‘Do people think I’m mad? Just maybe a little confused’
John Wilson has been called a genius for his shows about New York’s ‘oddballs’. They express his fixation with complicated emotions, he tells
How best to describe the quirky US documentary series How To with John Wilson?
Perhaps Wilson himself could have a go.
“Um, well, I think that like a lot of comedy, you know, it has a way of sublimating all these really kind of dark, anxious feelings into something palatable,” he says in that vague, faltering manner familiar to anyone who has watched the show.
“I like to make you laugh at yourself as you are processing what may be, like, really difficult emotions as well? Because I do,” he adds, “feel very deeply about a lot of things.”
How To is not so much a comedy as a half-hour video essay on a variety of topics that take place on the streets of his native New York. Here he encounters the kooks and eccentrics that walk its streets, people always happy, it seems, to engage with strangers, even those wielding cameras. They have a habit of unexpectedly opening up, too, and so while Wilson will try to get them talking about a particular topic – how to make a risotto, say, or how to get rid of batteries – they end up revealing deep and hidden truths about themselves.
“I have this vision in my head of what each programme will be about,” he says, “but the moment somebody says something interesting, or does something a little different, I kind of just leave [the original subject] and dive into that other thing instead. It’s stream of consciousness, but in real time.” It is difficult to talk about How To without reaching for hyperbole because, really, there’s nothing else like it on television. Each episode is a work of art, a small masterpiece, funny and melancholic, always fascinating, frequently jaw-dropping.
There have been three series and as each tries (and mostly fails) to stick to its subject, the screen fills with an overlapping montage of images and snapshots to help illustrate these notional “tutorials”: How to Split the Check, How to Be Spontaneous. In the episode on
How to Find a Public Restroom, he zooms in on water bottles that have been discarded in the gutters, filled with the urine of pedestrians who couldn’t wait any longer. Throughout, Wilson offers up a meandering narrative in a high, anxious voice suggestive of a man uncertain about everything.
“The aim,” he says, of his staccato delivery, “is just to get close to the audience.” His digressions are endless. When addressing his own lack of fitness and a desire to beef up at a nearby gym, he finds himself instead attending a giant pumpkin contest, in which the competitors are invariably male because, as he points out, of “the masculine urge to grow”.
During another episode, about cryogenics, a 75-year-old interviewee unexpectedly confesses that, as a much younger man desperate to stem his sexual urges, he hacked off his own testicles with a razor blade.
“That was one of the most, like, emotional interviews I’ve ever done,” Wilson, 37, says from his home in Queens. He’s dressed in a threadbare T-shirt with JEOPARDY! on the front, and speaks much as he does onscreen: plenty of “ums” and “ahs”, lots of throatclearing. “But, like, I really crave those kind of complicated emotions. They fascinate me.”
In this way, a show ostensibly about everyday oddballs actually reveals itself to be intensely sensitive and innately human. All of us, Wilson shows, no matter how idiosyncratic, crave connection and common ground, whether through a shared love of vintage vacuum cleaners or energy drinks that come in bright and vivid colours. And though his interview style can make him seem like an oddball himself, there’s a fierce intellect at
I still have no idea who watches it – but I do get recognised in the street
work. In relating to his interviewees quite so intimately, he makes Louis Theroux look like Piers Morgan.
And like Theroux, he tends to interview people standing up, while walking or working; the absence of comfort, it seems, somehow encourages greater intimacy.
“People,” he notes sagely, “do like to talk.”
John Wilson has always made movies, and they’ve always been conversational. “The first I made were in my bedroom for something called The John Show, just me in front of the camera on a fake talk show where I was all the characters. I’ve had a lot of different phases, and made a lot of weird, experimental stuff.”
Much of it found its way online, and eventually came to the attention of the Canadian writer and actor Nathan Fielder, who introduced him to HBO. The channel quickly offered him the chance to continue what he was doing but on a grander scale, on the correct assumption that the results would be compelling, and unique. His overriding driving force, he insists, is simply to connect with people, whatever their individual quirk. “That was totally unexpected,” he says, “but great.”
This is how he can be speaking about those public toilets in New York one minute, and end up at the Burning Man festival in Nevada the next.
Then, on the cross-country drive back, he meets a man who takes him to his underground nuclear bunker, and the first question he asks this individual is: “Do you have a toilet down here?” Wilson is almost routinely invited into the homes of strangers. He rarely needs to be asked twice.
“In my show about cleaning your ears,” he says, an episode prompted by the fact that his own ears were blocked with wax, “I ended up looking at sound, and noise in general, how noisy Manhattan is, and what it’s like to live next to a lot of noise. So I spoke to people with noisy neighbours, and neighbours who were feuding. The ability to find someone with an interesting story in that kind of situation is actually pretty high…”
Nevertheless, his approach requires much trial and error, and a lot of conversations that go absolutely nowhere. (His metaphorical cutting room floor must be several feet deep.)
Because the US is a litigious country, the production team approaches everyone he encounters to sign release forms – and so, no, he says, “I haven’t been sued. I always explain precisely what I’m doing, and I don’t think people ever think I’m mad… just maybe a little confused? I think mostly they think I’m this really talkative camera person who’s about to lose their job.”
The show’s success has brought him many plaudits. The New York Times labelled him a genius. That must be nice, I suggest. He shrugs.
“It’s all been… pretty relaxed,” he lies. “When the show came out, I had no idea, and I still have no idea, who’s watching it, but I do get recognised in the street, which is strange, because I thought I’d safeguarded against that.”
Wilson is never front-of-camera. The only glimpse we ever get of him is if he unwittingly catches himself in a reflection in a shop window. Or a bathroom mirror. “It’s funny, I thought this show would be super niche, so to see that it’s actually connected with so many people… That’s – it’s nice.”
Determined to bow out on top, he suggests there will be no more How To, but is instead now working on something more long-form, a film that will, he insists, “maintain the same production style”. One thing is for certain: he’s not short of subject matter.
“America does have a lot of eccentrics,” he says. “And the more ordinary it seems – well, the weirder it gets.”
‘How To with John Wilson’ is on BBC iPlayer now