In this Solo episode, Peter McGraw welcomes comedian Myq Kaplan, known for his appearances on the Tonight Show, Conan, and America’s Got Talent. They dive into a lively game of Truth or Truth, discussing the lone wolf nature of stand-up comedians, the prevalence of single scientists, and strong solo characters in media. What do you think? Join the Solo community and share your thoughts: https://petermcgraw.org/solo/
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Listen to Episode # 224 here
Truth Or Truth With Myq Kaplan
I recently appeared on my guest podcast, Broccoli & Ice Cream, and we had such a stimulating conversation that I asked him if he would join me for a round of Truth Or Truth. A comedian, he has appeared on Tonight Show, Conan, Letterman, James Corden, Seth Meyers, Comedy Central, Last Comic Standing, and America’s Got Talent. He has a half-hour special on Comedy Central, and a one-hour standup special on Amazon called Small, Dork, and Handsome. The Tonight Show, Kan Letterman, James Corden, Seth Meyers, Comedy Central’s Last Comic Standing, and America’s Got Talent. He has a half-hour special on Comedy Central and a one-hour standup special on Amazon called Small Dork and Handsome I found out he is taping another special. Does that have a name?
It will be called Before We Get Started.
Please welcome, Myq Kaplan.
Thank you so much.
This is like in the comedy club where everybody starts clapping, he comes out and he takes the mic off the stand.
I’ve been holding this mic the whole time, though.
I’ve appeared on a lot of podcasts and have taped over 300 between my two shows. You are the only guest and host who holds his mic for the taping.
It is a combination of I’ve been a standup comedian for many years, and I am accustomed to holding the microphone and I have never looked into acquiring a device that would easily help me not have to do that.
If only someone would invent one of those things and make it readily available to the podcasting public.
It seems like it could be done and yet.
I appreciate it. We met many years ago at the Bridgetown Comedy Festival.
You can tell me if this is incorrect. I remember doing a show at Gotham Comedy Club where there was somebody on stage live drawing, a woman who became a friend of mine named Heather Willem. My memory is that you were also a part of that comedy show event.
You have a stunning memory. The owner of Gotham, Chris Mazzilli, is a Minch. He’s a nice, great guy. I think he’s well-liked and he has a beautiful space in New York City. We were doing something related to the humor code, and that’s when we met. I think we crossed paths at Bridgetown. We have a very close mutual friend in Shane Mauss who’s appeared on the show. I was having a conversation. I was doing an event at Bridgetown and the comedian’s name was Pete Holmes. We were having a debate about humor in science. Pete gave me a note about holding a mic. I never forget this. I’ve told this to many guests of mine who need to hold a mic. He said, “Hold it like an ice cream cone that you don’t care about.”
That’s great. It’s funny. It’s accurate. Pete’s wonderful.
He’s a clever guy. I brought him around that science that the benign violation theory could explain humor.
I was out to dinner with my girlfriend and a good friend of hers. My girlfriend and I have been together for eight years and she is a co-creator of the Hour Of Comedy that I will be taping. It is all about our relationship essentially. She has been around me for the time that we’ve been together, and I’ve been a comedian for that whole time. She has also been a fan of comedy. A question that came up at dinner was when her friend said, “What makes it comedy? How does comedy? How comedy can be?” Whenever people ask questions like that, I frequently bring up the humor code and the benign violation theory.
The audience has figured out why I wanted to continue talking to you. For the new readers, Truth or Truth is a very simple game of sorts. It’s a conversational trick. We each have three questions for each other. We’ve shared two in advance. The third one is a surprise. This is a perfect segue into my question. Round one. Ready?
Ready.
The Lone Wolf
The standup comedian, especially that touring road dog type, a different city every weekend seems especially well suited for the role of lone wolf. There’s a flip side, and that’s the comedian who cannot function on their own. they often have a partner, maybe a parent, girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife or maybe it’s a manager, but it doesn’t have to be a loving, romantic, or familial relationship per se, that takes care of life for them. They make sure they’re fed. They make sure they’re housed. They may be the person making the real money in the relationship and the comedians spending years doing what essentially is a hobby and not yet a profession in the sense that it’s not making them money. Do you agree those two styles of comedians exist where one is very much a solo and one may not be? Are there any other relationship status tropes in the world of comedy?
I agree, without having given it extensive thought. You shared it with me and you expressed it to me. Those seem like very valid descriptions of different ways of being a comedian or a human in general, probably.
Our friend Shane is the lone wolf type. He loves being on the road. He was homeless for many years. Homeless on purpose.
Home free.
He’s currently living out of a Sprinter van.
He is a fantastic example of the first category that you offered. You brought up Pete Holmes and I will bring him up because I think he has spoken to at least a related topic fairly eloquently and elegantly. On his podcast, You Made It Weird, I’m sure this is where I’ve heard him say it when he has other comedians on that let’s say a comedian is in a monogamous or relationship romantic partnership. There is also a relationship between the work with comedy itself so that each relationship has two people in it, a comedian and a non-comedian, let’s say, it is as if polyamorous like a triad of comedian, partner, and comedy, which I think whether you conceive of it like that or not, it makes a lot of sense that if you are in a relationship with someone and they have a job that takes them far and wide away from home, it’s as if I’m sure a traveling salesperson might have had a similar situation.
There are tropes of traveling salespersons that could have multiple families in multiple places because it’s about how you’re spending your time and where you’re spending your time. My girlfriend and I both have a relationship with the comedy that I do and perform and that we create a lot of together. we’ve been together since 2016 and living together since 2017. In 2018, my girlfriend had, her name Rini in August of 2018, I went to the Edinburgh Fringe Fest for the first time. She decided to stop working at the job that she was at, and she came and spent most of the month that I was there with me there.
That is where our creative relationship began, where she would come to all of the shows. She would offer feedback that I was happy to have because she is creative, artistic, thoughtful, brilliant, kind, knows me, loves me, and knows who I am and who I am on stage. If I said something differently one night compared to the next night, she might be like, “Why did you say it this way then and that way now?” She would often have strong artistic, logical opinions that I would be happy to hear about and take into account.
