John Safran

And it was like all the years, suddenly this whole – the whole circus had become the mainstream.

So, yes, therefore I –

That's why I tried to shift into, hey, I'm going to look into cigarettes and stuff like that.

Although kind of, you know, I was still me in that.

And there seemed to be a lot of visits to churches and synagogues for a book that was about cigarettes.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it didn't really work.

But I feel like with my upcoming projects, God willing, God willing that I can still get work or whatever, is, yeah, I'm feeling like I need to –

lean in a bit more to religion again.

I feel like it's once again sort of being dodged around when discussing things and it's like, who better than me?

And also the other cool thing about religion as a storyteller is it's real shorthand to an audience that, oh, this is something that should be treated very delicately.

So I remember someone saying to me, she goes, John,

When I watch your shows and she goes, at the start of a story where there's the wide shot and it's like some temple, religious temple, and there's this little you walking along.

She goes, oh, God, oh, God.

And just that throws her off because it's such shorthand for like, yeah, you just should not be –

And I think I learned a bit of that from when I was young.

My dad used to watch these Marx Brothers films on TV and I used to watch with him.

And I noticed that at the start, it never started off with just –

they'd just been clowns or whatever.

They'd always start off setting up this very earnest or pompous or something kind of situation like either like a posh garden party or the opera or something like that and they'd kind of like build this sort of serious world a little bit to be serious world building that then when the Marx Brothers kind of came in on it, you kind of go, oh, my God, but they're at the opera or whatever.