Kate: There’s a certain kind of joy that feels irresponsible. Like if you laugh too hard or for too long, someone somewhere is just gonna tap you on the shoulder and be like, this is not the time or place. Adulthood feels serious, faith feels serious. That suffering is serious. Like have you even seen the headlines lately? And yet, joy persists. My name is Kate Bowler and this is Everything Happens. So I’ve been thinking about and writing about the nature of joy and how it relates to what I call the ache, that deep, unfixable longing that hums underneath, you know, everything. And I found that levity is sometimes the most honest response available to us. Like when a moment opens up and then we can just feel that there’s something ridiculous and tender there, well, we should just take it. Today I’m talking to two people who have built entire worlds out of absurdity and delight and making people laugh because joy doesn’t deny what’s hard. Joy is that great and wonderful yes to all of it. So when the world feels like it’s too much, when you feel like you’ve caught yourself policing your own happiness, or if you’ve ever just wondered if absurdity might actually be a survival skill? This is the one for you. Today I get to talk with two people who always made me feel less alone by being extremely funny about things that are hysterical and sometimes not funny at all. Jenny Lawson is like the first comic writer I ever fell in love with. She has spent years telling the truth about like life and taxidermy and mental illness and chronic pain and when our bodies don’t always respond to motivational posters and she’s written books that I just love like. Let’s pretend this never happened and furiously happy and her latest, which I would give to anybody, how to be okay when nothing is okay. And Rhett McLaughlin. This is just my miracle new friend. He is one half of Rhett and Link. He is the co-founder of this just like enormous powerhouse of entertainment and fun called Mythical. He’s co-host of Good Mythical Morning. He makes everybody laugh. Ever since just the early days of the internet of T-Rexes and MySpace stalking the planet. He’s also a musician performing as James and The Shame. And he has perfect hair and he’s wonderfully honest about doubt and faith. And every time I see his face just in a mediated or in-person way, my heart is full. And I’ve gathered you here today because you are my two beacons of delight in a world that is slowly trying to crush the joy out of us. Thank you so much for being here.
Rhett: Wow, can you say all that again?
Kate: In one breath.
Rhett: Yeah. Yeah.
Kate: You are both two of some of the funniest people I know and it really makes me wonder if you were always this way. Because I think that I never became strange later. I think I was just revealed as who I really am. So what were the indicators when you were young that you were-
Jenny: always this way? Mine does begin very early. My depression and anxiety showed up when I was quite young. And in particular, my anxiety made it to where I didn’t like to talk to people. And so from the very beginning, people thought I was weird. Even I was looking through some of my yearbooks recently, like elementary school, junior high, and so many of them say, to a very nice and weird girl. You’re so weird, you’re so, I mean, over and over again. So yeah, it came out right from the very beginning. And I don’t know, I think sometimes humor is one of the best ways to deal with the really hard things because if you can make somebody laugh, it puts them in a more comfortable situation and then they’re more likely to be like, oh, okay, it’s okay to be. To relax a little bit and if you’re laughing at those big things, they become a little less scary.
Kate: Should have known when like I didn’t want to be a princess for Halloween. I was a lamp. I wasn’t enormous pair of pants Raoul, are you always like this?
Rhett: Well, you know, I get a lot of my sense of humor from my dad. And my dad was the kind of dad who, he didn’t tell jokes, he said funny things. You know, there’s a distinction there. There’s always been this thing about saying something funny at the right time, and he was so dry. So something like, okay, somebody could fall down stairs in front of him and he would say something like. Well, that’s one way to do it. You know, that he’s always got something like that ready to go. And I saw how that worked for him socially. So I think that I picked up on that. But then at the same time, I mean, I can’t really talk about my humor without talking about my friendship with Link, which started when we were six years old, right? In first grade in 1984. So we were, just so intensely like sickeningly silly with each other. That was our humor. I mean, we’ve like unearthed some tapes of us recording ourselves like making a radio show when we were like eight years old. Like that’s the oldest like official record that we have of anything that we created together. And it is, I mean there’s nothing funny about it other than the fact that these two kids thought that this was funny. So I think that a silliness has been something that just always was the heart of our friendship and then when we started entertaining together, we sort of held on to that. So yeah, silly from the beginning.
Kate: Jenny, did yours also come out in, I mean, you’ve always had particular hobbies too that were, how early were those hobbies?
Jenny: Pretty early, when I was a kid, my sister and I used to play, but you would always see people and they would talk about their dolls and we would have dolls, what our dolls were called, we called them runaway girls and they were always running away from the most horrific abuse and we’d create these long, terrible stories and then because my dad’s a taxidermist, we had a lot of… Know, dead animals around and then so you’d bring in the, you know, the taxidermied animals and the, it just was, I’ve looked back at it now and I just think I would send child me to therapy, but therapy didn’t exist back in the 70s, at least not for poor people. And so, yeah, yeah. But I think, you have to have a certain amount of whimsy and darkness and you know it all, But it really works well together if you do it right.