This will tease part of one of the questions I have for you that I haven’t told you about yet. It seems to me that being a human being who has relationships, friendships, various introversions, or extroversion, there is a spectrum of, “How much time do you spend alone? How much time do you spend with one main partner? How much time do you spend with people in general? How much communicating? How much communing? How much time are you spending in relation to other people compared to on your own?” For someone like Shane, the road life suits him very well. Sometimes when he has a partner, maybe they’ll travel with him.
They join him.
That becomes a different beautiful adventure. I read something by a poet named Donald Hall something who was married to another poet. The thing that he wrote was called The Third Thing. He talked about how when you’re in a relationship with someone, you don’t spend all of your time just looking into each other’s eyes. Frequently you are facing the same direction, looking at a third thing. If it was two comedians in a relationship, the third thing might be comedy. For them, it was two poets in a relationship. For them, the third thing is poetry. For some people, it is their children.
Food or something.
A meal, a movie. an experience, a trip on the road, or a lunch with my mother. When it’s the two of us are a team, and then we have a third person experiencing, I’ve probably said it three times now. That’s about the third thing. I’ve talked a lot about how that lone wolf aspect, the version of things where a comedian or someone needs a partner to help. On the one hand, everyone needs other people. Most of us don’t farm our own food. Most of us don’t sew our own clothes. We were social beings. Capitalism is a double-edged sword. There are many critiques of it that are extremely valid. I’m glad that I don’t have to make my own clothes, farm my own food and create my own computer, etc.
Tell jokes for meals directly.
That is all to say, on the one hand, we all need people. We all need something unless you’re living in the woods on your own 100%. You needed parents to create you you need the pack of wolves to raise you, whatever it is. There’s a quote by a Zen master or a Buddhist teacher I like named Shunryu Suzuki. The quote is approximate, he says, “You are all perfect just as you are, and you could use some improvement.” I love it. I think it applies to, “I don’t think that I was missing anything.” I was living a full life. I was being myself before I met Rini now my life has been vastly improved by her presence in it, by our relationship and by our living together.
I’m not as far along the spectrum of needing somebody to do the laundry, cook the food, make the money, or whatever that other person might do, the absent-minded professor who is Mr. Magoo who’s about to walk off a cliff like, “Let’s get you back over here on solid ground.” I feel like I’m capable of being on solid ground myself. Also with her, she helps me fly.
It highlights a whole host of complexities around having this one style of relationship that is in some ways, a common issue within the solo community, either because people don’t want it, or they have trouble doing it. They’ve been there. They’ve done that. I have been banging a drum for people to be like you in the following way, is that you can parent yourself. If your girlfriend disappeared, and unfortunately that’s what happens in life, death, divorce, and disability, you could still function there. You would experience a loss. Your life would be worse off, but your childlike life would not be exposed, which is the case for some people. I make the case that you need to be able to take care of the basics so that a person adds value to your life, rather than being reliant on them for survival.
What you’ve said is true for most people. Rini and I are planning on remaining alive and healthy and functional forever, or if at a certain point, we decide to cease existing because we’ve lived long enough and rich enough and full enough, and we’ve done everything that there is to do. That’s us. For everybody else, it’s very applicable what you’re saying
I appreciate your optimism. I’m an optimistic guy myself.
It hasn’t gone wrong yet.
That’s what Turkey says the day before Thanksgiving.
That’s why we need to pardon all the turkeys.
I have some other thoughts, but I think I can incorporate them if you ask me the scientific question.
Solo In The Academia
Here’s my first question for you. Do you find more solos in the world of scientists than you do in the world of non-scientists? Is there research or any data out there on this topic or anything anecdotal that you would like to share?
You can see why I wanted you to ask this question because it’s connected. There are two worlds. I think there are some parallels. I was unaware of any data. I asked ChatGPT if academics are more likely to be single compared to non-academics. This includes not just hard scientists, but also behavioral scientists, the arts, engineers, and poets who are on college campuses. It said, “I don’t dispute that,” and it fits for a few reasons. 1) There is very clear data that people who pursue higher education tend to postpone marriage and family life. There are going to be people in that world who are not yet married because they’re not, they’re graduate students or postdocs.
They’re focused on their career in this way. Moreover, like comedians, and I don’t want to get into a work-off with comedians, but academics work long hours. They often work holidays. it’s a very demanding high-stress job. They tend to have very poor work-life balance. In a very early episode, I had Bella DePaulo on. She’s a behavioral scientist who’s a giant in the field. She basically invented the term singleism and has done most of the good work myth-busting a lot of the stereotypes about singles. She made a joke, “Academia is the best job in the world. You get to choose whatever, 80 hours a week you want to work.” Now, it is not 80 hours. I’ve put in long hours. I honestly have worked every day for a year at certain points in my career.
I can appreciate what is needed to be successful in this ultra-competitive environment and comedy is very similar. Most people lose, and a few people win. Academics move around a lot. They relocate for grad school, then they relocate for their postdoc, then they relocate for their 2nd and 3rd postdoc, then they relocate for their first job. They often move before they get tenure. they’re often moving to places that are not great for meeting people. There are big universities in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and havens for other intellectuals and singles and on. Ames, Iowa, if you get a job at Iowa State, a lot of these small liberal arts colleges are out in rural America, and so on.
I have a friend who has been in Maine for years, and he’s been largely single for that time. The best dating year of his life was when he was in Chicago for a sabbatical. It’s hard to do. There’s a phenomenon with women’s academics, I think in particular it has to do with the fact that a lot of men don’t like their partner to be more educated. They are there’s a bias in the data.
That sounds parallel to some stereotypes in comedy where some guys are threatened by a funny woman or a powerful woman or a woman who makes more. These are hopefully, trending historically more than into the future, but that certainly has been how a lot of men have been in the past.
In my generation, I have a very good friend, Janet, we’ve known each other since my postdoc, and we frequently travel together. We do these group solo trips. There have been times when it’s me and for female academics in Rome sharing the Airbnb situation and completely platonic. It’s noticeable at that moment because these are wonderful, interesting, successful people who for a variety of reasons find themselves single in their late 40s and 50s. That’s very real I think that there is something you mentioned. I had done an early episode of Solo that I titled Married To Comedy. I talked to Neal Brennan and Alonzo Bodden, who are bachelors and never married. In some ways, the profession, some professions can crowd out a lot and can very much crowd out a traditional relationship, which tends to crowd out a lot.
