One of the most recognizable sounds on the Internet these days is Caleb Hearon’s laugh. Boisterous, plentiful, pure: the comedian laughs heartily with guests on his podcast, So True; with his audience throughout his debut HBO comedy special, last year’s Model Comedian; and most regularly, at himself. It’s so distinct a sound that, when I conducted an at-home Zoom interview with Hearon for this column, my roommates took the opportunity to point out how its recognizable, melodic quality had seeped through all the walls.
The Missouri native, 31, came up by way of Chicago’s comedy scene and, as is now the standard, a few well-timed social posts. These days, you’re most likely to recognize the sound I speak of from So True, which he launched in 2022. It’s a TikTok clip generating machine that brings audiences face-to-face with Hearon’s seemingly endless trove of hilarious personal anecdotes and total lack of self-seriousness. (Among the hits are Hearon responding to an online troll, “I’ll kill you to death with a gun,” as well as a piss-your-pants inducing story about trying to leech popularity off a boy in school. “Cooper, why do you smell like ballsack, sleep pants kid?”)
For the last five or so years, he’s also been circling a transition into film and TV, starting with a writing job on a Big Mouth spinoff and bit parts in series like Mr. & Mrs. Smith. It’s all paying off this year, as Hearon takes on more high-profile parts in projects like the much-anticipated Devil Wears Prada 2 and now-viral, Gaten Matarazzo-led Pizza Movie. Ahead of the release of the former on May 1, we sat down with the comedian for a look at what life is like when the screens are all shut down, be they silver or pocket-sized. It turns out, his irreverent point of view is fed by a steady diet of pretty heavy duty reading.
Caleb, where do I find you?
I’m at my apartment. I just cooked a pretty perfect steak, so I’m not gonna brag.
Oh, amazing, and at 1 p.m. That’s a real accomplishment.
I know, in the middle of the day, can you believe it?
I’m excited to talk to you about your reading habits, especially because you are a digital native. I don’t know if you feel like everyone around you is reading or if that’s kind of a lost art amongst Internet comedian circles.
It’s funny because the comedians that I know that have big followings on the Internet, most of them started in the real world, on stage or at theaters. Most of them are way more cultured than they get credit for. They’re reading a lot of books, they’re going to the theater, they’re really out there doing stuff.
But also, in the last two years, I’ve had a lot of friends that are like, “I haven’t read a book since I was in high school,” that have started to be like, “I’m reading again.” I think it’s part of the larger disillusionment with the Internet and digital stuff. I know so many readers that I wonder if I’m reading enough. Micah, the woman who works at the bookstore that I go into a lot, who I adore, at Greenlight in Brooklyn, she’s trying to push me more into fiction all the time cause I’m such a nonfiction guy.
I have heard this about you. Is it a lifelong dislike of fiction? Is it a recent phenomenon? How did this happen?
“Dislike,” you’re gonna get me in trouble. No dislike. I just really love nonfiction. When I’m reading, I want to be learning something. It’s not that we don’t have plenty to learn from fiction—we certainly do. I just read a nonfiction book and I feel like I’m learning right now. I just love school and miss school.
You remember the Scholastic Book Fair when we were kids? My mom sent me in third grade with a blank check, and she was like, “You’re not allowed to spend more than $20 but I want you to write it for the specific amount that your stuff comes out to.” We were so poor and I spent like $150 at the Scholastic Book Fair. Did you ever see those kids’ books that were about a Supreme Court justice or something? I got a bunch of shit like that cause I was like, She can’t get mad at me if it’s educational. Then I came home and she was like, “Get in the car, we’re going back to the school and returning most of this.”
I remember the book fair being the most exciting time of my life. They had things that I had never seen before.
It was posters, pencils, erasers. The children yearn for capitalism. We wanna spend, we wanna be buyers, bad.
So now you’re doing DIY schooling via nonfiction. You’re putting together your own syllabi. Is it books about the industry that you’re in, random topics?
Certainly not. If you ever see me reading a book about the entertainment industry, feel free to go ahead and shoot me. There’s nothing I can imagine that sounds worse. I’m reading a lot of nonfiction essays, a lot of political books. I’m still trying to work through the dawn of everything. It’s so dense and people much smarter than me have been like, “It’s not that dense.” You’re just smarter than me. I don’t know what to tell you. It feels heavy to me.
Do you get most of your political learning from books? Are you also reading the news? Are you watching the news, as a lot of people do today, on some social media platform?
I don’t really watch the news on social media. I just read When the Clock Broke, which was all about the ’90s. That’s a political education in a sense—it’s a picture of how we got here. I’m not reading any current politician’s memoirs or anything like that. I’m a member of the tenant union in Kansas City and they send out a bullhorn blast every once in a while that’ll have readings at the bottom. Other than that, it’s mostly just stuff that people send to me. Friends will send me articles like, “Oh my God, this is so fucked. Look at this,” and then I do, and then we’re both sad. Like, Okay, I guess we did something.
I feel so accomplished for just having read the news these days. It already feels like I’m doing a lot more than the general population.
I fantasize about reading a newspaper in the mornings. There’s some weird thing about my brain that I’m like, You know what I’m gonna do soon? I’m gonna start reading the newspaper every morning. Maybe I will, but it’s kind of like when you go out and buy new running shoes and you’re like, Next week I’m getting into running, and then the running never comes.
Just flick it open. You’ve got the steak.
That’s what I’m saying. You’re sitting here having your morning coffee, flipping through a newspaper. There’s something about it. I hit 30 and I was like, I think I need to be flipping through a newspaper.
Is there one thing you’ve read that you feel really informs your viewpoint?