Kate: Gotten that it was your dad because looking back I was trying to explain why you had so much taxidermy but it really was like more than more than like a hunter friend.
Jenny: Oh, no, it was just constant. So many dead animals, so many. I mean, just the smell of blood is my childhood. Every time he’d come in and he’d have a big deer and he, you know, flop it on the kitchen table and start cutting things. And I’m just like, but you know what, if you grow up with that, you don’t realize that that’s weird. And so it never occurred to that people didn’t have, you know, deer steak every night for dinner. Um, or the, and, you know, I, when I started telling some of these stories of, you know, oh yeah, I remember when I was a kid and I had this, uh, magical squirrel that could do arithmetic and people would be like, wait, what? That’s not a real thing. And I would, Stanley, Stanley the magical squirrel. This is totally normal. And, um, and I would tell these stories and they would be like, no, that’s, that is actually not normal. That is, that is a. Um, a horrible story, uh, and what is happening. And I think what’s really lovely is, is we get older and we realize all of those weird, terrible stories or the stories that made us who we are. And I love hearing all of those.
Kate: The ones that have like the thing that nobody believes, then you find you have to drag out the story just to prove that you’re not a liar to a stranger. I really wish that I could have a limited television series about all my brothers-in-law because one of them was an amateur falconer who never seemed to actually have a falcon, but who is frequently in my yard just being like, caca, caca. It’s like, with like a leather, was just like the leather arms.
Rhett: So he was trying to catch one?
Kate: I remember, right? Where did he lose it? Was it never his to be good with? Was it an imaginary friend? Did it ever exist? But his dad was an entomologist. Is that the bug one? Not etymologist, which is words. And he was always late for things because he had a cooler in the back of his truck and he would stop for dead animals so that he could collect the animal and then bequeath it to his dad to collect dead bugs. And then he would return the animal to a nature center for for taxidermy and nobody thought that this was a true story. I was like, well, my brother-in-law is landing in.
Jenny: And my dad would be the guy who would go to the nature center and take the carcass. Yeah, this is this is a full circle.
Rhett: Did your dad ever do any pets?
Jenny: Uh, yes, but he realized that he wasn’t doing them accurately because you can’t get the, you can get the like the full spirit of it.
Rhett: This is crazy because the only other taxidermist that I know very well, you may have seen the commercial Chuck Testa.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah?
Rhett: So Link and I made that, like that was like the reason that we moved out to LA was for that TV show that featured that commercial of nope, Chuck Testa. What a guy, first of all. It made me fall in love with taxidermy. And he talked about this, about how he did pets for a while, but then everyone is always horrified because you cannot make someone’s pet look like the pet looked. And so he was like, I’m not gonna do it anymore. So he stopped. Sounds like your dad did the same thing.
Jenny: Yeah, exactly. You know, he would, he was like, the only way that you can kind of make it work is if you just make them look dead. And then you’re like, you’re, like, oh, look, this is how they looked when I found them. And the, but yeah, he like, if you freeze dry them and you just made them look like, maybe they’re sleeping, maybe they are not alive, then they’d be like, yeah, okay, maybe. But. Yeah, many times I have had a pet that has died and my dad has, you know, come to take it away and I will say, please do not surprise me with my dead Pomeranian later and he’ll be like, oh sure and he will give me that wink of like, I know what you really want not to call my mom and be like, please, please make it right.
Rhett: He’s like, I’m gonna get it right this time. I’m going to get it, right this-
Jenny: It’s practice makes perfect.
Kate: She has this gorgeous bookstore called Nowhere Bookshop. It’s like the cutest thing ever, but I’m pretty sure there’s an enormous bear.
Jenny: Um, there, well, we have an antelope and she’s dressed up as Anne Boleyn. So it’s Antelope Boleys and then we have a, um, a crow, Edgar Allen Crow, and we have, oh, we’ve so many different things. Um, but the, the manager of the store, she’s very like, we’re at, this is not our job is taxidermy. So maybe like start taking this stuff home. And so, yeah, I actually did bring the, the bear in because we were going to do like. Fancy store pictures. We’ve been around for five years. Like everybody’s always if somebody’s doing a story about us They’re like send us pictures and we don’t have any good ones. And so I was like, I should bring this bear in and and yeah, and the and the guys that were doing the Photographs were just like what do you what do? You want to do with this and I ended up carrying this bear drum It’s not even a real bear, it’s bigger than a bear. It’s enormous. And I ended up in every headshot, I’m just carrying this three foot wide bear head and just smiling like a maniac. But it feels right. It feels right.
Kate: We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. I would describe the level of humor in my family, the like nature of it as I put, make the category devastating, where you had to sort of have this comment that would just take somebody out at the knees and then, and then. And, but then there was just some light applause after, and it’s a quality that I have come to just really appreciate in my dad, there’s a, you know, there has been a lot of storms recently and a lot places have lost power. So my parents are in Winnipeg, which is an enormous winter city. And so if it was minus 48 Celsius the other day with the wind chill. And so I, you know, the power went out and I called my parents to see if they were okay. Cause of course I’m worried and they’re old. I’m like, dad, hey, just checking in on you. Well, no one’s in an iron lung here, sweetie.
