How to talk about How To: With John Wilson
How To with John Wilson — Bread Scene & Nathan Fielder Tik Tok House — YouTube
Trying to describe to an acquaintance why they would enjoy How To is a difficult task. It’s from the viewpoint of a guy who goes around shooting random odd footage in NYC. It is then stitched together, with the help of a few other writers doing the obviously sweaty work of making this look seamless, into a comedic pastiche on a theme. More often than not these segments are tenuous pieces of connective tissue — but often the jokes are better for it. Hearing through John’s nasally narration a goofy one-liner trying to connect one random piece of odd human behavioral garbage has produced some of the deepest belly laughs I’ve had watching television.
Yet the comedy is so often both wry and dry one can spend whole episodes not making a sound. It has little character profiles which more often than not feature unsympathetic oddballs with strange life priorities. Like in the first season: a guy who has invented a contraption to stretch out the skin on his penis to create an artificial foreskin that he mourns his loss of. Or novelty coffin makers. A general panoply of human esoterica. Though John, or the show itself, tries to treat everyone as fairly as it can. These characters are no more of a joke than John’s own self effacement, going with his camera to interview them.
Not an easy premise to sum up in casual conversation. In fact, judging by their own little promotional video (see above) — the creators of How To don’t really know how to talk about their show. The above video is a pretty strong joke in its own right, and I like the comedic turn that it takes; but one also gets the feeling like the video is heavily compensating for not really knowing what to say about their own show. And frankly, I get it. The show feels avant garde. Though the front line for, what, exactly, remains unclear. Though it projects a down-tempo desire to rationally address a “common” problem in the world, How To manages to remain exciting. Mostly due to the interstitial randomness that can take you off guard.
This works better in some episodes than others. The first episodes of the first two seasons are probably my favorites. An episode on NYC scaffolding, the big business of it, is genuinely informative. When I was in New York I wondered why it was above seemingly every sidewalk.
Perhaps, however, the show’s greatest asset — New York City itself — is also its Achilles’ heel.
I did not live in that bustling metropolis for very long. I had a job in a fancy restaurant that taught me some things. But I was a hopeless midwest transplant who looked for the slummiest of all housing options and found, even there, situations too expensive for working less than full time and finding free time to write stories. But I did manage to get my own story out of the scene and setting.
Trying to gauge this story’s merits, I sent it to an acquaintance who replied that he had enjoyed it despite the fact that it took place in NYC.
Immediately I understood what he meant. How To has an episode in its second season which features John Wilson trying to deal with the hassle of purchasing a car and trying to find a place to park it in the city. This was not a particularly strong episode but I liked it despite the specificity of the problem it meant to tackle. Still, I could see how this would turn others off. Is NYC really so interesting as to warrant putting up with these kinds of hassles? For me the answer was no. And not just because of such little inconveniences.
I did find myself meeting interesting people. Not to the frequency or depth I would’ve liked, but they were there. Squeaking out their daily lives with a certain gratitude — but their romance for the city was completely lost on me. I enjoyed walking. The long blocks of Manhattan, the constant barrage of sensory input could keep one going in a trancelike state seemingly all day. But other than that individual neighborhoods seemed like little cities unto themselves. Most people living out the majority of their time in a relatively contained space. I couldn’t see the difference, then, between that way of life and living in a different city without such “branding” or “name recognition”. Skyscrapers are interesting, but so are mountains.
I don’t think I really need to belabor this point. It’s pretty self evident to the less ambitious class of humans that to move somewhere already crowded and expensive, just for the sake of saying you did so, doesn’t make any sense. The great dream of the internet was to allow dispersal of ideas and interests to the parties who’d make the most of them from any space in the world. It’s probably true that this dream has proved to be an illusion — that having personal, face to face interactions, with people you find amusing and challenging to one’s intellect and ideas — that the internet is no substitute for this. And that big cities like New York do facilitate, at the very least, the possibility of these interactions.
Still, this is all despite.
I have similar feelings about another quasi character comedy that got picked up by HBO. The program which follows a bike riding weed dealer, High Maintenance. In every episode the dealer pops into a different character’s life. The inception of that program is a little easier to telegraph. Co-creator Katja Blichfeld is a costume designer on 30 Rock, she meets young upstart actors with bit parts and they have fun creating short little 13 minute character sketches that in the beginning were released online for free. If one goes another step back from that: Tina Fey moves to NYC to work on SNL, as many actors and writers still aspire, and that’s why Blichfield has work in the city. And why does SNL start in NYC? Well when Lorne Michaels …
I know, this exercise is starting to sound silly. You gonna go all the way back to 18th Century immigrants or what? Of course when I referenced NYC as How To’s Achilles heel, this comes with the implicit notion that the city does have great power. But I am very sympathetic to anyone who is turned off by the NYC vibe. Oh, jesus, that show Girls, too. Possibly the worst offender.
But what is it about this feeling and where does it come from? Is it a type of repressed jealousy? That there is a little part of everyone which feels ambition but has tried to talk themselves out of it for realistic and practical purposes? (Not even that well repressed, in the case of me and my writer acquaintance, those who have wanted to “make it”)
That might be a kind of answer. But not one I find satisfying. Though, to acknowledge a larger reality, none of these shows just mentioned have been particularly popular (except SNL of course). Whether or not hindered by this NYC vibe — I’d argue that they were.
To return to How To, it is one of the lesser offenders at manipulating a NYC mystique. It’s pretty much guaranteed that every episode of How To will have a cut or pan to a dead rat. And John’s housing challenges in the first episode of the second season border on absurdity. He even shoots an episode of the show in Vegas. Yet he starts the narration of every episode with, “Hey New York.” As if speaking directly to the city and its people.
For anyone else, it seems like New Yorkers are too self satisfied with calling themselves New Yorkers. I don’t think there’s any city, other than New York, where John could open up a narration to a documentary of weird human esoterica, without it sounding like a dis or a joke in itself.
I’m trying to imagine a “Hey Cincinnati” or “Hey Tampa”. There’s a curious mix of resignation and pride in John’s opening of, “Hey New York”. A city which, practically, is less than what it appears; as John traps on video people trying to move objects too heavy for them on their own, signs which miss the point of the meaning that they are trying to convey, and other human examples of an atomized society.
Still, something of the grandeur or illusion remains. I suppose that large cities are the closest we have to tombs for our pharaohs or sculpture that can only be made by a plenitude of hands. And NYC is the most sacred. As such it has the most need to be mocked, ridiculed and pilloried. Yet in so doing it is only more cemented as a symbol for America and the world (though there are 20 cities in China as big as New York for which you’ve never heard their name). As such it has a quality which implies that NYC needs to be seen to be believed.
Listening, this afternoon, through a collection of Ralph Ellison’s essays, I hear this line. “Human beings are basically the same and only differ in lifestyle.” Even if it’s just the illusion of being close to this sacred monumentality and the interplay between chaos and structure that’s needed to create it, the appeal of this New York lifestyle remains. And as such I’m indebted to John Wilson to capture it in little snippets so I don’t have to be there myself. That illusion was much too grand for me.
