Craft and Chaos

Specifically Specific: A Love Letter to the Humor We Do Not Write

Ryan kicks the season finale off in a British accent, which we will not explain, and from there the episode is about humor — specifically, the humbling realization that the comedy you love and the comedy you write are often two completely unrelated genres operating in two completely unrelated brains. Pete worships the broad, sandwich-falling-from-the-sky lunacy of The Young Ones. Kyle reveres physical comedians who can walk into a room funny. Ryan grew up on Monty Python. None of them, it turns out, write anything resembling any of that. Up top, Kyle tells a story about a script of his turning up somewhere it should not have been, by mechanisms still unclear, with an ending we won't spoil. Pete confesses he's drowning in two writing projects at once, learns from Ryan about word clouds, and longs for the halcyon days of just moments before he learned about them. Then a Conan O'Brien tangent, a Harrison Ford appreciation, and a Mae Martin break-up story. We close out the season with Romance Novel or Death Metal Band, Part Two — Pete is on a heater, several of these are not what you'd guess, and one of them is Howlers in Heat — and a parting line from Douglas Adams about the knack of flying. We'll see you next season. Go make weird art. Mentioned in This Episode Films * The Hangover — Letterboxd [https://letterboxd.com/film/the-hangover/] * Forgetting Sarah Marshall — Letterboxd [https://letterboxd.com/film/forgetting-sarah-marshall/] * Tig (2015 documentary) — Letterboxd [https://letterboxd.com/film/tig/] Shows * The Young Ones — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Ones_(TV_series)] * Freaks and Geeks — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freaks_and_Geeks] * Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_O%27Brien_Needs_a_Friend] * The Sarah Millican Television Programme — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sarah_Millican_Television_Programme] * Good One: A Podcast About Jokes — Vulture [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/good-one/id1203393721] Comedy Groups * Monty Python — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python] * The Lonely Island — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_Island] People * Conan O'Brien — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_O%27Brien] * Sona Movsesian — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sona_Movsesian] * Matt Gourley — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Gourley] * Sarah Millican — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Millican] * Harrison Ford — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Ford] * Jason Segel — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Segel] * Mae Martin — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mae_Martin] * Tig Notaro — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tig_Notaro] * Buster Keaton — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buster_Keaton] * Harold Lloyd — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Lloyd] * John Ritter — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ritter] * Jim Carrey — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Carrey] * Dick Van Dyke — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Van_Dyke] * Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson character) — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Bean] * Jen Silverman — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jen_Silverman] * Ithamar Enriquez — IMDb [https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2439800/] * Douglas Adams — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams] Books * Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams — Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_the_Universe_and_Everything] Stage Show * Ithamar Has Nothing to Say — The Elysian [https://www.elysiantheater.com/shows/ithamar] * (00:00) - Welcome to Craft and Chaos * (02:07) - A Kyle Hijacking * (07:53) - Pete's Weekly Creative Chaos * (21:53) - "Sponsor:" Bears * (22:40) - On Humor * (50:21) - "Sponsor:" Bears * (50:38) - Romance Novel or Death Metal Band?

Cold Read.

Kyle saw a Jen Silverman play that broke every formatting rule he thought theater had, which turned out to be the perfect prompt for an episode about what happens when creatives stop asking whether they're allowed. Mandy goes to bat for Lynn Shelton's Humpday. Pete makes the case for The Lego Movie, unironically and at length. And Ryan reminds us that Lord and Miller cast a puppeteer as the year's most beloved alien because the guy was too good at the scratch track to replace. Then: a pair of 24-hour plays, both written to the same brief. Pete returned with Tail, a play about two parents trying to reverse-engineer the psychology of a sixteen-year-old who has decided, unremarkably, to wear a squirrel suit. Kyle — going in a different direction — returned with Best Served Cold, a cooking-competition finale in which a disgraced contestant has plans. Both plays are read live and cold on the episode. Then a listener asks about the difference between being vulnerable online and being performatively vulnerable online, and all four hosts — each of whom has at some point posted something and later wondered what kind of person wrote that — try to answer honestly. Links & Notes * Witch by Jen Silverman [https://www.concordtheatricals.com/p/66152/witch] * Humpday by Lynn Shelton [https://boxd.it/1ySC] * The Lego Movie [https://boxd.it/4pDO] and Project Hail Mary [https://boxd.it/pEeQ] by Lord and Miller * Batman: The Audio Adventures [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/batman-the-audio-adventures/id1585025879] Connect * craftandchaos.fun [https://craftandchaos.fun/] * (00:00) - Welcome to Craft and Chaos * (02:14) - Taking Big Swings * (16:28) - A Brand New Segment! * (20:34) - Tail: A Family Play * (33:53) - Interstitial Chaos * (54:58) - Interstitial Chaos * (01:03:56) - Listener Questions