Speaker 4: Mm-hmm
Jenny: Yeah, my parents aren’t funny intentionally. They’re just, they’re funny. I write down the things that they say and do and they’re like, this is normal. I’m like, it’s actually not. And I love that it’s not. I called my mom a couple of days ago when we had this big freeze in Texas and she was like, I got to go out and break the goat water. And I was like, you have, wait, what? Say it again. And she was like I got to break the goat water because it keeps freezing over. And then the goats can’t eat and they can’t drink. And then, so I’ve got to go break the gut. And I’m just like, if you put vodka in it, maybe it’ll not freeze over. She was like oh, I need to see if goats can drink vodka. I’m not sure. I so yeah.
Kate: It’s so great. It’s like sincerity that pulls over into like, she’ll just follow you wherever you want to go.
Jenny: Yes, I have to say like, don’t actually give vodka to the goats. That was, I was just joking. She’s like, I don’t know. I think that actually might be a good idea. I’m going to check with your dad. I’m gonna see. Maybe, maybe it might be good idea, maybe. I mean, it’s, it can be good for people, like, you know, and make sure your blood thinner. Maybe this is, I dunno, who knows. Have a bunch of drunk goats out in my parents backyard.
Speaker 4: Mm-hmm
Jenny: Power for the Course right next to the working cannon and the moonshine still that my father made that I don’t know if I should say that out loud because I think that might be illegal now that I think about it. It’s like a combination of apocalyptic margaritaville over there. Oh, it absolutely is. It’s fantastic. And every time when Haley was little and I would take them, every time they would just be an absolute adventure. And I’d get them a tetanus shot and just say, OK, go. Don’t die. Just don’t die, that’s all.
Kate: Redd, you have this crazy subplot of your life where you had a spinoff show for Phil Vischer’s Veggie Tales. I don’t know, Jenny, if you are deeply immersed in the ways of Veggie Tails, and Redd I’d sure love to hear you explain it, but I want you to tell me about that part of your live, or else I will sing the songs to you until you do. Yes. Oh, do that anyway. Genesis!
Rhett: Yeah. So, Link and I have a circuitous path to doing what we’re doing now. We got engineering degrees and then we went and worked full-time with Campus Crusade for Christ, which we had been very involved with as students. And so we were working full- time with them, training students in friendship evangelism, is what we call it. At that time, we were making a lot of comedy-based videos and songs that they were just funny, but they would be played at like crew conferences and that kind of thing. They didn’t have like a direct spiritual meaning. And then somehow Phil Vischer saw one of our, one of the videos and went viral. And so of course he’s the creator of Veggie Tales. And he has a whole story about like losing control of veggie tales and then needing to do something else on the side. He’s got a great book about this whole thing, but he started What’s in the Bible, which was a puppet-based curriculum for kids to learn about the Bible. And he was like, my plan was to write a song for every book in the bible starting with Genesis. Is that I do want that to be part of this, but I’d like you guys to be two characters in this world, but the only two characters who are not puppets. So we came up with these characters, the Bentley brothers, the fabulous Bentley brothers. And we started with Genesis, and then he wrote the Exodus song, and then we did Leviticus. Yes, you can write a children’s song about Leviticon.
Kate: Oh, I need to hear this! Any part of it. RULE!
Rhett: Rules. You got rules. Something about rules. And it was basically God told, God gave rules to the Israelites and it was like, we went through, we didn’t talk about the really controversial rules.
Jenny: He just went straight to shrimp.
Rhett: Yeah, yeah. And boy, it’s somehow we made it work.
Kate: I do think there’s something funny though about having, I don’t want to say no pride, but I do have a very like, because I have a high love of absurdity, I do a real appreciation of like, the highs and lows of humiliation and where it can kind of.
Speaker 4: Hmm
Kate: kind of take you. Which leads me to my question about, um, adults, it’s funny to be like adult sadness, but I do think there’s this funny thing about when easy stories stop working. For me, it was when pain wasn’t just pain. It was like the collapse of a whole story that I had about progress and my life improving. And both of you have in your lives, this a season where life stopped making sense in the way that you’ve been taught. It wasn’t hard, it sort of became incoherent in some way. And I, I just, I’d love to talk about that for a bit. And just think there’s a relationship here between accepting incoerence and being openness to absurdity. That seems really real to me. Jenny, you’re, you are the, the story that you tell about like, just knowing that our brains don’t always act in the way we want and having to have like a higher and higher tolerance for, we’re living with. Thoughts and feelings that you don’t get to control.
