It’s a dog day afternoon and I’m feeling trés Pacino-ish so let’s glide this puppy onto the runway with some kind/interesting commentary from wise folks on recent Rubesletters…

🧠 I was mistaken (and you’re welcome)

I wrote about how the mistakes are the interesting parts in Wabi Sabi is rock 'n roll. It’s a “great essay on how imperfection embodies beauty,” according to Nick Gillespie.

Nick is the Editor at Large for Reason Magazine and conducts cool interviews. Here’s John Cleese telling him about how wokeism stymies creativity in comedy (and other areas too).

🧠 Curmudgeons

Speaking of mistakes, I made a dumb error in this one: The six best curmudgeons to follow on Instagram. The hiccup: I forgot to include art critic Jerry Saltz, whom I adore. He’s a true NYC no-fu©ks-left-to-give art lover who spits reality.

A good starting point on Saltz is his how to be an artist, a sharp list of 33 rules to “take you from clueless amateur to generational talent.” Good advice for non-artists here too. Actually, the way you lead your life is a piece of art so really everybody’s an artist. It’s all a movie and you’re the writer/director/star, baby.

Viralish

This one struck a nerve: My Instagram Reel just went viral (1.3M views). Here's why that sucks.

I gotta think this is part of why this Reel has entered the stratosphere. Yes, the joke’s funny, but also, it’s giving people a reason to fight with each other in the comments. And hate is the easiest path to engagement. A bunch of people LOL’ing doesn’t move the needle nearly as much as them screaming.

Jason Zinoman, NY Times comedy critic, wrote this about it:

Jason Zinoman @zinoman

I always find Matt's newsletter thoughtful, even maybe esp when i disagree, but this one is excellent (and depressing) on how we define success online is changing comedy. Worth your time.

🅼🅰🆃🆃 💎 🆁🆄🅱🆈 @mattruby

My Instagram Reel just went viral (1.3M views). Here's why that sucks. "You get into comedy to make people laugh. Yet online, a successful joke is one that makes people fight." https://t.co/JWUUMvD5BE

July 27th 2022

2 Retweets7 Likes

And Jesse David Fox, Vulture comedy critic, commented:

Jesse David Fox: Battle Angel @JesseDavidFox

There is A LOT of great stuff in this @mattruby post. To pick just one thing: I'm not sure I've seen a comedian actually self-reflect like this on the dangers of how their material might be misconstrued out of its original context. mattruby.substack.com/p/my-instagram…

July 27th 2022

1 Retweet13 Likes

Vaguely related piece by Nick Maggiulli: This is the problem of our age. We’ve become obedient to algorithms.

But this goes beyond content creators on Twitter and YouTube. Following the algorithm pervades our society. It’s when you take a career in consulting or banking because your college classmates did so. It’s when you invest in a new cryptocurrency or tech stock because it’s popular. Ultimately, it’s when you let others shape your life instead of building your own.

Amen.

Ayahuasca

Well, lookie here: Aaron Rodgers Says Ayahuasca Psychedelic Helped Him Win Back-to-Back NFL MVP Awards.

Rodgers added that ayahuasca has helped his mental health and given him "unconditional self-love," which has helped his relationship with teammates and others in his life.

Good for you, Aaron. Wonder if the jungle professor gave him the ultimate piece of wisdom he seems to need: Stop dating actresses.

FYI I wrote this (adjusted the title for symmetry’s sake): Matt Ruby Says Ayahuasca Psychedelic Helped Him Get Over His Relationship With His Father.

During my first time under the influence, I began to think about my father, my childhood, who I’ve become, and how I behave in relationships.

Howdy, partner

“Love this!” wrote master comedian Gary Gulman about my piece at Funny How on why finding a good writing partner is so important for comedians.

A good writing session with another comic lets you dive deep on jokes and can often be a more productive use of time than a crappy mic where no one cares. Just remember that a real audience is the ultimate arbiter.