I think I can do this. It’s going to be a couple of layers. There’s a comedian friend of mine named Steve Hofstetter. He is very funny and successful. One thing that he is successful at, in addition to comedy, is the business side of things. He is creative in the business side of things as well as creative in the creative side of things. I remember he came on my podcast and talked to me about that. Back in the days of MySpace, “Dane Cook got big on MySpace. Maybe we should all try to be big on MySpace. Burnham went viral on YouTube.” Everyone should have a YouTube do that one.
He already did that. Not everyone can follow in the same viral footsteps, whereas now it’s Matt Rife on TikTok, or previously Rob Delaney on Twitter. You can point to examples of people that like, “They were on the Vanguard or the forefront. They did something.” Steve suggested, “Don’t just do what other people are doing. You’re a creative person. Create some other way of being, not just in your act, not in your comedy, but in the way that you market yourself or the way that you produce whatever other things you want to produce or get the word out.”
The thing that you said that sparked this for me is, “Sometimes some careers can crowd out a traditional relationship.” What about a non-traditional relationship? Maybe you’re already living a non-traditional life. Why are you looking for a traditional relationship? I’ve been there. I started doing comedy in about 2002. In the beginning, and this will speak to the scientist life that you’re talking about, is similar to the comedian life, I would say, in as far as how much time and energy and effort and resources you’re putting in if you want to succeed, especially when you’re starting out, when you’re getting your graduate degree in comedy, when you’re working a lot for very little pay or if at all. Seinfeld is like, “At one point the original gold standard I heard once,” is he went eighteen months without missing one night on stage. We all heard that.
I remember Pete Holmes once on his podcast said, “Seinfeld, that’s the way to do it, or maybe what if I want to stay home and watch The Dark Knight one night? Why don’t people do it my way?” I’m like, “I think those are both valuable and valid perspectives to have.” This is all to say for my first six years of comedy, I was doing that. I had some relationships. I was married, but I had some relationships that fell away quickly. I remember dating someone I think in 2007, 5 to 6 years into comedy. I would schedule date nights, but then if a gig came up that was like, “This is ‘important, ’to drive 2 hours to get $100s at an Elks lodge in Western Massachusetts. I’m sorry, our romantic dinner is off,” and thus then eventually our relationship is off because I was more committed to the relationship I had with comedy than I was committed to the relationship I had with my “Relationship” partner.
That set, eventually I learned and realized, that 1) I was like, “I want to have a partner. I want to have a healthy relationship with somebody that I can spend either my life with or the time that I’m with them with.” I started easing off on I was like, “I’ll cancel a date if it’s for an important thing, but otherwise, I started making more room.” Do you know, that thing about, there’s like, you put in the big rocks first, and then you put in the pebbles and then you pour in the sand. I was treating comedy like a big rock, and then my romantic partner like sand.
Now I’m like, “These are both big rocks. These are both important.” The good news is that by doing that, I might have previously thought it would be a sacrifice. I’m, like, “If I’m not spending all of my time doing comedy, getting on stage, writing, performing, editing, whatever it evokes another Pete Holmes is, which is have a life that is worth commenting on live a life that is worth commenting on because if you only write what you know, and you’re only writing and performing.”
No one wants to hear that.
Eventually, with the partner that I have now, I’m like, “My comedy has launched. It has evolved to new levels that if I didn’t have this partner, and if I didn’t make time to spend with her, I wouldn’t be the comedian I am now who I love compared to the more childlike version I was many years ago.”
That’s uplifting. As I like to say, I’m not anti-marriage or I’m not anti-relationship. I think just it’s overprescribed. I do think that there are professions or callings we might call them, that I don’t want people to be in a traditional relationship in a sense. There are certain jobs that are demanding, and some of them are like my brain surgeon but then also the people who are making art and the people who are making science and the people who are making policy. I want them to be married to their policy job, art, and business because what they can do is make the world a better place. I don’t want to tell them what to do, but I want to be able to release them from what is societally expected of them in order to do that.
I think that you and I are both fans of Dan Savage. I know you’ve been on his podcast, perhaps had him on yours. I’ve listened to his podcast since it started and read his column as long as I’ve known about it. I feel like he talks about like polyamory and monogamy. Monogamy is for many people in our society, the default setting. I’m in a monogamous relationship now that I want to be in, in part because I have considered the alternative I want to be with the person that I’m with now, not because I want a traditional relationship between one man and one woman. Lenny Bruce once said, “I’m not a comedian, I’m Lenny Bruce.”
I’m saying I’m not in just a “monogamous” relationship. We are Mike and Reini. We are like by happenstance, monogamous because that is what we choose. We choose it because we think of it as a choice. The thing that you’re offering as well for these academics, for these policymakers, for these people who can change the world, it’s important not just to default to the factory setting. That’s why I think on Dan’s show, he talks about, I think that people who realize, who learn or discover that they are queer, for example, trans or something that is not the societally prescribed heteronormative setting, you have to, if you’re like, “I don’t match that.” It’s important to consider what’s going on on the inside in addition to maybe probably more than what’s going on on the outside, which indeed brings me to my mystery question. I don’t know if it’s important to go in order.
It is. Here’s the problem, my question is also perfect for next to.
Let me say one more thing then about this topic before we get to your perfect question. I learned recently about what the meaning of the word gnostic is as compared to agnostic. There are these gnostic Christian writers and such, and gnostic thinkers. My understanding of it is there are some religious authorities that say, “This is what you are to believe. It comes from outside of you. We tell you and you follow it.” Perhaps that is not the most generous way, but there is some external authority. Whereas gnostics are basically saying, and Buddhism is gnostic in this way. The Buddha says specifically, “Don’t just do what I say because I’m saying it. Try it for yourself and see if it works do what works for you because you are an expert in your own experience. You are the only one who knows what is true of your own internal experience. Don’t just do a nice thing for someone.”
My friend Brett said this thing, “I find that when I help somebody else, and when I help myself, I feel equally as good, but when I help somebody else, the satisfaction lasts longer.” I sent that to a friend. He wrote back. There’s research that has been done by this professor at Yale that says like, “That is true from the outside, but try it for yourself. See if it’s true from the inside so whether it be your religious practice, your spiritual practice, your relationship model, or your career, whatever it might be, don’t just do what other people say is the right good thing to do, or what society says.