Jenny: Yeah, I think absurdity, whimsy, trying to press joy back into your life as much as you can. And sometimes you can’t do that. And I think a lot of times, we will say, oh, well, do this and this and that. But there’s also an awful lot of time where I’m like, OK, well this week, the only thing I’m going to do is cling to the couch and keep breathing. Because, you know, sometimes… The world is too hard or my depression gets on top of me. And, um, and, and that’s okay. But I think a lot of times because we don’t see, like, I’m not doing like a live stream that week of like, here I am still on the couch, still haven’t taken a shower in three days. I feel like a loser. I just post when I come out of it and go, Hey, it’s going to be okay. I’m coming out of, if you’re in it now, you’re going to come out it too. It’s okay, but I do. Every time that I have a possibility of doing something absolutely ridiculous, I grab onto it and I say yes to it because I never regret it. My husband regrets it. My husband is like, hi, it’s 2 a.m. Why do you have the cats all dressed up in human clothes? And why do you, you know, you have this… This taxidermied mouse that’s dressed up as an acrobatic and it’s strapped to Hunter S. Tomcat and so he’s running around the house and he’s, you know, and I’m like, I just want to entertain myself and Hunter loves it and it, it’s fantastic. It’s fine. Yeah. If somebody gives you the opportunity, somebody’s like, you, know what, hey, do you want to go to clown school? I’m, like, yeah, I’ll do clown school. I was bad at it. I was terrible. Nobody tells you that when you do the um what is it called the acrobatic stuff where you’re holding onto the swing? Did you know, I mean, I guess basic math makes sense, that when you’re holdin’ onto that swing, you’reholding your body weight? Oh no. Yeah, I can’t do that. So every time I would just swing right off onto the net over and they were like, you’re gonna do it this time? Then every time, I’m like, you are overestimating my upper body strength and underestimating lower body weight. This is not going to happen. But being able to laugh about it makes that story now so fun. And I’m so glad I did it, even though I failed miserably.
Kate: You always find these little yeses until they become bigger and bigger and biggest yeses.
Jenny: Exactly.
Kate: I really always trust you when you talk about this, because it’s one thing to know sadness, it’s a different thing to like the flavors of despair, and I just, I find you honestly to be the most trustworthy person I know about finding the small yes, and then being patient with yourself when the yes isn’t quite there yet.
Jenny: Well, that means a lot coming from you because I go back to your stuff over and over again, and when the world seems hard, which it certainly does now, I tend to look for the people that I can go to who will not only be honest about the fact that things are not easy now and that we need to be doing work, but also are positive and are saying like, this is This is real and it’s really happening. And, but here’s how you can also take care of yourself. Here’s how can, and finding that middle ground I think can be incredibly hard, but I think it can also, you know, if you don’t have safe places that you can go to to recuperate and rest, you’re gonna burn out. So you have become one of those places and I think that’s really wonderful.
Kate: Normally I get like that woman is very sad
Speaker 4: I appreciate you.
Jenny: Comparatively, you’re very upbeat compared to me, so you just need to stand next to me more often. Thanks!
Kate: Right, you’ve had like a whole world that you lived in that was quite like seamless. Evangelicalism is not just a belief system. It’s a whole word. It’s communities, it’s friends, it’ language, it’s a sense of purpose. And I think people really underestimate the grief involved when that meaning system falls apart and what that undoing kind of costs us emotionally and relationally. And I just wonder how your ability to find your way through like. Play and creativity might have helped carry you in some of those harder moments.
Rhett: Yeah, it’s interesting how, um, because I’ve been doing what I do now in some form for almost 20 years with, with link, you know, this, this summer will be 20 years on YouTube.
Speaker 4: Oh, wow.
Which is just crazy to think. And of course, that 20 years really spans me. When I started in 2006, I was definitely, that was right, we were basically still in ministry at that point, right? So I was so certain about everything. I had this, my complete worldview and framework completely locked in. And knew that it would hold up and take me forward. And of course, now I’m in a place where that framework has been completely turned upside down and tossed aside. But the thing that has remained constant is trying to make people laugh. And also trying to people laugh on a schedule because. We have always sort of brought this engineering approach to the way that we schedule our day and we schedule our. Our shoot week and a lot of people, trade secret, we shoot a bunch of Good Mythical Morning together every single month. So we’ll shoot like four episodes a day, five days in a row. And like bring everybody in to like kind of make the show. And then there’s everything else that we’ve got going on in between, but our day is not reactive to how we’re feeling. It’s like, I know that regardless of what’s going on in my life, regardless of how I’m feeling emotionally, physically, okay, I have got it. To go into this silly mode. And Lincoln and I may be going from having this, it might be, you know, years ago, it might, okay, we’re having this existential conversation where I’m bringing to him how my faith is crumbling and he’s like, oh, shit. You know, he’s, okay. And then, but okay, 15 minutes from now, we got to go on camera and make people laugh. And that principle still kind of applies. So I think that One of the things that that has taught me is that that silliness is always right there. It’s always available. Yeah. So even in the midst of difficulty and sadness, there’s like this, it’s almost like sometimes sadness and silliness can be like two sides of the same coin. And they’re just, okay, I got to turn it over right now and I can go to this place, set that stuff aside for a second. And then we’ve had to learn how to do that just to make a living essentially. But I think that has sort of had this net effect of making me see that that can happen at any time. I can access that at any.
