When did you accept the fact that you were a nerd? When did you decide you wanted to appropriate it and make it something you could be proud of and write a book about it instead of be ashamed of it?
I first became aware that I was a nerd when I was about 8 years old. That's when others started applying the term to me. I started fantasizing about it like a lot of kids do, of writing a record of my life that would show the other children to be stupid and that would show me to be brilliant. And from that very childlike, immature beginning, I think this book germinated. It's been germinating since I was 10 years old.
So you always wanted to do this in a way?
Yeah, back then the way I envisioned it as a very stupid book at the time. But then as I got older, when I was 26 or so, I thought, You know no one has actually done a history of the nerd-type.
Or at least they didn’t actually call it that. Because you do mention books and authors who deal with the subject.
Yeah, Sherry Turkle came the closest in The Second Self. That’s still a book about how people interact with computers. It’s not a history of the nerd by a different name. I guess you could argue that Anti-Intellectualism in American Life came close, but as I stated, nerds and intellectuals aren’t the same thing.
So was it that you felt empowered in some way since, as you say, with the hipsters, the nerd has become the cool nerd or it’s popular to be a nerd?
I would resist the term empowered. I think being a nerd has become romanticized, the same way poverty has been romanticized. I think people who were probably nerdy when they were children, which is to say incredibly socially awkward and hard to be around. I don’t romanticize nerdiness. It is interesting to see how some of the young women tell me that men introduce themselves on first dates by saying that they were nerds in high school. They tell girls, “Oh I was such a nerd in high school,” as a way of being authentic and self-deprecating. I think people like the idea of being nerds. But I have a suspicion that those aren’t the people that actually had the experience of being nerds.
I remember writing down the word romanticized when I was reading the first part of the book, when you discuss 19th-century ideas and texts and apply ideas of the nerd to a time when they didn’t really think that way. I mean, I think most of the concepts surrounding the nerd didn’t really come to be until the 1950s and '60s, and most of us probably think of them from the '70s and '80s, the '80s being when the nerd was really present in popular culture. I wondered if you were trying to create a genealogy of nerd-dom, to show that it had a longer history.
I’d say that “nerd” is a problematic category, the same way various racial categories are put into are problematic over the centuries. Obviously the way people have been oppressed by being called nerds doesn’t compare to the way people have been oppressed by various forms of racism.
I do think it’s interesting how you nerds have been subject to a form of prejudice related to racism.
Yeah, I think they’re tied together. So what I was exploring wasn’t so much the genealogy of something real, so much as the genealogy of a concept and the genealogy of a category. The same we you could write a book about whiteness which aren’t scientifically valid. Like, nerd isn’t a psychologically valid concept.
Your idea that nerds have influenced popular culture for the rest of us is fascinating. You bring up Microsoft, DreamWorks, other forms of pop culture. Nerds are actually the ones shaping the ideas of what cool.
Well, I think that’s true. I think it's what’s happened. I think the people who have given us the images of America haven’t been the people who actually resemble those images. It’s not cowboys who have given us cowboy movies. I think what nerds had in common is that they looked at America from the outside and so one of the reasons I think these Hollywood images of America have been so internationally persuasive and successful is that they’re written from the outside looking in. And it’s no coincidence that a lot of them are written by Jewish immigrants. And it’s probably no coincidence that the ethnicities that tend to be successful are also immigrants. There are a lot of really smart Asian TV writers in Hollywood right now who are vaguely understood by themselves and others to be the next Jews. It’s very much an immigrant experience.
But didn’t it all change in the '90s when it was the nerds who became the richest people in the world, they became the elite and took over? Don’t you think it shifted in some ways during that time? That it became cool to be a nerd?
I think it’s become that way to some extent. I actually don’t think because people like the idea of being nerds and can say, “Oh yeah, Bill Gates is a rich guys; nerds inherit the earth,” doesn’t mean they actually like interacting with people who are so socially awkward. Socially awkward kids in high school who are really good with computers and math but are not good at being charismatic are always going to be less beloved than athletic, charismatic counterparts.
But I think that those kids can presumably look at more images in pop culture that seem to represent them as sexy and cool. Like Seth Cohen on The OC. It’s always kinds of iffy to presume that positive pop culture portrayals of anything have actually changed anyone’s life. You never know. Like, did Will & Grace make life easier for gay teenagers.