This is a theme of the movement in general, which is don’t default. Choose it. If you choose a traditional relationship, I think that’s great. I want people to question and say, “Is this the best style of relationship for me?”
One other quick analogy. Feminists in the last century made it so that women could work at all outside the house, make money, have self-determination, and have choices. Now there are some women who might use that choice power to stay at home and be a mother and raise children. If that is her choice, then it is not incongruous with the feminist movement as long as you’re choosing it.
One last tag to finish answering your question. There is another phenomenon in academia that I see, and it is gendered. It is a male academic with a traditional stay-at-home wife. The breadwinner and then the person at home taking care of the household and the kids. That allows typically him, it’s not always, to be a workaholic. It allows him to be committed to the craft and to be successful in this very ful thing. It can be advantageous to not have to clean your house, cook your meals, or take care of things, and you could spend all your hours in the lab or wherever that work is being done. It’s a tale of two academics. the ones who struggle the most are the ones who are having a modern-day relationship where tasks are meant to be split equally or more equally. Occasionally, this happens when you have two academics together. In some ways that pairing works because at least they understand each other.
It’s the same in comedy in a weird way, perhaps comedy is more progressive than academia by virtue of the way that the patriarchy also infuses it. Whereas I know there is a trope, or there certainly are many examples of male comedians who, have female partners who do provide health insurance. They can have fun in the comedy lab because they know that if they get injured, they’re like, “Thank goodness, my wife’s a doctor, or else what would I be doing?”
Happily Not Single
Let’s go to round two this is a perfect segue from you speaking wonderfully about your partnership. You are very happily not single. You’re as happy being not single as I’ve ever seen and you’re happier now than when you were single. Yet you seem quite drawn to the Solo movement. There’s something I think that resonates with it to you, and I’m curious what that is.
In my comedy, I am in life a straight White, cisgender able-bodied American male and many privileged categories. Within that, I have many views that are more marginal. I do not want children, for example. At times, I have explored open relationships and have talked about it in my comedy, podcasts and such. I have been atheist identified. I have been an advocate of psychedelics, which are all things that aren’t the weirdest fringe things now. I am vegan. I am a member of many, not marginalized communities, but communities of people that have fringe beliefs and practices. Because of who I am, how I live and how I want to live, I’m not gay, but I feel a similar affinity for the queer community. I love it when people are being themselves, living their truest best lives, which I believe often involve self-reflection and choice.
Comparison of what it feels like inside to what other people. My friend Gus, who is a therapist and a practicing Buddhist, introduced me to the concept that when we look at other people, we see airplanes when we look at our own from the inside, we see the cockpit. We only see our cockpit. I see. Everyone else is an airplane. It’s been said wisely, “Don’t compare your insides to somebody else’s outsides.
This has a term to be put on my professor hat, it’s called the fundamental attribution error. When you behave in a certain way, you see all the influences on why you behave that way then when someone behaves the way they’re like, “That’s because he’s a bad person.”
Somebody cut me off in traffic, they are jerks. I got somebody else, I have reasons. I have a very important thing to get to.
It’s important. What we see are the influences on our behavior differently because we have the insights into what’s influencing us and we don’t have the insights into what’s influencing someone else.
I read a quote, the inelegant way of saying it is like, “If we knew what was in anyone’s heart, our hearts would break for all of the causality. There are reasons why everyone does anything.” It goes back to them at least as far as them being a baby who didn’t choose to have the nature and nurture combination that they started this life out with. This ties into the gnostic situation that we were discussing earlier as well that I like seeing other people live well. That’s one aspect of my affinity for the Solo community.
I want to say amen to that. I resonate a lot with your perspective as also a straight White man, able-bodied educated in America, et cetera, recognizing those privileges and how powerful they can be. I have an essay that I’ve been fussing with. If I ever get enough bandwidth, I’ll write it. It’s a project idea that is on the back burner that I call semi-freak. The idea is that we’re all a little bit freaky in some way, shape, or form. We all feel like misfits in some ways, whether it be that we go to bed at 8:00 PM or 4:00 AM. You have this particular kink, your diet or what you do for fun, your hobby or whatever it is.
If you take a picture of them and they look completely traditional, there’s something non-traditional about them that they look completely conventional. There’s something unconventional about them. I think that you have a choice in life. You were talking about some marginalized groups who some have a choice, some don’t have a choice, that you can embrace your freakiness and accept it and enjoy it, or you can hide it or feel guilty about it or try to fit in. I feel very much the same way you articulated it much better than I could have about I have this shell, and part because of the solo project, have become even more open-minded about the vast array of proclivities abilities, interests, desires that we as humans walk around with often feeling terrible, weird, gross off kilter. I want to create a world where we celebrate.
Encourage people to love because everyone is truly unique. There are things about each of us that are the same as everyone. We’re all made a carbon if we’re human but there are things about each of us that is different than every single or even identical twins don’t have the exact same environment. One of them was born slightly second earlier. The shell thing reminds me of a thing Dan Savage said about the three-layer cake of identity or of a person’s experience. Regarding sexual orientation, he said, “Inside, there’s the people that you are attracted to. On the next level, there’s the people that you do things with, and how you act on that attraction. On the final level, the top level is how you identify.”
The more in alignment all three of those are then the happier a person you’ll be. If you’re gay, but you don’t act on it, maybe you’ll be less fulfilled than if you did, or if you’re gay and you act on it, but then you aren’t out of the closet, perhaps you’ll be less fulfilled. I’m not telling anyone how to live their lives or what to do, but this is a theory that Dan Savage, a gay man has put forth that makes a lot of sense to me. It operates again in every category. I think that your point, you are now a member of a community that is at least semi-freaky.
Solo community is not the norm. It is not the default. There are discriminatory practices in place like in the form of tax codes that benefit married couples, for example. No one is free until everyone is free. There’s Dick Gregory was a comedian, certainly in the racial equality movement, but also he was vegan and saw animal liberation connected to the liberation of the human animal. No one deserves to be harmed.
If the readers stuck with us this long, they recognized why I wanted to talk to you. You had a follow-up to why the Solo movement resonates.