Kate: Oh my gosh, I love thinking about that. That little like, it opens up a space and then, but you would like have felt more and more, almost like you can feel the boundaries around that space. Like, okay, in here, we can strike this stone and there’ll be a little spark and we can do something with this spark. It’s really, sometimes I’ve thought about, even though it’s like been one of my saddest places, I do kind of honestly think about the hospital that way. Where it’s a space because it’s a certain amount of time I have to spend there. But I actually have, I’ve had enough experiences, you know, and it used to be, I’d have to be there every week. And so, you know. You’re either gonna live or you’re not. So you’re gonna decide you’re going to postpone a whole day where you don’t feel like a person or you gonna make something happen when I’m there. And I think I treated that hospital time as being like, what happens? What else can happen? I know what happens here. What else could happen here? And now I weirdly have this expectation when I go in. That something could and will happens. I will say yes to something and someone else will say, yes, back. And it might not be the first three people, but at some point, a nurse is gonna agree with me that he is a vampire and that he wants to be left alone with my blood for his own sinister purposes and that should be supervised and who should I call? For some reason, this weird expectation I have, because I’ve had this discipline about that time, okay, well, if I’m here, and sometimes I write, sometimes I whatever, but I really believe that it doesn’t have to be the opposite. Life is still possible there. And I kind of, I’m sort of, I’m very intense about it, I guess, now that we’re, when I heard you say that, I was like, yes, I believe that. About sadness, I Guess.
Jenny: I love also the idea of the sadness and silliness being two sides of the same coin, because I think there is a certain type of person, and I am definitely one of those where some of the funniest moments that I’ve had have been like in the middle of a funeral, or some truly awful when my grandmother got… COVID and we couldn’t be with her in the hospital because this was at the beginning of COVID. And they called and they were like, she died. And then right after that, an hour later, they were, like, no, we got that wrong. It was somebody else. She’s not dead. And and so I was like, okay, and so my sister and I and my mom are making these like terrible jokes. And just absolutely read and then they call back and they’re like, Oh, no, no. No, she did die. She did die and and and Every single time it got, even though it was so sad, it was so ridiculous. We could not stop laughing. We were like, granny would have I wish she was alive for this. She would have been like, this is fantastic. I fucked everybody up. This is what I love it. So yeah, yeah. It’s so I think it can be very easy to to access that when you’re feeling these high emotions. Sometimes when you’re sad, people go to anger, or they go to this, or they got to that. I think silliness, it can be one of the most helpful and healthy ways to deal with it, even though I will say there’s a lot of people who look at you when you laugh in the middle of a funeral and try not to laugh, and then you’re laughing and even more, and you’re trying to pretend like you’re crying and you really not, and your sister is also doing it, and yeah. I have this w-
Kate: I have this one example of that. A friend of mine was dating somebody and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to keep dating him. And it was a really, really sad, it was really really sad service. And I guess he wasn’t familiar with all the church words in the like, it was like first time reading maybe like a psalm or something, but you know the verse like, yay, the wife. Yay, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death he kept being like yay
Speaker 4: I love it!
Kate: And then he turns to her and he just goes, yay!
Speaker 4: You
Kate: see like murder in her eyes. Oh, I just think that’s so much funnier. Well, I love that.
Jenny: Yippee! The shadow of the death again! This is a great valley! Tourism here is really…
Kate: It’s really underdeveloped. We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right. This is why I thought of you guys to have this conversation is because I’ve been doing this research on joy and there was this one little piece about joy that I was having a really hard time understanding. And this was my like, oh my gosh, I feel like they’d get it. I wanna run an argument past you. I have this theory about why we have this strange confrontation between joy and between like this one moment of insanity. When absurdity happens, when life comes apart, like illness or depression or loss of belief, it can take us right up to the edge of meaning. And then it can kind of push us over for a second where we’re like, okay, well, I guess there are no reasons. I guess it doesn’t matter. I guess nothing’s controllable. And all of that has this very charming name, nihilism. It’s just a moment of like, who cares? There’s no reasons, there’s no nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Nothing, nothing. But once you get tipped over, I actually think the no reasonness is a really close friend to joy because joy has this weird moment where everything matters and nothing matters. And like you kind of see the everythingness of everything. And you can just say joy is like a yes instead of nihilism being a no. But there’s just this moment of like, I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m laughing and I miss my loved one and my life isn’t getting better or it is getting better and I’m not in control. Just this like crazy hyper feeling of, but I love what you said, Jenny, but like, and then all that joy or whatever, it can actually, it can bring you back into language. It can bring back into connection with people. But I love this one thing where you just, where joy just says yes, even when there’s not obvious reasons. Why?