Gulman's 366 Comedy Tips is an amazing collection of comedy wisdom. He tweeted them out, one per day, during 2019. A must-read for any aspiring comic – and good stuff for civilians too.

Drag ‘em with you

I wrote up 15 lessons in comedy creativity from George Carlin and then 15 more lessons on creating like George Carlin. I keep thinking about the last sentence here:

I like to bother people. [I try to figure out] where the line is drawn, and then deliberately cross it and drag the audience with you. And have them happy that you did it.

Judd Apatow, director of the HBO doc about Carlin, called my writeup a “great piece” which was cool to see.

Support

If you dig this newsletter, please subscribe, tell a friend, or leave me a comment –that way, I can feel that I’m not just typing into the void and instead we’re human beings on a joint mission of some sort because I’d appreciate that.

Comedy

Check out my most recent standup clips on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

Recently at Funny How (my other newsletter about standup philosophy): How Jerry Seinfeld, Ricky Gervais, Larry David, and other comedians approach awards shows.

Quickies

🎯 Can't believe Don Henley managed to turn cruel into a two syllable word ("cru-ell dude"). Guess that's just life in the syllable fast lane!

🎯 Here’s a phrase you never hear anymore: “it’s none of my business”

🎯 I get bad reviews of movies or meals because they’re fast. However, I don't understand bad book reviews. Just stop reading the book! You shouldn't torture yourself for hours upon hours just so you can write a smarmy pan.

🎯 We live in a culture where we are never bored and we are never sad. And that has left us on a deep, fundamental, primal level eternally bored and sad. (Also: LOL that this is what comes out when I sit down to write “jokes.”)

🎯 Men don't take women with high voices seriously (too girly) yet are threatened by women with low voices (too masculine). So women are put into an eternal pickle akin to cooking soup for Goldilocks – except the soup is always too hot/cold and never just right.

🎯 Marie Kondo loves stacking things vertically which makes me think she's probably a big fan of Pringles.

🅼🅰🆃🆃 💎 🆁🆄🅱🆈 @mattruby

If it's something YOU take to feel better, it's medicine. If it's something OTHER PEOPLE take to feel better, it's drugs.

August 6th 2022

3 Likes

🎯 Young people look at homes on Zillow the way old people look at sex in p0rn: “Oh, I’ll never get to do THAT.”

🎯 "Latchkey kid" is so dramatic sounding. I'd just come home and make a frozen pot pie and watch Three's Company reruns until my parents came home. It wasn't some Dickensian nightmare where I had to sweep the chimn– Wait, I just realized I'm also a latchkey adult!

🎯 People with good taste can't comprehend how few people actually watch HBO. Every ep of Girls = 300,000 viewers. Every ep of NCIS = 21,000,000 viewers. America doesn't actually like art. It likes Arby's.

🎯 Crypto is to money as The Matrix is to philosophy.

🎯 Venture capitalists are using bogus rage topics (pronouns! CRT! trans teachers!) to frack our brain stems in order to maximize engagement because that is how the incentives of predatory capitalism work. If you post about any of those things regularly, you're a mark. (Yes, I’m talking about Andrew Sullivan.)

🎯 Lotta hate for “bothsidesism” but feels like we could do with a little less onesideism in our culture right now.

🎯 The mistake is trying to make eye contact when you should make eye communication.

🎯 My solution to the renewed debate on gay marriage (or any marriage debate): Abolish marriage. It's a dumb institution. Every argument people have about who should/shouldn't be allowed to do it reveals just how radically silly it is to have the government sanction relationships in any way.

🎯 Love Jesus, hate his superfans. Kinda the same way I feel about Beyonce.

🎯 The key to astrology is vagueness. Ya gotta say stuff that sounds specific yet applies to everyone. "You like learning but you don’t like being told what to do." "OMG yes that's ME!"

🎯 Lotta stuff has gone to hell in the past decade but let's stop and appreciate the one thing that's actually gotten better: Porta Potties. They've gotten borderline luxe lately. I see you, Porta Pottie People!