Well, it’s actually funny you mentioned that because one of the things that I kept coming back to was that you don’t really seem to focus on the gay nerd. I know that in Revenge of the Nerds, they kind of lump them all together: all the misfits are nerds. So I was wondering about that and trying to figure out how do you define a nerd. For you, a nerd comes down to essentially two things: they’re socially awkward and they’re interested or obsessed with things that are not of the norm in some way. Or would you say there’s more categories?
Yeah, essentially I define two categories. One are nerds like Anne Beatts, who was potentially socially a droid in high school, the sort of person who socially excluded for arbitrary reasons. And the second type are those who are nerds for some intrinsic mental reasons: They prefer rational, rule-bound activities over more intuitive thinking. I think in both of those categories there is room for various sexual orientations, ethnic backgrounds, etc.
But gay kids were on the fringe, they were awkward; they didn’t interact; they were on the outside; they have all the parameters. Is it that they weren’t interested in computers, does that keep them from being nerds?
There are different ways of being an outcast in high school. I don’t know if the stoner kids and the goth kids were necessarily nerds, but they were certainly outcasts in their own way. I think if you were an out gay kid in high school, then the reasons you would be an outcast wouldn’t necessarily be the same as nerds would be an outcast. I think the reason why I created that first category for the people who were arbitrarily called nerds is because some people are called nerds for whatever reason all over America, which are arbitrary reasons why a lot of people are called nerds; it doesn’t have to do with a love of these rule-bound activities. That first type is an important distinction to make.
Part of the reason was broadening the definition as well. It wasn’t just an MIT kind of guy or computer engineering. You wanted it to be more open.
I think they’re two really different kinds of people. But I think they both get called nerds.
I wanted to talk about the title and that you make the distinction by saying “American Nerd.” It makes a lot of sense to me that this is an American experience. You pretty much say it’s America, England, Canada and Japan. Because I know from personal experience, when I tried to explain to Spanish speakers what a nerd was, they don’t have a word for it and they really had no concept of it. I think in other cultures people who may have these attributes, they may have other adjectives for them, call them awkward or something, but they don’t have the same way of ostracizing them. They have a way of adapting into society. Whereas as you say in America there has been a long history, as you say with the jocks.
It’s been really fascinating to see which foreign countries want to interview me. And Sweden has been all over me. I was in the Swedish GQ equivalent and a Swedish daily newspaper. But then I was interviewed by an Italian magazine called Panorama, and they were like, “Yeah, we don’t really have a parallel concept in Italy.”
I think England absolutely has a concept of nerds. We got our concept of Gentleman Athlete from England and Anglophilia. A lot of the eugenic, racial ideology that Teddy Roosevelt and like-minded people were inspired by when they created mandatory phys-ed was also some of the ideology when Hitler drew on when he was creating the Third Reich. Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race was used by both Roosevelt and Hitler.
So I think there’s a very Northern European/Anglo-American concept of manhood that’s probably at play here. Of course that doesn’t mean that Teddy Roosevelt was a Nazi. But it’s the type of stuff they talk about in The Great Gatsby when Tom, the football player goes, “We’re all Nordics here” and then there’s a moment of hesitation before he includes the women in. In that ideology there’s some equation between being a really white guy and being the kind of gentleman athlete who they idolized that’s really fascinating and probably doesn’t exist to the same extent in other cultures.
And Japan has this really crazy history about its own masculinity, especially after World War II. I can’t remember the name of the famous Japanese fascist writer who killed himself in front of an assembly. I think in some cultures where this is a really fraught thing, and we’re one of them and England’s one of them. I don’t think it’s the case with India or China. And from what you’ve said, I can believe the Mediterranean cultures are different.
Are you still dating Mindy Kaling [who plays Kelly on The Office]?
I am
She acts and writes for a TV show that I would say is obsessed with nerds.
Right, Dwight Schrute is a nerd, definitely.
Well, but when I started applying some of the nerd characteristics, I started to see that Steve Carrell’s character, Michael Scott, in a lot of ways is a nerd because he’s socially awkward, he doesn’t know how to interact with others. He has weird obsessions and unacceptable interests. But at the same time, he isn’t because he’s supposed to be one of the cool guys, right? He wants to have a hot girlfriend. But then his “best friend,” Dwight, is a nerd. And, of course, Jim is the anti-nerd: socially adept, likable. I was using this as a case study to see what you thought of the dynamics.