Rhett: One of the things that my whole process of sort of setting aside an orienting framework did was this embracing of uncertainty, embracing of the mystery. Yeah. Sort of letting go of this expectations that everything has to make sense. And I think that there’s something about joy that is Well, I’m interested in philosophy, but when people start talking about philosophical things, a lot of times it starts to be like it doesn’t stick to my brain because it’s so conceptual and theoretical. And then where philosophy begins to make sense is when it becomes practical and I understand like, okay, that principle makes sense to me. I can, on the experiential level, that is meaningful to me And I think that’s one of the things about joy is that when you start trying to explain why you’re joyful, it’s like, well, it not really, it’s not based on some well-defined reason and logic. And so it does feel like it’s right there in the same ballpark of this like, okay, I don’t know why I should care about anything, really, if I start thinking about it. If I start trying to build a philosophical framework, I’ll just sit here and just. Rot all day, but it’s just like, so then my choice is between sitting there rotting all day or leaning into joy and they feel like they’re right there in the same place. Does that make sense? But my experience of joy is, that’s the experience that I prefer. Sometimes it’s that simple.
I think that the not reasons can go into the, then everything’s a no, then why. Or I think it can tilt into a million small yeses, even if the original yes goes away.
Kate: I’ve just found that then joy is a gift, it descends on you. And it’s also like a thing you can cultivate as you can try to find your, like, like you were describing, Jenny, about your smaller yeses, like there’s a little window and then you can just kind of catch it like the end.
Jenny: Of a helium balloon. So the, what were you were saying about the, you know, it being this edge, I think when it comes to laughter, the thing that is so great about that type of joy is that it almost always comes from a surprise. Like nobody’s ever just sitting there and you’re like, you know what, I really like babies. Ha ha ha ha, just thinking of babies. The laughter always comes with some kind of like, Oh, that’s a surprise to me. That’s a, and so, so I love the idea that laughter reminds me every single time that I can still be surprised. There’s still something new. There’s something that just looked at from a different perspective makes me go, oh, that’s actually really funny. It almost is like I’m reminding you that, that joy exists. You know it
Kate: It makes me realize that on the joy spectrum, that both of you represent two philosophies I really enjoy. Jenny, you find these like the small window of yes, and then you take it like the gift. And Rhett, you structure it like an engineer. And then you can actually experience it more often. Like, could you tell people, for example, of some of the stuff that you try that just like, you structure these really fun, ridiculous experiments, like deep frying glasses, or like, I think people would love to hear just the. Spectrum of randomness that you introduce.
Rhett: Yes, it turns out there are so many ways that you could try food on the internet. Yeah, that was, I think the deep fry glasses were Will It Deep Fry? Which was one of our early Will It videos. And.
Kate: Your tone of voice is killing me. It makes me so much happier.
Rhett: Yeah. I’ve also tried basically every, I think every testicle that can be eaten from an animal. No. I believe there was, I think we did have a guess the testicle that you were eating at one point, which was not fun. Not fun for me, apparently very fun for people who are watching. And I mean, just yesterday we were eating, You know, there’s this a Filipino fried chicken fast food place in LA called Jollibee. And we were taking Jollibee and we were mashing it together with Pizza Hut ingredients and creating new dishes. I mean, I do so much damage to my body during that week that we shoot GMM, that I’m constantly trying to undo the rest of the time. But yeah, but then sometimes it’s just, okay, let’s just. What is definitively the best flavor of Dorito? That is something that.
Kate: People have strong opinions about it. Because it’s Cool Ranch.
Rhett: Corrent is my tried and true. It did not win our tournament though, because I have to take into account Link’s opinion, which is.
Kate: You bracket them. Suspect.
Jenny: That’s so great!
Rhett: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It gets very intense. It can get very, very intense!
Jenny: I think you should do a will-it-soda stream to try to make every possible soda. And I will tell you from experience that if you try to use SodaStream to put carbonation into pickle juice, it explodes. Ask me how I know, atomizes the entire house covered in a mist. It’s on the ceiling. We need to repaint. Oh!
Rhett: Just with pickle juice. Yeah, we’ve done something with a soda stream where they put a bunch of stuff in there, but they always test it before the day that we shoot to make sure that that doesn’t happen. That’s a good idea. So they may have learned that lesson the hard way as well.
Jenny: Learn from my mistakes.
Kate: Jenny, I feel like I would just poke you and any number of these really important realities would come out. You don’t even know how you can paint the nails of squirrels. You don’t even know.