🎯 This is going to sound crazy but I think working hard has become bizarrely underrated. We got so into hacks we forgot about the biggest one of all.

🎯 Your grandparents have photos in a shoebox, but we'll have nothing. Reminder: Just like every hard drive fails eventually, every business goes under eventually. Get a hard copy of anything you want to actually own and keep forever.

🎯 I'm pumped for HBO/Discovery+ merger! Now I can watch "Fixer Upper: Trailer Park," "Magnolia Toilet with Grimes," "Choppin' Broccoli, Family Dinner with the Octomom," "Junkyard Road with David Arquette," and all 5 seasons of the original "Dakotas Chic."

5-spotted

🗯 RIP Lamont Dozier, one of the best songwriters of the past century. Trust me, you know so many songs by him that you didn’t know were by him. Turns out he couldn’t read or write music, saying, “I did it all by ear and feeling when I sat down at the piano.”

“Always put the song ahead of your ego,” he wrote in his memoir. And he revealed the secret to his relentless productivity: “Writer’s block only exists in your mind, and if you let yourself have it, it will cripple your ability to function as a creative person. The answer to so-called writer’s block is doing the work.”

🗯 Integration coach Daniel Shankin: We need to talk about how the world is not designed for trippers. I talk about “vibe control” (i.e. the lighting, music, flow, and feng shui of a space) – a lot and this is why.

Imagine a train car for people on psychedelics. It would be soft and lovely. Good colors and textures. The only problem with this train car is that everyone would want to ride in it. Because it would be the only train care designed for a lovely human experience, and not to move human resources to and from spaces of commerce efficiently. And this reveals the issue with our society, it is simply not designed for humans and their happiness. And this is part of the reason people think psychedelics can fix society, because it makes it impossible to ignore this fact, and inspires us to do something about it. We need to have conversations about this issue, and start designing different systems with different aesthetics.

It's nice to have sacred space, don't get me wrong. Place to do deep and healing work. But it troubles me that we live in a world where these spaces have to be so rare and separate. I don't think that we should only be cloistered away for our journeys, in carefully curated precious spaces. We occasionally need to interact with the world, and see it with special eyes. Imagine a world where we listened to the psychonauts. If they complained about 'the vibes' of a space, we took that seriously and did something about it. If we actually cared about the effects of our architecture on the souls of delicate and open beings. I'd like to live in that world.

🗯 My fave restaurant review site is The Infatuation which features restaurant reviews written for “the rest of us.” Not as high falutin’ as the big boys but way more insight than the crowdsourced nonsense you get from Yelp. I dig the categories they have too featuring playful yet real world scenarios:

🗯 Ross Douthat: We’re Watching the End of the Movies.

Globalization widened the market for Hollywood productions, but the global audience pushed the business toward a simpler style of storytelling that translated more easily across languages and cultures, with less complexity and idiosyncrasy and fewer cultural specifics.

The more things go international, the dumber they get. I remember watching 300 on a bus in Bolivia and thinking, “This film is awful, but I get it: Everyone understands muscular dudes getting sliced up by swords for two hours.”

🗯 Tom Missler suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and he believes laughter is essential. Even while bedridden, he writes to Matt Labash: “I can feel some real joy coming on.”

He now has a tremor when he types, and so the emails come with very little capitalization or punctuation, and with erratic line breaks.  Fussy copy-editing is for those who have much more sand left in their hourglass. Yet Tom writes:

 i try to find the humor in everything. i tell people sometimes i am so sick it is hilarious and it is true.

most of the time it is similar to riding a roller coaster. gonna have good and bad feelings during the day. just wait out the bad ones until 

the good ones come along. maybe you will write a country and western song some day.

I tell Tom that I think he just did.

“It is hilarious and it is true.” Also: It is hilarious because it is true.

Thanks for reading. Stay cool.

-Matt