I defend the NY Times

My podcast Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby is back! Vid version of the newest ep above or on YouTube. In it, I defend one of my least popular takes: The NY Times is actually doing a pretty good job. (Trust me, no one agrees.) Just feels like it’s about time someone defended journalism as an institution – lord knows journalists do a p*ss poor job of that. Discussed this in a previous newsletter too fyi.

Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby Stereoactive Media 38 episodes

You can also listen/subscribe to audio version of the podcast wherever you pod. Thanks to producer Jeremiah McVay for his killer editing skills too. Hire him!

Fauxtations

“Do you guys like impressions?”
-The Impressionists

"I have main character energy."
-Narcissists

“So I did a thing.”
-Serial killers

"Bert people Bert people."
-Ernie

"An edible is inevitable."
-My approach to social anxiety

"When push comes to love."
-Buddhist monk avoiding conflict

"Y'know, you could scape- other animals too."
-Goats

"Don't trust vaccines.”
-Podcasters hawking ++questionable supplements

"No one. The answer is no one."
-Me whenever I hear someone say, "I don’t know who needs to hear this right now"

"JLOL"
-Jennifer Lopez when she finds something funny

"Ooh, cowboy hat with a suit! Now THAT is a look."
-Guy carrying a crossbow while wearing a speedo

"Oh, sorry. I can't donate. See, I prefer doctors WITH borders."
-Guy who opposes every charity

"Oooh, I love the theater!"
-Me in line at TSA

“Are you two in a server farm or independently operating microprocessors?”
-AI comedian doing robot crowdwork

"I asked ChatGPT a question and it hallucinated an answer! Whoops, my bad. That’s wrong. I'm on shrooms, someone asked me a question, and then *I* hallucinated an answer. And that's when I realized: WE ARE ALL CHATGPT."
-ChatGPT when I asked it to impersonate me on shrooms

"Take my life, please."
-Suicidal Henny Youngman

“Look, it’s a sub sub sub!"
-Me watching a gay guy who is a bottom eat a footlong sandwich on a submarine

"You bought one of these things. So now we're just gonna assume you want to see 10,000 ads for more of that thing."
-Social media advertising

"We're too hard on guys in their mom's basements. We blame them for everything bad that happens online. Some of this stuff is probably the fault of men in their mother's attics too, OK?"
-A guy in his sister's kitchen

"Have you noticed how neat nature is? Like, the details? Because I certainly have."
-Every poet ever

Me when sent an invite via Partiful:

Comedy

🃏 Watch BOLO:

🃏 Social with me: Get jokes (and more) on my social media at Instagram – TikTok – Threads – X – Substack Notes – Bluesky.

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🃏 NYC weeklies: 1) GOOD EGGS (Mondays) at 7:30pm at NY Comedy Club (Upper West Side). 2) HOT SOUP (Tuesdays) at 10:30pm at Comedy Cellar. 3) GOOD EGGS (Wednesdays) at 8pm at NY Comedy Club (East Village).

🃏 FUNNY HOW: I have another newsletter all about the craft of doing standup. Check it out. Recently there: 7 tips from Bill Burr on doing "push-pull" comedy.

“If I’m in a conservative place, I’ll go more liberal. And if I’m in a liberal place, I’ll go more conservative. There’s an art to it. I always have to make sure, if one side gets too excited that I’m agreeing with them, that I trash them — or myself.”

Related:

Bill Burr: "If you're going to fail, fail doing what you want."

Matt Ruby · January 24, 2023

Bill Burr is one of best comedians out there so I love devouring interviews with him. Below, some comedy (and life) wisdom from Burr taken from various podcasts and interviews.

Read full story

Quickies

🎯 One thing standup comedy teaches you is how terrible drunk people are at whispering.

🎯 Debt is the ultimate escape room.

🎯 I know a great moat store. Only thing is it’s a real pain to get there.

🎯 People on Facebook claim the entire world can be viewed through a prism of oppressor/oppressed. Yet when it comes time to define their relationship, they’ll tell you “It’s complicated.”

🎯 Social media incentivizes getting things slightly wrong so people go to the comments to correct you/fight about it. The trick is to get it just right enough that it’s believable and just wrong enough so it feels fresh.

🎯 Hard of hearing is a weird phrase. We don’t say a paralyzed guy is hard of walking, y’know?

🎯 I used to love Mr. Magoo and now I look back and realize I was just a child laughing at an elderly man suffering from dementia.

🎯 Shazam-ing a song and finding out who sings it is still the greatest magic trick I've ever seen.

🎯 Between Bobby McFerrin and Michael Winslow, the late 80’s were a magical time for black men who could make weird sounds into a microphone.

🎯 Google is more dangerous than Ket@mine. K-holes last a few minutes, a g-hole can last a lifetime.

🎯 All we speak is violence now. We even need our burgers smashed to smithereens and our salads chopped into shrapnel.

🎯 Him: "Revenge is a dish best served cold." Me: "So it's like an antipasti?"

Working Methods

Working Methods is a newsletter filled with ideas to kickstart your creative efforts. Recently there: Tim Kreider’s advice to resist consensual fictions.

I think it’s a writer’s job—my job, anyway—to try to talk honestly about what people are actually like, and resist the consensual fictions we all tell each other (and ourselves) — everyone acting publicly as though they have their shit together and then going home to be heartbroken, addicted or depressed, binge-eating or -drinking or -watching TV just to try to shut their brains up. People are a mess. We do wrong things. We want what is bad for us.

Working Methods Advice from legendary artists to kickstart your creative process. Curated by Matt Ruby. By Matt Ruby

Thanks for reading. Appreciate ya.

-Matt