I think Dwight is a huge nerd. And really has a love of order and rules and hierarchies. Whereas Michael is socially inept but is trying really hard to be the cool boss. He doesn’t like hierarchies. I think Michael Scott’s a different kind of person. I think he’s one of those people who tries so hard and is obsessed with being liked, to the point where it becomes a self-destructive obsession. Which is a very different thing from being a nerd.
You realize when you read a book like this, it’s what starts happening. You start to apply these “rules” to all sorts of situations. You wonder: is that person a nerd or is he not a nerd. and what does it mean if he doesn’t fit the nerd limitations you’ve set.
Yeah, I was interviewed by someone who asked me about which of the presidential candidates were nerds.
Well of course, we all know that Hillary was a nerd. But she’s tried to become not a nerd.
Yeah, that was my thinking too; that Hillary was the one who’s the nerd in this triumvirate.
John McCain would totally not be a nerd.
John McCain’s very jocky. I think Obama has a little bit of hipster going on too, which is a problem he’s running into, winning over the general electorate.
So do you think the hipster nerd is a true nerd or it is just a fake nerd? So you think they’ve appropriated nerd things to seem authentic, as you’ve said.
Well, some people.
Do you consider yourself a hipster?
Yeah. People certainly call me that. Not as a positive thing. In that, do I obsess about being cool and knowing what the most recent band is? Yes. Sure. But uh, I think there are genuinely nerdy people who honestly do a nerd look. I think there is a tendency for some people who are extremely socially self-aware and stylish to appropriate nerdsy ways that are suspect. I definitely have many very cool friends who have gone around calling themselves geeks and nerds and it struck me in deeply funny ways.
I think it’s easy to hide being a nerd. As you get older you can recognize your nerd ways and say, “Oh, I’m such a nerd” and in some ways neutralize it. But you would never have admitted that as a kid, you'd never have been self-aware enough to realize you’re a nerd for some specific reason. I wonder, is it hard to be an adult nerd since you can actually adapt and change to be more socially acceptable?
I think if you become self-aware enough to be accepted among people who care deeply about status, fashion and what’s cool, then you’ve probably become something other than a nerd. That doesn’t mean you weren’t a nerd when you were a kid. I think I’m a really typical example. I was a really nerdy kid and then, from the ages of 14 to 20, I gradually became something different.
When I went back and found my nerdiest friends, they pretty much stayed nerdy, and they were happy still doing things like D&D and Worlds of Warcraft. Those were really important parts of their lives. My friend Kenneth, he used nerdiness to escape from a somewhat violent, hard-core Christian household, and it was sort of an escape into the rational for him. He left and moved in with his nerdy gay uncle and is now an executive at a video game company and still meets his friends online playing Worlds of Warcraft. For some people, it continues to be a big part of who they are and is part of their maturation process. For other people it means leaving that behind. And I think I was in the latter category, but a lot of people are in the former category.
So why do you think you left it behind?
For me, personally it was… it was becoming a grunge kid. It was discovering Nirvana and R.E.M. at the same time. I sold my Nintendo to one of my friends and used the money to get an amp. I was just one of those kids who suddenly, really badly wanted to become counter cultural when I was 14 years old. Much to the amusement of my classmates. When I showed up for the first day of 10th grade in some kind of like, Mudhoney outfit. I think that was a really common trajectory for my generation. I’m 30 years old. I think there’s that year, for me 1992, when things changed. It wasn’t just nerds becoming vaguely grunge, indie rock or buying Fugazi albums; jock kids made the conversion, too. And I assume that happens in some form with more recent generations, too. I’m sure somewhere right now there’s a 14-year-old discovering Vampire Weekend and vowing to no longer play Grand Theft Auto.
I also connect to the kids who, as they’re getting older, they decide to change and they become hyper-sexualized. They go to the gym, their body transforms. And they’ll tell you later, "Oh I was really awkward and a nerd, but you look at them now and you’d never be able to tell that."
Well, in a lot of ways I’ve structured the book like an '80s teen comedy. I’m this nerdy kid who abruptly turns his nerdy activities and nerdy friends in order to be cool. And eventually gains a moral compass and decides it was an innocent childlike state but I can never return. That’s kinda like the classic narrative.
In some ways then, is this an apology?
Interesting question. I guess in the same way that the Fortress of Solitude is an apology [laughs]. Not to compare myself to Jonathan Lethem, but in the way that any personal story about the people you left behind usually has some component of realizing you didn’t appreciate what you had.
Who would you say the five big nerd icons are for you?