A perfect idea is a nice dichotomy. One is the outside, whether I am a member of the community or not, I am a fan of people self-actualizing on all the levels possible. On the internal experience, I was telling my girlfriend that I was coming on the show and what we were going to discuss. I have not yet fully read Solo. I have not listened to all of the podcasts. I am not as versed in it as you are, the author and host. I said to her that you were going to ask me about my resonance with the concept. She’s like, “You seem in some ways the opposite of a solo.” In that, I am a person who communicates with people all of the time and at any given moment any day.
There are some people that I talk to every day, on a weekly basis, or on a monthly basis. I don’t think that this does not fly in the face of the solo lifestyle, but that I am a person who is connected to many and aligns with so much in addition to being in a monogamous lifelong relationship that I value deeply. I think everything will perfectly lead to my next question for you, my secret question. I do what I want. I live my life the way that I want for the most part.
There’s a joke I used to tell in Buddhism. They say, “Everything in life is either something that you can control or something that you can’t control.” That seems to be logical. You either can or can’t control something, whether you have free will or not, either you can or you can’t. They say, “If you can’t control something, don’t worry about it because you can’t control it. What will worrying do? If you can control something, then don’t worry about it because you can control it. What good will worrying do?”
There is that. The place that I want to get to with this, it maybe I’ve forgotten it if then I was faded to forget it and I can’t control it. The point is I do what I want. I live my life the way that I like living my life. There is another joke I tell about, I say, “I wear the pants in my relationship. Rini wears the pants. She wears pants if she wants to. She wears a dress, if she wants to a jumpsuit. She’s got a lot more options. We met her in a prison of her own creation. In fact, I point out that the pants I’m wearing on stage are usually pants that she helped me pick out. Rini wears the pants of what pants I wear in our relationship, but not in a prescriptive way that she says I have to do it.”
The Four Tendencies
I don’t care that much about fashion or style. I trust her judgment. I know she wants what’s best for me. She has strong, beautiful opinions that I’m happy to take on as my own when I have nothing to fill them with. Whereas sometimes audiences or other people might be like, “You shouldn’t let her tell you what to do.” I’m like, “I’m definitely not going to let you tell me what to do. I tell me what to do sometimes the thing that I tell me what to do is listen to Rini because she has nice things to tell me as far as what I can do.” I often choose a thing that a valuable source that I respect tells me what to do. That brings me to my next question for you, which will be multi-part. The first part is, do you know the book The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin?
I know Gretchen’s work, but I have not read it. I’ve had Gretchen on the show.
She’s written numerous books, The Happiness Project and The Life In Five Senses. We can launch from this overview even better for the reader, including you.
This is your surprise question.
The way that The Four Tendencies, what the book is about? It is about, you can take a test in ten minutes or less to find out what your tendency is. The tendency is based on whether you are motivated more internally, externally, both, or neither. For example, and she gives them each a name. The internal motivator is called the questioner. The external motivator is called the obliger. The one who does both internal and external is called the upholder. The one that does neither is called the rebel. We’ll start with the two simple ones. The obliger is the one who tends to follow external motivations, which is by her research, the largest group that, I don’t know if it’s a majority, but more than any other of the tendencies identify as, or when they take the test, they are obligers following external motivation.
A classic obliger conundrum could be like she offers in the book a person’s like, “I had no problem showing up at 6:00 AM for the track team every day of high school, but now I can’t make myself work out. What’s going on?” It’s because of the external accountability, she’s not going to let the team down. The idea is that if you know what your tendency is, you can figure out life hacks to be like, “if you want to exercise, get yourself somebody else as an accountability partner. If you’re both obligers, neither of you will let the other one down the way you would let yourself down. You’ll both show up for the workout session.”
She says that none of them is better to be than any of the others, though it does seem like, I’ll tell you the rebel, the one who cannot motivate externally or internally like her catchphrase for them is, “You can’t make me and neither can I.” Here is an example of a way that a rebel can make their rebelliousness work for them because they still want to live a happy life. They still want to feel good, but they sometimes get in their own way in ways that others don’t.
If a rebel wants to have a healthier diet, but then they’re like, “Screw you, I’m eating candy,” they can then be like, “When I eat candy, big candy wins. That’s right. Big soda.” I’m going to say, “Screw you,” to somebody. I’m going to say, “Screw you, big candy. I’m eating a salad.” It’s about framing it for them. I am a questioner. The questioner is somebody who not, doesn’t care about external things like, “I drive the speed limit or maybe 5 miles over it because the external rule of this is the way that you should drive. I don’t just do it because, but I do it because I have thought about it. It’s safe for me and others, and less costly than getting tickets to drive closer to the speed limit.”
Questioners will take external motivators and make them internal or go by internal ones and both is both. That is the framework. My question to you would be, without having taken the test and with only having learned about the framework, do you think that one tendency more than another, do you think that internal motivators are more likely to identify as solos or would there be solos across the board and maybe some of them, if they’re obligers, end up in marriages that they defaulted into?
Relatedly, do you think of soloists as a spectrum? Do you think that in all the combinations between solo and single, like for example, you can be solo and single, you can be solo and partnered? You can be single and not solo. You can be not single and not solo. Are any of those like the healthiest ones that you recommend or could you be anything as long as whatever you’re coming to is reasoned and thought out? I feel like by asking that question, I’m answering it myself. Are there any thoughts that you have on any of this?
I’m trying to figure out which of these four tendencies I am. I was both an upholder for much of my life and struggled with the conflict that that creates. I talk about me being Pete, the good little boy through much of my life and now, transforming myself into Peter, who very much gives fewer what’s transitioning into being more of a questioner, in general. Although I always had that in me, but I was always like, doing what I needed to do in order to survive, get along, and so on. It was quite good at it.
These are tendencies, meaning that if you’re one, it doesn’t mean that you might flip. There’s a thing called obliger rebellion. I feel like an example in the book was given like that Andre Agassi was an example of somebody who got into tennis because of his father. He obliged the external motivation, but at various points would rebel against it, build in some way, or cut his hair, or throw a tantrum or whatever. When an obliger gets pushed, everyone has something that they feel is true to them. The obligers who are gay people who live in the closet for much of their life might come to a point where they’re like, “I got to get out of here,” even if that’s their tendency.
