters, alcohol and drugs. We also learn why he named his memoir, “Punch Me Up to the Gods.”

  “Basically, it’s a rewording of something that my father used to say, but I think sometimes a lot of Black parents say, like, ‘I brought you into this world and I’ll take you out,’” Broome told WPR’s “BETA.” “My father used to say that he would punch you so hard that you would go back up to God to be remade and reborn so that you were made correctly.”

  Broome said that he knew his father would use these words as a threat, but they were spoken to him so often that he didn’t really have any emotional reaction.

  But in his memoir, Broome does not shy away from sharing the most heartbreaking details about his life.

  “It could get really difficult at times, like sitting alone in a room and trying to really get at the emotion that you were feeling at that time. Whether it be embarrassment or shame or sadness, you want to tap into those emotions,” he recalled. “So I would have to get really deep into the memory and try to feel the same way that I felt then, so at times that was pretty difficult to do.”

  But Broome said writing “Punch Me Up to the Gods” was cathartic.

  “I don’t feel like I have any more secrets. Since the book has come out, I’ve had to explain a lot of things to people in my life who are still in my life about my past, things that I didn’t tell them. They’re reading them for the first time and they have questions.”

  He admitted that he struggled with whether or not he was obligated to provide answers for the people in his life. Broome hopes that the book takes care of that.

  “But for me, it’s been revelatory. I feel a little bit freer in the world,” Broome said.

  When he began writing the book, Broome really wanted to connect with young Black boys and men. He wanted to be a messenger, telling them that they do not have to be this thing that the world keeps telling them they are.

  “Whether that message comes from Black people or white people or anybody, you don’t have to be this paragon of masculinity,” he said. “You don’t have to be this tough guy. You can be anything you want. You know, This is your life and you are entitled to all the experiences of the human condition.“

  Since publication, Broome has been hearing from many different kinds of people who have said they feel as if the world was trying to put them into a box they don’t fit into.

  “I’m hearing from a lot of people who grew up with shame the same way that I did,” he said. “So I’m hoping that now the book can reach people who maybe they feel this way in their own life, or maybe they know somebody who might feel trapped in their own life.”

  Broome said that his parents were very stoic and that they didn’t really interact unless it was to deal with household concerns, like keeping the lights and gas on.

  “So it was kind of like a business. And, you know, I was watching TV at the time. And I saw these parents on TV who were super loving and kind and jokey with their kids. I didn’t have that kind of relationship with my parents,” he said.

  One of the major themes in “Punch Me Up to the Gods” is Broome’s incisive exploration of the intersection between his identity as a gay man and the concept of Black masculinity.

  “I think that I have grown up with a terror of being perceived as effeminate, because any sort of behavior that was considered feminine when I was growing up was just basically beat out of you or shamed out of you because there’s a stereotype — ubermasculine, cool, athletic, strong and stoic man,” he explained.

  As a result, Broome believes there are things in his life that he’s wanted to do but has avoided because he was worried about being perceived as feminine. He says that one of those things was writing.

  Broome said he avoided writing for a long time because it was characterized as unmasculine by his cousin.

  “I think I probably would have written something much sooner had I not had that implanted in my brain at a very young age,” he said.

  Near the end of “Punch Me Up to the Gods,” Broome includes the following quotation from James Baldwin’s 1963 non-fiction book, “The Fire Next Time“:

  “The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.”

  “I think that, unfortunately, one of the functions of this idea of white people and Black people is to ensure that white people always can feel better about themselves no matter what — ‘at least I am better than Black people,’” Broome said of the quote. “This is something that I grew up with … going to a predominantly white school. And I think that somebody once said — he was a white man who said — and I’m paraphrasing here, ‘This idea is to make even the lowest white man still feel better than the highest Black man.’”

  “I think a lot of things that we’re told about ourselves as Black people in this country are profoundly untrue,” Broome continued. “We grow up under the idea that we are this other form of human being, that we’re a different species, and a lower species at that. A lot of things in America systemically are constructed to keep us feeling that way and to make sure that white people still feel good about themselves and superior at all times.”

  Broome said he hopes the release of “Punch Me Up to the Gods” marks a turning point in his life going forward. “I do think that this book being in the world has broken something in me that needed to be broken. I just feel like now I’m living more than I have been ever before in my life.”