Hmm. Let me think about that… [A Jenny Lewis song starts to play and Ben is distracted. “Sorry, I really love this album.” After a little more contemplation, he gets back to answering the question.] It’s interesting, even when I was a nerd, I think my idols were outcasts rather than nerds. Like, when I was still pretty nerdy, a teenager deciding I want to be a writer, like, Gore Vidal was it. I couldn’t read enough of those essays. And he was kind of like bitchy and supercilious and superior and I thought, to be OK, like that was huge. Again, another one was Whit Stillman. It wasn’t that he was a nerd, it was some fantasy of a civilized world, which is kind of nerdy but he wasn’t a nerd per se. And then when I was younger. Sorry none of these people are nerds. Nerds weren’t the people I… think all the people who are good at casting themselves as outsiders. I guess in college, Elliott Smith
Who you wrote a book about.
Clearly an obsession. I’m trying to think of someone a little less typical. You know how I thought was super cool in college and was a little nerdy. Dean Wareham, the singer of Luna. When I was in college it was that nasal, disaffected and somehow soporific at the same time. You know who’s a nerdy, not really nerdy, but slightly nerdy guy who became an idol in my twenties was George Saunders.
Who do you think are iconic American nerds? Bill Gates, for example?
I think Bill Gates is one of them. He’s clearly, when people think nerd, he’s the first person who comes to mind. He’s still a really smart, socially awkward guy. And he’s really important in the history of America because he was the first J.P. Morgan kind of guy who was not charismatic figure at all. I think that’s a really important transition.
I think Steven Spielberg is a really important nerd. If you read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, he was definitely the nerd of that bunch, trying to be cool but Coppola and Jack Nicholson were definitely the cool ones. But surprisingly George Lucas, even though he became a nerd icon, it sounds like he was more of a hipster than the rest of them.
I think the Seth Cohen character on The OC was a watershed moment too because, as far as I know, he was the first nerd heartthrob in a really mainstream way.
I think between Paul Feig and Judd Apatow we’ve had a different image of the nerd coming to the mainstream than we’ve had before. I wouldn’t say Seth Rogen is a nerd. I’ve been around him, and he’s not awkward at all. It’s always hard to know whether you call someone who’s really funny, and sharp and socially with it nerdy or not. They put a certain kind of nerd on the screen but I don’t think they themselves are nerds. But I think the McLovin character in Superbad was a really interesting nerd.
Oh, I can’t believe I left this out. Dawn Wiener in Welcome to the Dollhouse is the single greatest female nerd character I’ve ever seen on screen.
And I also love the three nerdy boys in Freaks & Geeks: Sam, Neal Schweiber and Bill [Haverchuck].
So now that you’ve written the book, are you prepared to be the nerd expert?
We’ll see if I become the go-to nerd expert. I’m doing Fox & Friends. I don’t know if I’ll get Colbert or not. They’ve called me, but who the hell knows what’s going to happen?
That’ll be rough.
They’re going to give me a wedgie and throw things at me.
Do you get anxious about that? That you could be potentially be labeled a nerd again although you’ve changed your lifestyle not to be a nerd?
I don’t mind people asking me if I’m a nerd. That’s one of the interesting things about it becoming a de-stigmatized category that people, at least in theory, think is cool. If people are falsely claiming to be nerds, I shouldn’t be one to recoil when I’m called a nerd.
But then you can have the nerd smackdown: No, I’m a nerd. No I’m a nerd.
Yeah, I hope to have nerd one-upsmanship on Fox & Friends or with Brian Lehrer.
[We digress for a moment and then Ben seems to remember something he’d wanted to say but I’d never asked.]
One of the things I was trying to do with this book—and I don’t know if I succeeded—but I was trying to do something with nonfiction something the novel does, which is to show how the personal relates to the social, political and historical. So that you empathize with people it’s not easy to empathize with. I think journalists ridicule too much.
Do you already have another project or book in the works?
Yeah, it’s going to be nonfiction, the history of the step family.
So you come from a divorced family?
Yeah, my parents are divorced. My sister is a playwright and we kind of obsessively write about our childhood and family.
But you haven’t written a memoir yet. This is sort of close to memoir in some ways.
What I don’t like about contemporary memoir is how it’s so utterly centered around one person’s perspective. And to me the function of fiction and what’s so good about the novel is that it inhabits multiple perspectives. And if it is from a first-person perspective, it’s usually incredibly critical of that person and ridiculing of that person. Whereas I feel memoir has recently become a ritual of blaming others and the great self-flagellating memoirs have turned out to be novels [laughs].