I do have a bias here, which is I do believe that soloness in general, not for everyone, is helpful whether you’re in or out of a relationship. Let’s do a brief recap. Frequent readers will know this, but this may feel new to you. I like to say that solos have three characteristics. The first one is they are wholehearted. They see themselves as a complete person, not as half of a whole. The second one is that they embrace autonomy, and self-reliance and that they seek to be a good parent to themselves. That allows them to make choices now they’re not completely dependent on someone else for survival. That allows you to then be more interdependent in your relationships rather than codependent, for example. The last characteristic is most relevant to your surprise question, which is that solos tend to question the norms of relationships.
By extension, they tend to start to question the norms more generally to recognize how many of these rules, these social rules are made up or arbitrary and are often designed for the benefit of society rather than the benefit of the individual. What that allows them to do is to perhaps choose those rules and feel comfortable and not feel boxed in by those rules, or allows them to bend or break those rules. That feels like very much of a questioner orientation, in general. I think that you strike me as a solo in that way because even though you have found yourself in a fairly traditional model, you did not happen into it. You chose it and you realize this is what’s working well for me. What I want people to do is to choose the life that they want to live. To me, what a remarkable life is living the life you want to be living. You have to decide that it’s going to work for you at this point in time, at least.
Consider it. I’ll offer these two additional frameworks, or maybe not the word framework, but whatever is. I’ll offer two additional things. I might forget one of them. One of them is from Brené Brown, who I’m sure you’re familiar with. She talks about the comparison between fitting in and belonging. Growing up, you might want to fit in with your class because if you stand out, then you get picked on. As an adult, a comedian, as an artist, as an interesting human living, a remarkable life, the things that make you different are interesting and cool. If you own them and acknowledge them, then you find the people with whom you belong. Fitting in is trying to shape yourself like others belonging is finding the place where your exact shape fits in or belongs.
Let’s get to your surprise question. We’ll save the last one, which is a fun one for the end. I met you many years ago. I’ve always been fascinated with your brain. It was especially on display when we talked on your podcast and it’s been on display now. You’re incredibly well-read. You read very deeply and very broadly. You’re not just aware of diverse topics, but you’re also able to recall them even recalling direct quotes quickly, when did you realize you had this skill and have you done anything in particular to develop it?
Thank you. That’s a very generous question. I appreciate it.
It is your thing.
I won’t dispute it.
It’s your superpower, in my eyes at least.
I think that sounds fair. I’m pausing only because 1) Great question. When I say great question, I usually mean I don’t immediately know the answer. I do have to take a moment to let my wonderful brain process and consider.
If you don’t do well with this question, maybe I was wrong,
Here’s the thing is because my brain is the only brain that I’ve ever had in this incarnation. It’s like the thing I forget. I learned who this was and this is hilarious. I’m like, “You always remember. You’re good at remembering.” Somebody said a thing about asking a fish, “How’s the water?” The fish is like, “What’s water?” It could be David Foster Wallace. He has another thing about fish.
That’s him.
I have been swimming in the water of my experience forever, for as long as I have known me. I think that getting into comedy has been a beautiful experience. I’ve been doing comedy for many years. I had experience very early on, in the early ‘2000, when I was in a Master’s program getting a degree in Linguistics. It was a silly joke. You don’t need a master’s degree to understand my joke. The joke was basically that I was not getting a Doctorate. The reason I’m not getting a Doctorate for real is I’m like, “That’s a lot, and I want to do comedy,” but at the time, I loved Linguistics.
I finished. I got a minor and an undergrad. I majored in Philosophy and Psychology. I was like, “I don’t know what my adult life is going to be, but I want to keep learning about Linguistics.” I applied and went to BU to get a Master’s in Linguistics. The joke is being a master sounds better than being a doctor. He-Man doesn’t hang out with the doctors of the universe, or a bunch of things like that. I remember I told that joke on a show once, and an older comedian pulled me aside. We were at some suburban room, hour outside of Boston, not an all-college kids crowd, which was probably where I had been honing most of my jokes. This comedian gave me the note, “Just so you know probably most of the people here, like many of them won’t have Master’s degrees. Wen you say offhand, nonchalantly, “I’m in this Master’s program,” that might not be relatable or resonant. Maybe it will turn people off or make them see you as elitist or whatever it could be.”
I forget exactly how he said it, but it was something that I’d never considered because I was like, “This is my experience and I’m sharing my experience.” That was one of the first times, then all comedy audiences have been helpful to me as a comedian, You tell an audience something that you think, something that you feel or something that is meaningful or that you think is funny then frequently they’ll be like, “We disagree.” I’m like, “How?” I feel like having my comedy and my thoughts forged in the fire of this opposition has been helpful for me to figure out who I am and specifically to the point that you’re talking about, it’s been happening all along.
I don’t know if there is one point at which I was like, “I like reading things. I’m good at remembering things.” It goes back to childhood. I was very good in school when the task was to memorize this thing. I have a good memory for facts or for quotes. I do work on it some. When I meet people, I do my best. I meet a lot of people. I have a good memory and have had a few experiences in life where I’ve met somebody again four times, and they have gotten mad at me for not remembering their name, which I understand. If people don’t remember my name, I understand because we’ve all been in situations where we don’t remember something. For that particular situation, I read something. Funny, I don’t remember where I read it, but it was like, “Here are the two pieces of advice if you want to get better at remembering names.”
One of them is just to use it. If I met you and you’re like, “Hi, I’m Peter.” I’m like, “Hi, Peter. It’s good to meet you.” Keep doing that, say your name over and over again, and that you won’t be friends with a person, but you’ll never forget. The other thing is to ask them a question about it, which I do in my comedy sometimes like if I meet somebody in the audience, if I ask a question, I’ll ask them their name. If they’re like, “My name is Carolyn,” I’ll say, “Is it with a Y or an I?” I’m curious because I studied Linguistics. I have an interest in words and language, and also an added benefit that asking them a question about their name later when I’m like, “What was their name? What was the question I asked? An I or a Y.”
There’s probably a scientific term for what’s happening, but it’s like reviewing it over and over. It’s like reading your lines again. It’s not just like, “Carolyn,” in one ear, out the other, it’s Carolyn, “What is it? How do you spell Carolyn? Great. Now, I’ve said it a few times. I’ve asked a question about it. I’ve engaged with it.” In the saying of that, I have determined more of the answer to the larger question you’re asking. How do I do it? When I see a quote that I like sometimes, like the quote I read to you from my friend Brett, he sent that to me in an email, and I texted it to a lot of friends.