Jenny: It is ridiculous. You know what I think is really fun is I think people go through this kind of stuff all the time. I mean, maybe not exploding pickle juice, but I think people go though this stuff all of the time and if you don’t take the time to look at it with a ridiculous lens, you don t see it. Like yesterday I went to the ophthalmologist And she was like, your eyes are messed up, you’re. You don’t have tears, right? And I’m like, I’m not crying correctly. Is that what you’re trying to say? And she was like, yeah, it’s real messed up and we’re going to have to do all this stuff and maybe all these different things. And she like, first of all, you got blephritis. And I was like that’s not a real word, blephitis? There’s absolutely no way that’s a real world. And she’s like, no it is. And then she put these drops in and she looked and she was oh. Your tea, but looks awful. And I’m like, your tea, that looks awful, what’s a tea, but what are you talking about? She’s like, you’re eating. It takes like 10 seconds for like your I juice to go away. And she was like, yours is gone in less than a second. You’re so dry. And I was like. I mean, like, okay, all right. And I mean these people, they’re not serious. Atomic t-bots and and blepharitis and, and, you know, I could come home and just be like, this sucks. I’m going to have to have this procedure done and all this. And instead I was like, this is ridiculous and a really good distraction actually.
Rhett: Listen, I cannot tell you how much I relate to everything that you just said.
Jenny: Really?
Rhett: I have been on the very similar eye journey. I had all the same insults from the doctor that you just got, including a very low T-butt. And I have been going to this guy for almost a year now. He’s not just a guy, he is an eye doctor.
Jenny: Just some random man on the street.
Rhett: What he has been doing is he does all this stuff where he like runs like an electrical current through, like around my eye and then he like does this little. That’s what they told.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they need to do!
Rhett: Yes, this like light therapy thing. And then he takes these calipers and he squeezes the eyelids to get the oil flowing.
Jenny: To milk the I wasn’t even gonna bring that up because I was like there’s no one is gonna believe this is real She was like you’re gonna have to oil
Rhett: Yes.
Jenny: Milk your eyes for the oil.
Rhett: For the oil. Yeah, he milked my eyes. Like I’m getting my eyes milked like every two months now. And he films it. It sounds so sexual. He films it and he sent me the footage and we showed it on our podcast last year. And I mean, I told people turn away if you don’t wanna see like a snake of like oil, like, yeah, anyway, there is hope.
Jenny: Okay, well, that’s good to know because when she tried to oil mine, she was like, nothing is coming out. And I was like I feel like a cow that doesn’t work anymore. This is the weird, the weirdest, like only fans I’ve been involved in. And then she said, she was like so look, we’re going to do this. She’s like, insurance not going to cover it. It’s going to be expensive. But while we’re in there, you know what we’ll do? We’ll go ahead and hit these like age spots you have over here and they’ll make some of them go away. And I was like, okay, that’s very nice, but also you just told me that I’m dry. And I’m old. Like, can we just take it one day at a time?
Rhett: Yeah, but that is a benefit. The stuff that they do with the little light, they’re like, people go to the plastic surgeon or the dermatologist to get this done, to look younger. I was like, okay, that’s not something I would have chosen to do, but I will take.
Kate: But I will take side what a stunning bright side at the end of that very disturbing apocalyptic story eyeballs and a woman struggling with sadness is what told she can’t cry also a great television Okay, guys, let’s, even though I’ve never, never do this, let’s end with a game called Keep, Toss, or Change, where I’m gonna name a belief, habit, or instinct we picked up as we grew up or went through hard things. And will you just tell each one of us whether you wanna keep it, whether you want to toss it, no longer serves you, whether you would just change it in your own way. First one is talking to yourself in the car. Oh, keep. I’m the only one who listens to me.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Jenny: It’s good, it’s good. I hate gratitude lists. Change I like the idea of them and I have one that I can go back to you to be like Oh, I remember these things are gonna be good again one day but I don’t like to write them every day because then I’m like I Don’t I can’t think of anything if I’m in what if I am depressed and then it makes me more depressed and I’m Like oh, I’m just not even creative. So yeah
Rhett: change. The gratitude list used to be directed to God. And then when I didn’t know what I thought about God, you’re like, well, who are you grateful to for these things? Yeah. And then you’re, like, well, okay, I kind of need to put something in that. And I mean, I’m in LA, I could say the universe. But I think maybe it’s just God again, but that God means something else.
Kate: I think we’re all in agreement, we’re gonna change it. I looked up the studies the stuff was based on and it turns out that when they said keeping gratitude lists helps you become more grateful in the happiness studies school of thought, it turns that it has benefits, it just has limited benefits. And if you try to be too grateful, you actually end up falling back into the same tar pit of either despair or frustration that you started. So you can be grateful. But in a very limited way, and I accept that.
Rhett: A Goldilocks zone of gratefulness. Exactly, there really is. Okay.
Jenny: I kind of love that. Yeah, don’t be too grateful. Be grateful. Be grateful, Ms. Lack. We were trying to pull one over on you.
Kate: No, exactly.
Jenny: Big gratitude.
Kate: You know, big gratitude just wants you to be too grateful. You’ve got to scale that back. All right. Apologizing to inanimate objects. Keep. Always do that.
Rhett: I can’t remember the last time I did that.
Kate: Rad, are you not a woman? How rude. Gosh. Are you not Canadian? Give me a- give me a…
Rhett: Give me a recent example of you doing this.