I first became aware that I was a nerd when I was about 8 years old. That's when others started applying the term to me. I started fantasizing about it like a lot of kids do, of writing a record of my life that would show the other children to be stupid and that would show me to be brilliant. And from that very childlike, immature beginning, I think this book germinated. It's been germinating since I was 10 years old.
So you always wanted to do this in a way?
Yeah, back then the way I envisioned it as a very stupid book at the time. But then as I got older, when I was 26 or so, I thought, You know no one has actually done a history of the nerd-type.
Or at least they didn’t actually call it that. Because you do mention books and authors who deal with the subject.
Yeah, Sherry Turkle came the closest in The Second Self. That’s still a book about how people interact with computers. It’s not a history of the nerd by a different name. I guess you could argue that Anti-Intellectualism in American Life came close, but as I stated, nerds and intellectuals aren’t the same thing.
So was it that you felt empowered in some way since, as you say, with the hipsters, the nerd has become the cool nerd or it’s popular to be a nerd?
I would resist the term empowered. I think being a nerd has become romanticized, the same way poverty has been romanticized. I think people who were probably nerdy when they were children, which is to say incredibly socially awkward and hard to be around. I don’t romanticize nerdiness. It is interesting to see how some of the young women tell me that men introduce themselves on first dates by saying that they were nerds in high school. They tell girls, “Oh I was such a nerd in high school,” as a way of being authentic and self-deprecating. I think people like the idea of being nerds. But I have a suspicion that those aren’t the people that actually had the experience of being nerds.
I remember writing down the word romanticized when I was reading the first part of the book, when you discuss 19th-century ideas and texts and apply ideas of the nerd to a time when they didn’t really think that way. I mean, I think most of the concepts surrounding the nerd didn’t really come to be until the 1950s and '60s, and most of us probably think of them from the '70s and '80s, the '80s being when the nerd was really present in popular culture. I wondered if you were trying to create a genealogy of nerd-dom, to show that it had a longer history.
I’d say that “nerd” is a problematic category, the same way various racial categories are put into are problematic over the centuries. Obviously the way people have been oppressed by being called nerds doesn’t compare to the way people have been oppressed by various forms of racism.
I do think it’s interesting how you nerds have been subject to a form of prejudice related to racism.
Yeah, I think they’re tied together. So what I was exploring wasn’t so much the genealogy of something real, so much as the genealogy of a concept and the genealogy of a category. The same we you could write a book about whiteness which aren’t scientifically valid. Like, nerd isn’t a psychologically valid concept.
Your idea that nerds have influenced popular culture for the rest of us is fascinating. You bring up Microsoft, DreamWorks, other forms of pop culture. Nerds are actually the ones shaping the ideas of what cool.
Well, I think that’s true. I think it's what’s happened. I think the people who have given us the images of America haven’t been the people who actually resemble those images. It’s not cowboys who have given us cowboy movies. I think what nerds had in common is that they looked at America from the outside and so one of the reasons I think these Hollywood images of America have been so internationally persuasive and successful is that they’re written from the outside looking in. And it’s no coincidence that a lot of them are written by Jewish immigrants. And it’s probably no coincidence that the ethnicities that tend to be successful are also immigrants. There are a lot of really smart Asian TV writers in Hollywood right now who are vaguely understood by themselves and others to be the next Jews. It’s very much an immigrant experience.
But didn’t it all change in the '90s when it was the nerds who became the richest people in the world, they became the elite and took over? Don’t you think it shifted in some ways during that time? That it became cool to be a nerd?
I think it’s become that way to some extent. I actually don’t think because people like the idea of being nerds and can say, “Oh yeah, Bill Gates is a rich guys; nerds inherit the earth,” doesn’t mean they actually like interacting with people who are so socially awkward. Socially awkward kids in high school who are really good with computers and math but are not good at being charismatic are always going to be less beloved than athletic, charismatic counterparts.
But I think that those kids can presumably look at more images in pop culture that seem to represent them as sexy and cool. Like Seth Cohen on The OC. It’s always kinds of iffy to presume that positive pop culture portrayals of anything have actually changed anyone’s life. You never know. Like, did Will & Grace make life easier for gay teenagers.