I’m cutting and pasting. I’m not typing it out every time, but I’m like, “My friend Brett said this cool thing.” I’m looking at it over and over, and then people are responding to it and engaging with it. I feel like repetition, like getting the reps in. I don’t know how anyone else remembers anything, but it’s how I remember things. With the internet, everything is at our fingertips. We still don’t know everything, but we have access at this time to more of everything than anyone has ever had access to. I feel like it’s a gift. I like to acknowledge that. I mean, I’m doing it for me. This was a cool thing, and I’m telling my friend, “Listen to this cool thing.” By virtue of joy for myself and sharing joy with others, I think that is how the mechanism replicates itself.
In hearing you talk about this, I wrote down, “Learn and share.” I think what happens is you have a predisposition to this genetically or there’s something about your childhood that was intellectually rich and resonated with you, and you had this skill and you started to hone it. You were rewarded for it. Hence all the degrees and being a Master of the universe, you take great pleasure in learning, observing, and working things through in your mind, but you also take great pleasure in sharing. That creates this flywheel where you learn, you share, and you remember more. You decided to be a comedian. What is it the comedians do? They observe and share with the desire to entertain and perhaps even educate.
I’m glad you said that because everything that you said leads me to say my upbringing was about learning in part because my parents were both Music teachers, but also because there were many books in my home. At a certain point, I would say that I had more books than friends. Reading is something that I did extensively growing up. It became you know, the bloomers study that they tell a teacher or a bunch of teachers like, “This half of your class are bloomers. This half are not.” At the end of the year, they’re right. At the beginning, it was random.
I was the recipient of that in that I was an only child and only grandchild. My family was like, “You are the best. You are the smartest. You can do anything.” It’s self-fulfilled as a prophecy. I the past many years, knowing Rini, she brought reading back into my life in as much quantity as I’m doing it now. As a kid, I read a ton. As an adult, I read some, maybe more than most, but certainly not as much as many. By surrounding myself also with like-minded and like-hearted, people who care about the world, art, literature, learning, sharing, joy, and love, it’s a positive feedback loop. I will say, “I’ve never heard of a flywheel. What’s that? I’d like to learn?”
It’s a metaphor. It has to do with once a wheel or a fan gets moving, it’s easier to stay in motion. To get it to start to turn takes a lot of energy, but once it’s moving, it doesn’t take that much energy to keep it moving.
I guess you might say a flywheel is a mechanical device that uses the conservation of angular momentum to store rotational energy, a form of kinetic energy proportional to the product of its moment of inertia and the square of its rotational speed, a flywheel
Your discussion of books is a perfect segue into our final question.
Solo In The Media
My final question to you is, even though much of our culture is built for pairings over solos, have you seen any specific media you recommend historically or currently that features strong solo characters or stories, any books, movies, TV shows, et cetera, or any art?
This is something I’ve thought a lot about and I pay attention to because I do consume media. I’m much more, as my readers know, more interested in creating than in consuming. To be a good creator, you need to consume. I talk about, “Writing is exercise, reading is nutrition,” is the metaphor that I use for this. To be a great artist, you need to consume art. I do believe that “You can’t be consuming more art than you’re creating,” is my approach. I’ve also been thinking a lot about advocacy. I’m a member of the solo movement. This is only going to grow if lots and lots of people get involved in it, seeing the growth of it. I’m seeing other podcasts pop up, for example, other books, voices, and so on.
I think there are three levels to advocacy. The first level, you almost think about it like a pyramid, the base, which is the people who consume this knowledge, these messages, and then act on it in their own lives and become a better person, begin living a remarkable life, living their most authentic life in the ways that we talked about earlier, letting their semi-freak flag fly, so to speak. As a result of that, they make the world better because they become an example for others, “If Mike can do it, maybe I can do it.” Members of the community oftentimes talk about how they had that solo aunt or uncle who had a big effect on them, who showed by virtue, not through anything they ever said, but the way they lived their life that there was this other life that might’ve been a better fit.
The second level of the pyramid is then the people who start to speak up. They share a message. They tell a friend, “There’s this podcast. Lucy Meggeson got this Spinsterhood Reimagined podcast. I think you’ll resonate with this. It’s about being a happy child-free woman,” for example. That’s the classic of, “I tell two friends who tell two friends.” That has the potential for a compounding effect, like an ex-exponential effect. At the top is more of a broadcast model, and it’s a media model. It’s the podcaster. It[‘s Lucy Meggeson who launched Spinsterhood Reimagined, the person who writes a book, or the person who makes a television show or a movie that features a strong solo character. They exist, but they’re too often lacking in a world that defaults to having partnered characters.
I wrote an article about advertising and that so many ads feature families. That happens in part because you tend to think about the family unit and the buying power of a family, but it’s easier to create a commercial where there are two or more people, even though most people drive around in their car alone when you see a car commercial, it’s always filled with happy people like kids in the backseat. What ends up happening is that you don’t end up representing half the population. Half of American adults are unmarried.
I’ve been very focused on the business side of things, the commerce side of things, and trying to jump up and down and wave my hands and scream and yell at these companies to say, “There’s this untapped market who’s being ignored, who have different needs, aren’t being represented in their marketing communications, in their services,” and so on. The case study for this is the LGBTQ+ community, a sizable community that was ignored for years.
What has happened, at least in the United States and in a lot of, the Western world and even now, even the Eastern world, and call it a pro or con of capitalism, is that businesses create culture. They shape culture. I have thrown myself into that. That’s my big advocacy step next. Now suddenly, this big diverse group, LGBTQ+ is much more identifiable. Their needs are being better met because there’s money to be made. The businesses benefit and then they benefit. I believe the same is true for solos.
I am personally largely ignoring policy and government. Other people are doing that. There are members of the community who are working on a single spill of rights. People do advocacy work. They write their senator or Congress where they try to attack those laws that benefit couples and ignore singles. There’s business, government, and then the last one is the media, Hollywood, et cetera. They shape culture faster probably than anyone else. You think about like Will & Grace, for example.