Recently it’s been When the Clock Broke. Before that, I would say it was All Things Are Too Small, this book of essays that I really adored. I grew up pretty sheltered in rural Missouri, and I went to college and had a pretty large political awakening. I knew a certain amount about U.S. politics just by virtue of being poor, so those things were occurring around me all the time and happening to me, but I would say particularly around race and imperialism, the two most important books I ever read that I recommend to absolutely everybody are—of course, and go ahead and kill me for being the guy who recommends this—A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, and probably even more than that, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. That book doesn’t get the same level of lobbying as People’s History of the United States, but I had no fucking idea. I had absolutely no idea what our prison system was like and how we got here. That book just totally changed my entire viewpoint of our country and our criminal system—I don’t even want to say justice [system]. I think about those books once a week, every week.
You’ve talked about going through this moment of transition in a few interviews—from kind of being well known to being really well known. Have there been books that you’ve read or even interviews with other creatives that inform this more personal moment?
That’s a really good idea. I’m really trying to push myself into new spaces and books, and maybe that would be a place I could go. I certainly will not be reading a celebrity memoir. I do not care. Every celebrity memoir, I’m like, Who gives a fuck? I don’t care how interesting your life is. Especially a comedian celebrity memoir. That being said, when I write mine, let’s get it on the New York Times bestseller list. When I was starting comedy, a bunch of people were recommending comedians’ memoirs to me, and I was like, “What would that possibly tell me about being funny as me right now?”
Is there a book that you turn to when you’re looking for inspiration?
Like every mentally ill person in their 20s, I of course had a moment with The Artist’s Way. It has to be number one for books that just scream cry for help. If you see your friend doing The Artist’s Way, you need to check in. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I got a lot of writing inspiration at a time when I really needed it. There’s an essay, Some Thoughts on the Common Toad by George Orwell, that I read every spring. It’s really, really short, and it’s just basically him talking about how even in authoritarian, dark times, we can still enjoy the blooming of the flowers and the coming of spring.
Is there a book that you loved as a kid that kind of sticks with you?
The Dollhouse Murders. That one was crazy. What else jumped out to me as a kid? When everyone was doing Harry Potter, I wasn’t doing it. I didn’t read any of those huge fantasy kids’ books.
You’re on the right side of history now with those books.
Yeah, that sucks. Those movies really were, and I assume the books as well, so phenomenal. All my love to her and the black mold situation that she seems to be going through—allegedly, allegedly, allegedly.
Is there a book that you stopped in the middle and you’re like, I’m not getting to the end.
Plenty. I have Work Won’t Love You Back. That was a book that my friend recommended to me—drag of the century, by the way. I stopped that one in the middle, not because it was bad. It got pretty granular.
What’s the best book recommendation you’ve ever gotten? Or the worst one…
I think Work Won’t Love You Back is the funniest book recommendation I’ve got. It’s a crazy thing to say to your friend, “You should read this book, Work Won’t Love You Back.” I was enjoying it. I need to finish it. Best book recommendation I’ve ever gotten? I went to the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, and was recommended this book called Heartland by Sarah Smarsh. I just absolutely adored it. I wish a whole bunch more people would read it. That was just recommended to me by the lady working in there. That book Nickel and Dimed. It was written in the fucking early 2000s about how people are struggling to survive on low wage jobs, and 20-something years later, it’s still so, so relevant. To me, that’s just remarkable. I can’t believe how much worse things have gotten. How they’re still the same in many ways.
Is there a book that someone should read if they want to get to know you, that’s you in a book?
I wouldn’t say necessarily this is me in a book, it’s very explicitly not me, but any of Sam Irby‘s books. She’s so funny and fucking brilliant, and she has this mix of genuine intellectual insight and also just crass, disgusting humor. I just really admire her and I feel like she’s done it her way, the whole way.
Have you guys had a chance to connect? Did you get any words of wisdom from her?
I do know Sam. I am cursed by being her friend. It truly is a nightmare. Whatever the opposite of a blessing and a gift is, that’s what it is to be Sam Irby’s friend. [Laughs] We’ve talked about books, we’ve talked about writing books. She’s lovely, and her advice is mostly just like, “I don’t even really know how I did it, good luck.” But she’s phenomenal.
Do you read about yourself online?
I used to read about myself online all the time. It’s almost inescapable when people first start talking about you. It’s very human to seek it out and want to know what’s being said and wanna know basically just, Do they like me? But if you want to maintain your sanity at all, you have to stop. I have, for the most part, stopped.
I get a lot of calls from friends that are in the public eye, and they say, “Oh my God, people are saying this about me.” I go, “Where did you read it?” They go, “Reddit,” and I go, “Delete that fucking app from your phone, block that website.” Reddit is the scourge of the earth, and if you are somebody who has any kind of public presence, you cannot ever open Reddit.com. That’s definitely where I saw the most upsetting things about myself back when I was still doing that particular self-harm ritual.
Was there a moment where you were like, That’s it. That’s like the last thing. It would also feel crazy if someone’s saying, “This is the funniest, best person I’ve ever seen,” and you have to maintain some objectivity.
It’s all subjective. The funny thing about comedy in particular is the only way to break through is to have a point of view. You have to have something to say about the world that is unique. Words put things together and take things apart, so inherently, by having a point of view, you’ll bring a bunch of people into the fold, but you’ll also exclude a bunch of people. Nobody is ever going to be universally loved. The only person who is living and currently close to it is Dolly Parton. I don’t have any delusions that I’ll be Dolly Parton.
Caleb Hearon’s Required Reading
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, 1980
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, 2010
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, 1994
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
How To Write An Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee, 2018
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
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