Well, it’s actually funny you mentioned that because one of the things that I kept coming back to was that you don’t really seem to focus on the gay nerd. I know that in Revenge of the Nerds, they kind of lump them all together: all the misfits are nerds. So I was wondering about that and trying to figure out how do you define a nerd. For you, a nerd comes down to essentially two things: they’re socially awkward and they’re interested or obsessed with things that are not of the norm in some way. Or would you say there’s more categories?
Yeah, essentially I define two categories. One are nerds like Anne Beatts, who was potentially socially a droid in high school, the sort of person who socially excluded for arbitrary reasons. And the second type are those who are nerds for some intrinsic mental reasons: They prefer rational, rule-bound activities over more intuitive thinking. I think in both of those categories there is room for various sexual orientations, ethnic backgrounds, etc.
But gay kids were on the fringe, they were awkward; they didn’t interact; they were on the outside; they have all the parameters. Is it that they weren’t interested in computers, does that keep them from being nerds?
There are different ways of being an outcast in high school. I don’t know if the stoner kids and the goth kids were necessarily nerds, but they were certainly outcasts in their own way. I think if you were an out gay kid in high school, then the reasons you would be an outcast wouldn’t necessarily be the same as nerds would be an outcast. I think the reason why I created that first category for the people who were arbitrarily called nerds is because some people are called nerds for whatever reason all over America, which are arbitrary reasons why a lot of people are called nerds; it doesn’t have to do with a love of these rule-bound activities. That first type is an important distinction to make.
Part of the reason was broadening the definition as well. It wasn’t just an MIT kind of guy or computer engineering. You wanted it to be more open.
I think they’re two really different kinds of people. But I think they both get called nerds.
I wanted to talk about the title and that you make the distinction by saying “American Nerd.” It makes a lot of sense to me that this is an American experience. You pretty much say it’s America, England, Canada and Japan. Because I know from personal experience, when I tried to explain to Spanish speakers what a nerd was, they don’t have a word for it and they really had no concept of it. I think in other cultures people who may have these attributes, they may have other adjectives for them, call them awkward or something, but they don’t have the same way of ostracizing them. They have a way of adapting into society. Whereas as you say in America there has been a long history, as you say with the jocks.
It’s been really fascinating to see which foreign countries want to interview me. And Sweden has been all over me. I was in the Swedish GQ equivalent and a Swedish daily newspaper. But then I was interviewed by an Italian magazine called Panorama, and they were like, “Yeah, we don’t really have a parallel concept in Italy.”
I think England absolutely has a concept of nerds. We got our concept of Gentleman Athlete from England and Anglophilia. A lot of the eugenic, racial ideology that Teddy Roosevelt and like-minded people were inspired by when they created mandatory phys-ed was also some of the ideology when Hitler drew on when he was creating the Third Reich. Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race was used by both Roosevelt and Hitler.
So I think there’s a very Northern European/Anglo-American concept of manhood that’s probably at play here. Of course that doesn’t mean that Teddy Roosevelt was a Nazi. But it’s the type of stuff they talk about in The Great Gatsby when Tom, the football player goes, “We’re all Nordics here” and then there’s a moment of hesitation before he includes the women in. In that ideology there’s some equation between being a really white guy and being the kind of gentleman athlete who they idolized that’s really fascinating and probably doesn’t exist to the same extent in other cultures.
And Japan has this really crazy history about its own masculinity, especially after World War II. I can’t remember the name of the famous Japanese fascist writer who killed himself in front of an assembly. I think in some cultures where this is a really fraught thing, and we’re one of them and England’s one of them. I don’t think it’s the case with India or China. And from what you’ve said, I can believe the Mediterranean cultures are different.
Are you still dating Mindy Kaling [who plays Kelly on The Office]?
I am
She acts and writes for a TV show that I would say is obsessed with nerds.
Right, Dwight Schrute is a nerd, definitely.
Well, but when I started applying some of the nerd characteristics, I started to see that Steve Carrell’s character, Michael Scott, in a lot of ways is a nerd because he’s socially awkward, he doesn’t know how to interact with others. He has weird obsessions and unacceptable interests. But at the same time, he isn’t because he’s supposed to be one of the cool guys, right? He wants to have a hot girlfriend. But then his “best friend,” Dwight, is a nerd. And, of course, Jim is the anti-nerd: socially adept, likable. I was using this as a case study to see what you thought of the dynamics.
I think Dwight is a huge nerd. And really has a love of order and rules and hierarchies. Whereas Michael is socially inept but is trying really hard to be the cool boss. He doesn’t like hierarchies. I think Michael Scott’s a different kind of person. I think he’s one of those people who tries so hard and is obsessed with being liked, to the point where it becomes a self-destructive obsession. Which is a very different thing from being a nerd.