Understanding the Heroes, Gods, and Monsters in Creative Work

There is something almost embarrassing about the relief that comes from owning a thing entirely. Pete self-published his first novella, Lattice [https://amzn.to/4sIbTuR], and what he keeps coming back to is not the early reader responses or the question of whether people will like it. It is the dashboard. The group digs into what gatekeepers actually do (less line editing than you think, more echo chamber than you would hope), what self-publishing opens up and what it absolutely cannot guarantee, and why Ryan Dalton's first question to any aspiring author is not about craft but about goal. Mandy is in Greece, surrounded by ruins built for gods that still feel alive, and she wants to know what makes a hero, how thrasheth the gods, and whither our monsters. Everyone has opinions and nobody picks the same examples, and yet somehow the whole conversation keeps circling back to the same question: what are you actually worshipping? We are haunted by the forces that guide us this week. We thrive in the chaos. Mandy does not like horror movies and would like to understand why everyone else does. The group obliges with a theory about indifference that is genuinely unsettling, a taxonomy of monsters that ends somewhere near Eldritch horror and the insect kingdom, and a merch opportunity. Meaning is for hats. * (00:00) - Welcome to Craft and Chaos * (02:02) - The Creative Brief * (15:42) - What Makes Your Heroes * (34:14) - "Sponsor" Gibberish * (35:12) - Our Gods * (50:41) - "Sponsor:" Hit Send * (51:35) - Monsters

Necessary Fictions

Your brain told you this was going to be a short project. It also told you the outline was basically done, that sleep is optional, and that this time things would be different. Your brain, it turns out, has the self-awareness of a raccoon who just knocked over a trash can — and you keep listening to it anyway, because without it you never start anything. That's the premise of this week's Craft and Chaos, and it only gets more uncomfortably accurate from there. Pete Wright, Mandy Fabian, Kyle Olson, and Ryan Dalton each confess the lies that get them to work — the necessary fictions every creative runs on, whether or not they'll admit it. Some of those lies are aspirational. Some are borrowed from Terry Pratchett. One of them is genuinely bleak. They also name the imaginary audience living in their heads while they create, which turns out to be a surprisingly revealing question when four people actually answer it honestly. The back half introduces "Guilty or Not Guilty," where each host confesses a creative rule they violate and then — badly — argues against themselves before the rest of the crew delivers a verdict. The arguments get personal. The analogies get gross. And someone uses the phrase "creative polyamory" in a way that makes everybody uncomfortable. If you have ever told yourself a beautiful, necessary lie in order to make something — and you have — this one's going to land. Links & Notes * Jess Plus None [https://boxd.it/F67S] * Charlie Kaufman • BAFTA Screenwriters' Lecture Series [https://youtu.be/eRfXcWT_oFs] * AO3 (Archive of Our Own) [https://archiveofourown.org/] Connect with the Show Submit your questions at craftandchaos.fun [https://craftandchaos.fun/] — click any episode page and hit the submit button. New episodes drop every two weeks. * (00:00) - Welcome to Craft and Chaos * (02:00) - The Creative Roundtable * (09:50) - The Lies that Get You Out of Bed * (18:17) - "Sponsor:" COP * (19:48) - Your Imaginary Avatar * (36:24) - "Sponsor:" Nostalgia * (38:41) - Guilty or Not Guilty

Against Productivity: A Manifesto in Three Acts and One Bowl

Creative people are very good at turning joy into homework. We find something we love, immediately ask how it could become a career, worry that we're not doing it correctly, read seven books about it, and six months later we're staring at the thing we used to love and feeling nothing. It is a remarkable talent and we should probably stop. This week — inspired by The Tick, of all things — the Craft and Chaos crew attempts to remember what it felt like before all that. The assignment: something you made or did or consumed recently whose only job is to make you unreasonably happy. No portfolio value. No lofty artistic ambition. Just the pure, embarrassing, uncomplicated thing. The results are, genuinely, a lot. Pete spent months learning to use a lathe in his neighbor's garage and emerged with a camphor burl bowl so thick-walled it could survive a home invasion, and he is vibrating at a frequency that can only be described as "third-grader at a craft fair." Ryan wrote his first murder — in a genre he's never written, with a live stream, an off-camera death, and a moral ambiguity that refuses to let you off the hook — and somehow made it work without a drop of blood. Kyle has finally launched a plays page on his website (WadeIntoTheWeird.com [https://wadeintotheweird.com/plays], which is a name that earns its keep), attended four overlapping high school theater productions, and was reduced to helpless laughter by a single line delivered with absolutely no inflection whatsoever. And Mandy directed a commercial, hired her own dog, and dissolved a piece of paper in eclipse water at a crossroads to banish obstacles from her life. We are not here to judge. It worked, probably. The episode closes with a dramatic reading of Terry Bisson's 1991 short story "They're Made Out of Meat" — two aliens assessing humanity and arriving at the only logical conclusion, which is to erase us from the records and pretend no one's home — and if you don't come away from it slightly horrified by the fact that you are a pile of thinking, dreaming, singing meat, you weren't paying attention. Pure joy, folks. This is what it looks like. * (00:00) - Welcome to Craft and Chaos * (02:24) - Things that are Creatively Satisfying * (19:25) - "Sponsor" Brevity * (20:26) - Something you Do for Joy * (51:17) - "Sponsor" Brevity