Jimmy O. Yang (performing a bit)
speaker
225 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Jimmy O. Yang (performing a bit)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It doesn't feel like you're, you know, writing a script and then just hoping that he'll, you know, that the actor will like want to do it more than once. It's a constant dialogue with him. It's a constant discussion and experimentation and a poking and prodding at the script to make sure we're getting it right. There's just no substitute for that.
And it's, you know, one of the many reasons I love him.
Well, it's simply a question that I've been asking myself for a really long time. I used to play this game as I drove around in traffic in L.A. where someone would cut me off on the freeway or we would be in traffic and someone would pull onto the shoulder and speed past me and cut the line.
And as a way of trying to stem off what you would call road rage, I would play a game in my head where I would say that guy just lost 10 points. Like I was imagining a scenario in which there was some kind of omniscient observer of human behavior. And I satisfied my own anger or displeasure with other people by imagining that that cost them in some cosmic way.
And so after Parks and Recreation ended and Brooklyn Nine-Nine was up and running and my friend Dan Gore who created with me was running that show every day. NBC very kindly said, you can sort of do whatever you want, and we'll give you at least one season on the air.
So I had been thinking about that game I played in my head about other people and about myself and judging my own behavior and doing things that I knew were maybe slightly iffy and how many points I lost or how many points I gained when I did certain things. And so that became the idea that I just liked the most of the ideas that I had. And I
I just pursued that and thought, all right, this is going to be weird. I'm going to do a half-hour comedy show about moral philosophy, but I don't know, maybe it'll work. I just sort of rolled the dice, and I'm glad I did because the experience of working on it was wonderful. It was a big hit.
Yeah, I mean, as far as you can determine anything these days is a big hit, it was at least a show that people watched and seemed to enjoy, and it seemed to resonate with people.
Oh, philosophy by far. I say that only because I had no religion really to speak of. My father's side of the family are Jewish, but my grandfather, his father, renounced Judaism when he was very young and became a devout atheist. My mother's side of the family was raised vaguely Methodist, I would say, but... I had no religious upbringing at all.
When I got to college I took a couple philosophy classes and really liked the way that philosophy was able to talk about ethics and morality and other topics without
limiting them in many cases without limiting them to who can apply for this right like that was always one of my problems with organized religion was that it was like this is the way the world works but it's only for this group of people it's not for that group of people it's only for you over here if you believe these sets of things we told the marketing team
When we were coming up with posters and advertising materials for the show, no harps, no puffy white clouds, no halos. This is not a show about Christianity. This is a show about philosophy.
Yeah, absolutely. This show is appearing on NBC at probably 8.30 on Thursday or something. And, you know, you can't say those words. So let's come up with a reason why you can't say them within the context of the show. It wasn't just that it was on NBC. Like, I wanted that show on.
Ideally to be able to be watched by people of all ages and it was I'm happy that that show was on NBC and not you know behind a paywall on a streaming service because I think that ultimately my bet which was just a conjecture at the time but my bet was that kids would like it. And it turned out to be true when we entered the COVID era and everybody was having to go to school from home.
My wife said, you know, everyone in William, my son's class, is watching The Good Place right now. Like you should do like a fun extracurricular like Zoom class where you watch episodes of The Good Place and talk about philosophy. And I was like, I don't know. Like, it feels – those kids are on – poor kids are on Zoom like six hours, eight hours a day and –
And she was like, I think they would like it. So I sent an email to the parents and we're like, if your kids would be interested in this, is this like a thing that, you know, we're all desperate for ways to occupy our kids' time these days. And immediately like 30 kids showed up. And so I ended up teaching this kind of like fun sixth grade class on philosophy where we watched episodes of the show.
And then I talked about, you know, Aristotle or Kant or something. And it was really fun. And the kids were really into the show and they really liked talking about that stuff.
It's a little rarefied, but I'll bet if you did a Venn diagram of Parks and Recreation watchers and NPR listeners, it's a pretty big intersection. Like it's not the craziest thing in the world, right? And also the joke works whether you know who those people are or not. If you've never heard their names, it still is funny. It's a funny little MC Escher logic loop that we wrote out there.
But, you know, there were a number of times that Leslie went on the local NPR station over the years, and it was just our chance to, like, make little jokes about the reality of listening to NPR. And that one, I don't remember who, I wish I remembered who pitched that. My guess would be that it was Ayesha Muharra, who was a writer on the show the whole time.
who loved NPR and she always loved writing those scenes and pitching jokes for those scenes. She's a wonderful writer. She writes on Hacks now, which is another show that I executive produce. But it was always fun to do NPR jokes. It was always a favorite exercise.
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