You realize when you read a book like this, it’s what starts happening. You start to apply these “rules” to all sorts of situations. You wonder: is that person a nerd or is he not a nerd. and what does it mean if he doesn’t fit the nerd limitations you’ve set.
Yeah, I was interviewed by someone who asked me about which of the presidential candidates were nerds.
Well of course, we all know that Hillary was a nerd. But she’s tried to become not a nerd.
Yeah, that was my thinking too; that Hillary was the one who’s the nerd in this triumvirate.
John McCain would totally not be a nerd.
John McCain’s very jocky. I think Obama has a little bit of hipster going on too, which is a problem he’s running into, winning over the general electorate.
So do you think the hipster nerd is a true nerd or it is just a fake nerd? So you think they’ve appropriated nerd things to seem authentic, as you’ve said.
Well, some people.
Do you consider yourself a hipster?
Yeah. People certainly call me that. Not as a positive thing. In that, do I obsess about being cool and knowing what the most recent band is? Yes. Sure. But uh, I think there are genuinely nerdy people who honestly do a nerd look. I think there is a tendency for some people who are extremely socially self-aware and stylish to appropriate nerdsy ways that are suspect. I definitely have many very cool friends who have gone around calling themselves geeks and nerds and it struck me in deeply funny ways.
I think it’s easy to hide being a nerd. As you get older you can recognize your nerd ways and say, “Oh, I’m such a nerd” and in some ways neutralize it. But you would never have admitted that as a kid, you'd never have been self-aware enough to realize you’re a nerd for some specific reason. I wonder, is it hard to be an adult nerd since you can actually adapt and change to be more socially acceptable?
I think if you become self-aware enough to be accepted among people who care deeply about status, fashion and what’s cool, then you’ve probably become something other than a nerd. That doesn’t mean you weren’t a nerd when you were a kid. I think I’m a really typical example. I was a really nerdy kid and then, from the ages of 14 to 20, I gradually became something different.
When I went back and found my nerdiest friends, they pretty much stayed nerdy, and they were happy still doing things like D&D and Worlds of Warcraft. Those were really important parts of their lives. My friend Kenneth, he used nerdiness to escape from a somewhat violent, hard-core Christian household, and it was sort of an escape into the rational for him. He left and moved in with his nerdy gay uncle and is now an executive at a video game company and still meets his friends online playing Worlds of Warcraft. For some people, it continues to be a big part of who they are and is part of their maturation process. For other people it means leaving that behind. And I think I was in the latter category, but a lot of people are in the former category.
So why do you think you left it behind?
For me, personally it was… it was becoming a grunge kid. It was discovering Nirvana and R.E.M. at the same time. I sold my Nintendo to one of my friends and used the money to get an amp. I was just one of those kids who suddenly, really badly wanted to become counter cultural when I was 14 years old. Much to the amusement of my classmates. When I showed up for the first day of 10th grade in some kind of like, Mudhoney outfit. I think that was a really common trajectory for my generation. I’m 30 years old. I think there’s that year, for me 1992, when things changed. It wasn’t just nerds becoming vaguely grunge, indie rock or buying Fugazi albums; jock kids made the conversion, too. And I assume that happens in some form with more recent generations, too. I’m sure somewhere right now there’s a 14-year-old discovering Vampire Weekend and vowing to no longer play Grand Theft Auto.
I also connect to the kids who, as they’re getting older, they decide to change and they become hyper-sexualized. They go to the gym, their body transforms. And they’ll tell you later, "Oh I was really awkward and a nerd, but you look at them now and you’d never be able to tell that."
Well, in a lot of ways I’ve structured the book like an '80s teen comedy. I’m this nerdy kid who abruptly turns his nerdy activities and nerdy friends in order to be cool. And eventually gains a moral compass and decides it was an innocent childlike state but I can never return. That’s kinda like the classic narrative.
In some ways then, is this an apology?
Interesting question. I guess in the same way that the Fortress of Solitude is an apology [laughs]. Not to compare myself to Jonathan Lethem, but in the way that any personal story about the people you left behind usually has some component of realizing you didn’t appreciate what you had.
Who would you say the five big nerd icons are for you?