I was literally thinking about that when you said that there’s not great, there’s sometimes lacking of examples in the solo community, I was reminded. Speaking about Will & Grace, there’s the Gandhi quote, “First, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” I think first you’re not represented at all, then you’re represented as a caricature, and then you’re eventually represented more widely and in a nuanced way because like when Will & Grace came out, it was one of the only shows that had openly gay characters at all look at things now. Where we’re at now with Solos is where we were with the LGBTQ community many years ago, it seems like.
I hope so. I think it’ll happen fast when it starts to happen. in my book, I write about a television show, called That Girl about a woman who moves to, New York City. Her name’s Ann Marie. She was played by Marlo Thomas, and it broke a lot of molds. She wasn’t looking for a husband. She came to like be an actress, and then she had to get a job as a secretary. She was living this very vivacious life, then you had Mary Tyler Moore. More recently, Murphy Brown. There’s been this evolution in television of strong female characters who are not living a traditional life. They’re not June Cleaver.
There are these models out there that are not proportional to the number in real life. There are these weird gymnastics that happen in the media at times. The number of widowed men in movies is shocking to me. There are very few young widowed men, or middle-aged widowed men because women outlived men by a large degree like Sam Baldwin in Sleepless in Seattle, Michael Sullivan and Road To Perdition, Daniel in Love Actually and Benjamin Mee in We Bought A Zoo. It goes on and on. The number of women dropping dead in movies to allow a man to be the central character without a wife is outrageous to me. There are other characters whose relationship status is either doesn’t matter. I have this feeling that Quentin Tarantino writes a lot of characters where you have no idea whether they’re married or single or whatever. He ignores this a lot.
That’s an inter-intermediate step. Like their relationship status is irrelevant, but then they have like Sherlock Holmes is of classic bachelor. In the more recent BBC versions of it, people wonder, “Is he gay? What’s going on with him?” John Watson is called The Bachelor. He’s a bit of a ladies’ man. They’re a married couple in a sense there. I’m going to have a thread on the Solo community. If people want to join, they can go to PeterMcgraw.org/Solo, where we can dive more deeply into this. I’ve been working on an article about good solo-led movies. I’ll finish my editorializing with, and make a case for a movie that I think people should watch if they haven’t watched it. It’s a classic. It’s a low-key solo movie, and it’s called Casablanca. Have you heard of it?
It sounds familiar. It means it means the White House.
It’s a classic film, 1942, starring Humphrey Bogart. He plays Rick Blaine, the owner of Rick’s in Morocco, in Casablanca. Ingrid Bergman is in there. She plays Isla and then Paul Henreid, who played Victor Laszlo. The story is a love triangle set in World War II. It’s a romantic drama of sorts. I’m going to ruin it. Spoiler alert, turn this off if you want to be surprised if you don’t know Casablanca’s story. Isla and, Rick had an affair in Paris, then she left him and disappeared on him, and broke his heart. He goes off flees to Morocco, flees to Germany. She is married to Victor Laslow, who is a war hero, who escaped The Nazis escaped from a concentration. He is leading the resistance. Rick is this aloof character but is a much deeper character as observed by other people.
He’s really a rebel. He tends to side with the underdogs. He has a critical choice in the movie where he could get Isla back because she would do anything in order to let Victor be free and escape the Nazis. Rick makes the choice to stay in Casablanca and to send the love of his life. This man who he greatly admires, who’s critical to defeating the Nazis to go to America. There are two passes to get on the plane to Lisbon and then off to America. The movie ends with a famous quote. Do you know the famous quote?
“Play it, Sam. Play it again.”
That’s that earlier. That’s earlier in the movie. There’s another character. There’s the police chief who’s a French guy, Luis Reno, who ends up getting drawn into this drama, so to speak.
Is it, “We’ll always have Chinatown.”
You’re getting your movies mixed up here.
One more guess, “Frankly, Peter, I don’t give a damn.”
You’re good with your classic films. He says, “Luis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” What I love about this movie, and I’m getting a little emotional talking about it, it’s a movie that violates the rules of a rom-com where boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, rather boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy helps save the world and makes a friend in the process. Rick is a strong solo character, an anti-hero, which I love my anti-heroes. I think of myself as an anti-hero, as a deeply flawed person who’s trying to do his best.
I’m dipping my toe in this world. I have a couple of secret projects that are media-related. You live in this world. I’m sure you have pitched TV shows. I’m sure you’ve written scripts. You know how nearly impossible it is to get anything made in Hollywood. I’m keeping these projects close to my vest, but I hope that I can create a piece of art with strong solo or solo characters to help move along this cultural revolution. That’s going to happen eventually hopefully it’ll happen in my lifetime so I can witness it.
That’s beautiful. I love it. I appreciate your sharing the statistic that it seems like why isn’t business getting on top of this half of the market that they’re missing. You don’t have to hire as many actors, just one person in the car. A couple of friends maybe, you don’t need a whole bunch of kids.
Those kids actors are probably a pain in the ass because you had to deal with their parents. I knew we would go long. Thank you for making that a reality. I’ve always enjoyed talking to you. I hope our paths cross again soon.
The same. It was an absolute delight and an honor. Thank you for having me. Thanks everyone for reading. I appreciate it.
Cheers.
Important Links
- Broccoli & Ice Cream
- Bella DePaulo – Past Episode
- Married To Comedy – Past Episode
- Solo
- The Four Tendencies
- Gretchen Rubin – Past Episode
- The Happiness Project
- The Life In Five Senses
- Peter Mcgraw – Solo
- Myq Kaplan
- Myq Kaplan – Instagram
- Myq Kaplan – YouTube
- Broccoli and Ice Cream – Peter McGraw
- Savage – Lovecast – Peter-Mcgraw
About Myq Kaplan
Myq Kaplan has appeared on the Tonight Show, Conan, Letterman, James Corden, Seth Meyers, Comedy Central, Last Comic Standing, and America’s Got Talent. He has a half-hour special on Comedy Central, a one-hour standup special on Amazon called “Small, Dork, and Handsome,” and a new Dry Bar special called “Live From The Universe,” as well as two podcasts, “The Faucet” and “Broccoli and Ice Cream,” and a book of his jokes illustrated by Ramin Nazer called “Heart Brain Art Train.” His debut album, “Vegan Mind Meld,” was one of iTunes’ top 10 comedy albums of the year, and his newest album, “A.K.A.,” debuted at 1 and was called “invigoratingly funny” by the NY Times! Thanks for reading this!