• Steven Hall Returns To Bend Readers' Minds Further With 'Maxwell's Demon'

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  Steven Hall made a huge splash in the book world with his debut novel, “The Raw Shark Texts,” which was released in 2007. The New York Times Magazine described it as “a genre-founding work of fiction.”

  The title intentionally sounds like “The Rorshach Tests,” the psychological ink blot tests used to identify mental illness. The book earned comparisons to Philip K. Dick and Haruki Murakami, as well as the movies “Jaws” and “The Matrix.”

  Hall continues to explore more uncharted territory in his new novel, “Maxwell’s Demon.” It has a similar vibe to Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film, “Inception.”

  Hall’s wizardry with words and his obsession with big ideas like entropy and thought experiments will probably have you questioning reality. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

  “It’s about a failed novelist whose father was very successful and his feelings of being replaced in his father’s affections by his father’s assistant, who is also a successful novelist,” Hall told WPR’s “BETA.” “And when we meet the protagonist, he’s kind of languishing at home on his own and he gets a series of strange messages. The first one seems to be an unspoken message from his father, despite his father having died seven years before.”

  The failed novelist, Thomas Quinn, then receives a letter from his father’s protégé, Andrew Black. Black wrote a very successful best-selling whodunit called “Cupid’s Engine” and then disappeared. The enveloped contains a Polaroid photo and a folded note. The photo looks like a black sphere with a small bit of light touching the sphere’s left side. The note is handwritten and reads:

  Thomas,

  What do you think this is?

  Andrew Black

  Hall took the title “Maxwell’s Demon” from a thought experiment dealing with entropy, thermodynamics, and the idea that entropy can only be decreased by applying energy. This results in some mysterious connection between entropy and time that most don’t quite understand. Physicist James Clerk Maxwell proposed the hypothesis in 1867.

  “Time can only flow forward because things are tighter in the past and messier in the future,” Hall explains. “Maxwell’s demon is a very simple little thought experiment that shows that under the right circumstances, if a creature in the right place knows what it’s doing, it seems to be possible to reverse entropy and therefore to reverse time.”

  So how does Maxwell’s demon, the thought experiment, relate to “Maxwell’s Demon,” the novel?

  “It relates in terms of the themes of the novel, in terms of putting things right that have come apart, or finding a way to move back to a state of being that was before some kind of decay or entropy,” Hall said. “In the plot, it also seems at several points that maybe Thomas has lost a day and arrived somewhere the day before he left, although we don’t know whether that’s really true or someone is messing with him.”

  Hall says his novel is concerned with tricks that stories tell. One of the tricks he identifies is: “The writer is setting the pace for the reader to travel at, but the writer does not travel at that pace.”

  “What I’m talking about is that a book is written for the speed the reader reads. So you’re constantly working through, and you’re reading what you’ve written back at the speed the reader would read it in the book,” Hall explains. “Actually, the writer’s taking 10 times the time that you’re taking to read that paragraph to write it, maybe much more. It comes back to time and entropy — that when you’re going through a book with a writer, you have this weird idea that the writer is actually aging 10 times faster than you as you are moving through the text. As he did in “The Raw Shark Texts,” Hall makes tremendous use of interesting typographical elements that resemble concrete poetry in “Maxwell’s Demon.” Most of them are in the shape of leaves (for example, the image at the top of this article).

  Hall says he likes to do this because he is interested in “that contrast between what we imagine as we read, versus what we’re seeing.”

  “I’m quite a visual reader, so I find myself setting a scene on the stage and putting characters in it. And it’s almost like I’m looking at the page and reading. I’m kind of seeing this film in my mind. And I know some people aren’t that sort of reader, but I think a lot of people are.”

  Hall chose an epigraph from Stephen King’s time travel novel, “11/22/63.” He says he chose the quotation because it encapsulates the aim of his novel in the most beautiful possible writing.

  Stephen King includes Hall’s “The Raw Shark Texts” in the reading list of his book, “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.” If Hall were to write a book about writing, what would be the most important advice he’d give?

  “There are so many things to say. I think the really important thing to do is always try and put yourself in the shoes of the reader to learn the skill of going back through the text and reading it as though you don’t know it. And allowing yourself to trip up and allowing yourself to kind of be confused and sort of separate what you know from what’s on the page, which is a technical skill. It’s so important, you have to kind of get out of your own head and allow yourself to be a little disappointed with what you’ve tried to do.”