Hmm. Let me think about that… [A Jenny Lewis song starts to play and Ben is distracted. “Sorry, I really love this album.” After a little more contemplation, he gets back to answering the question.] It’s interesting, even when I was a nerd, I think my idols were outcasts rather than nerds. Like, when I was still pretty nerdy, a teenager deciding I want to be a writer, like, Gore Vidal was it. I couldn’t read enough of those essays. And he was kind of like bitchy and supercilious and superior and I thought, to be OK, like that was huge. Again, another one was Whit Stillman. It wasn’t that he was a nerd, it was some fantasy of a civilized world, which is kind of nerdy but he wasn’t a nerd per se. And then when I was younger. Sorry none of these people are nerds. Nerds weren’t the people I… think all the people who are good at casting themselves as outsiders. I guess in college, Elliott Smith
Who you wrote a book about.
Clearly an obsession. I’m trying to think of someone a little less typical. You know how I thought was super cool in college and was a little nerdy. Dean Wareham, the singer of Luna. When I was in college it was that nasal, disaffected and somehow soporific at the same time. You know who’s a nerdy, not really nerdy, but slightly nerdy guy who became an idol in my twenties was George Saunders.
Who do you think are iconic American nerds? Bill Gates, for example?
I think Bill Gates is one of them. He’s clearly, when people think nerd, he’s the first person who comes to mind. He’s still a really smart, socially awkward guy. And he’s really important in the history of America because he was the first J.P. Morgan kind of guy who was not charismatic figure at all. I think that’s a really important transition.
I think Steven Spielberg is a really important nerd. If you read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, he was definitely the nerd of that bunch, trying to be cool but Coppola and Jack Nicholson were definitely the cool ones. But surprisingly George Lucas, even though he became a nerd icon, it sounds like he was more of a hipster than the rest of them.
I think the Seth Cohen character on The OC was a watershed moment too because, as far as I know, he was the first nerd heartthrob in a really mainstream way.
I think between Paul Feig and Judd Apatow we’ve had a different image of the nerd coming to the mainstream than we’ve had before. I wouldn’t say Seth Rogen is a nerd. I’ve been around him, and he’s not awkward at all. It’s always hard to know whether you call someone who’s really funny, and sharp and socially with it nerdy or not. They put a certain kind of nerd on the screen but I don’t think they themselves are nerds. But I think the McLovin character in Superbad was a really interesting nerd.
Oh, I can’t believe I left this out. Dawn Wiener in Welcome to the Dollhouse is the single greatest female nerd character I’ve ever seen on screen.
And I also love the three nerdy boys in Freaks & Geeks: Sam, Neal Schweiber and Bill [Haverchuck].
So now that you’ve written the book, are you prepared to be the nerd expert?
We’ll see if I become the go-to nerd expert. I’m doing Fox & Friends. I don’t know if I’ll get Colbert or not. They’ve called me, but who the hell knows what’s going to happen?
That’ll be rough.
They’re going to give me a wedgie and throw things at me.
Do you get anxious about that? That you could be potentially be labeled a nerd again although you’ve changed your lifestyle not to be a nerd?
I don’t mind people asking me if I’m a nerd. That’s one of the interesting things about it becoming a de-stigmatized category that people, at least in theory, think is cool. If people are falsely claiming to be nerds, I shouldn’t be one to recoil when I’m called a nerd.
But then you can have the nerd smackdown: No, I’m a nerd. No I’m a nerd.
Yeah, I hope to have nerd one-upsmanship on Fox & Friends or with Brian Lehrer.
[We digress for a moment and then Ben seems to remember something he’d wanted to say but I’d never asked.]
One of the things I was trying to do with this book—and I don’t know if I succeeded—but I was trying to do something with nonfiction something the novel does, which is to show how the personal relates to the social, political and historical. So that you empathize with people it’s not easy to empathize with. I think journalists ridicule too much.
Do you already have another project or book in the works?
Yeah, it’s going to be nonfiction, the history of the step family.
So you come from a divorced family?
Yeah, my parents are divorced. My sister is a playwright and we kind of obsessively write about our childhood and family.
But you haven’t written a memoir yet. This is sort of close to memoir in some ways.
What I don’t like about contemporary memoir is how it’s so utterly centered around one person’s perspective. And to me the function of fiction and what’s so good about the novel is that it inhabits multiple perspectives. And if it is from a first-person perspective, it’s usually incredibly critical of that person and ridiculing of that person. Whereas I feel memoir has recently become a ritual of blaming others and the great self-flagellating memoirs have turned out to be novels [laughs].