Kate: I hit that one chair I can see from here on the way out of my studio. And then I said, sorry. Same thing.
Jenny: Almost always a chair or sometimes I have a handle on my door and it’s awesome because it’s Victorian and it is an actual hand there’s a hand like sticking out which I love except every time I walk by it grabs onto my clothes and rips whatever I’m wearing and so I will on a regular basis yell at it so it’s
Rhett: Oh yeah, getting angry at it. I would get angry at that chair. I’m not apologizing to that chair!
Kate: I think we’ve located a gender imbalance in our panel, but okay, all right, that sounds fair. And our last one is having a very strong emotional reaction to a song you forgot existed.
Jenny: You know what, I don’t listen to music very often because I have a weird cognitive dissonance thing about if I hear music and I feel like I need to have emotions and I’m in a state when I’m not having emotions, it really kind of messes with me. So instead, I just listen to murder podcasts because that’s good for my anxiety. So I probably though, you know what though? Sometimes when I’m I I’m like, oh I forgot that podcast existed and I go And I’m like, Oh my gosh, they did like 15. I can, I can binge this while I’m cleaning the house. This is amazing. That w that makes me so happy. Maybe happy enough to cry if I had tears.
Rhett: If you could, if you could. You will soon. Yes.
Jenny: Yes! Fingers crossed!
Rhett: You will cry again. That should be the slogan of that doctrine.
Kate: When some man milked me.
Rhett: I’m going to keep this one, my wife Jesse thinks that I am a little bit sick because I can still listen to evangelical praise music from the late 90s, early 2000s and get emotional. I think it’s because I was a man in that world and so it’s a little less traumatic for me if she listens to that. It’s like, okay, this is triggering. Yeah, it doesn’t take much to get me going when it comes to music.
Kate: It’s good, because I’m about to sing the song Majesty to you. Just to see how it plays out. My other choice was wrecking ball, but I’m going to choose that, just to worship the Majesty. You guys, nothing has made me happier than being with the two of you. I’m so grateful you did this. I really thank you so much for understanding exactly how I feel about absurdity and joy and like finding a way to put yourself in the way of both. And I just cannot thank you enough for being perfect people with. Apparently, no sadness inside.
Jenny: Or at least you can’t tell because of the lack of tears.
Rhett: Yeah, right, yeah. We have a lot to relate to.
Jenny: Did we just become best friends?
Rhett: Yes, we did.
Kate: Absurdity doesn’t solve suffering, right? It doesn’t heal grief, it doesn’t get rid of depression once and for all. But it does interrupt despair’s claim to be the loudest voice in the room. Absurdly is the moment when we remember that being alive is not only tragic, it is also bizarre and hyper-specific and often hilarious. And when we say yes to that, Even briefly, we’re refusing to let despair… have the final say. I just love the way Jenny says yes to small things, like a strange idea, a ridiculous new hobby, a bookstore with a taxidermied antelope dressed like Anne Boleyn, because she says yes. Yes, knowing it’s not gonna fix anything, but it sometimes cracks open a little window to something new. And I love that Rhett schedules Joy. Like he makes room for silliness like it’s his job. Okay, it is his actual job, but like… He does treat delight like it’s something you practice, not something you just wait around to feel. Both of them understand that joy is something we have to put ourselves in the way of, like we’re standing in traffic. This is the pearl of wisdom I gleaned after thinking about and researching joy for so long in my new book, Joyful Anyway. Theologian Karl Barth once said it like this, joy is both a gift and a task. It’s something that mysteriously pops up out of nowhere. When we least expect it, like grace. And it’s something we have to put ourselves in the way of because we can’t always be happy, but we can be joyful anyway. So my dears, here is a blessing for you. May you have permission to be odd in a world that prefers the shiny and put together. May you find one friend who understands your particular blend of weirdness. And when the news feels unbearable, may silliness and delight fill you like oxygen to your lungs. And when you get confused, may you remember, play is not frivolous, it is how some of us survive. Bless you all. All right, my darlings, look, you do, I don’t even know if you know what Substack is because I didn’t know what Substack is before I was on it. It’s just a website, but it’s a website that’s kind of like an old school blog where if you go on, you’ll just see like an entry and then all these amazing comments. And if you come over there, you’re gonna see everybody talk about their absurd joy. And I would love to hear, I’m collecting these little zags. Like zig and zag about how we open ourselves up to something new. So like come on over and put that in there. I wanna hear what you do to put yourself in the way of joy. I’m at KateBoller.substack.com. I’m also currently on tour for Joyful Anyway and I would love to see you at one of the stops. There’s still a few seats available at Kateboller.com slash tour. So come be joyful with me. And a huge thank you to my team who I just adore, Jess Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Anne Herring. Haley Duritt, Megan Crunkleton, Katherine Smith, Elia Zonio, Anna Fitzgerald Peterson, and Keith Weston. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.
