Rainn Wilson

speaker

3,063 appearances 12 recordings 7 series first heard Jul 2024 last heard 7 Jul

Rainn Wilson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Know Thyself · E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution · 21 Jan 2025 podcast

And, you know, when I hear about how much that show has meant to people, it really moves my heart.

Well, it's interesting. I created a company a long time ago called SoulPancake. It was an early YouTube company, and we had over 3 million subscribers, and we did a lot of positive, inspiring content. One of the things we did, we did a long-form documentary called Laughing Matters, and it was about the intersection between comedy and mental health.

And the reason I'm going into it in that way is I realize now after a lot of therapy and a lot of soul searching that comedy for me did come out of a certain measure of pain and trauma. It was a coping mechanism that got me through a difficult childhood and also was a way for me to connect with the outside world in a way where I always felt alienated and cut off and like I never fit in.

And comedy was my way in. Like, I was never gonna be popular. I was never gonna be good looking. I was never gonna be a jock. I was never gonna be... you know, smooth and charming, but I could do weird impersonations and I could do funny pratfalls and I could tell jokes. And that allowed me to fit in.

And it's funny, the professor and author, Arthur Brooks, talks about that in terms of comedy, that you can't... Two things can't exist in the brain at the same time, which is like, you can't live in comedy and laughter, and you can't live in depression at the same time. They're like pistons working like this.

Yeah, exactly. Or love and fear can't occupy the same brain space at the same time. You can literally try and feel love and fear at the same time. You can't do it. You know, they're an antidote for each other. And laughter and sadness are the same way. It's like the drama masks, you know. It's the smiling and the crying drama masks from ancient Greece. And...

You know, out of a really difficult childhood that was incredibly challenging in its own way. We've all had very challenging childhoods, I'm sure. There are ones far worse than mine. Mine kind of was centered around a loveless marriage and a lot of like suburban ennui. You know, I wasn't like...

beat, you know, there wasn't like, you know, grotesque things happening to me like happened to a lot of people in the world. So I want to I want to couch it in that. But again, comedy was my way out. Comedy was my way of soul searching. So All of a sudden, I signed up for an acting class. I found I was pretty good at it. I made people laugh. I played characters. I did funny walks.

I did funny voices. I told jokes. I did improvisation. I got a lot of accolades for that. These tools that I had learned in this kind of pressure cooker of a really... kind of disconnected, loveless child space, all of a sudden came in very handy. And then I went to acting school, and then all of a sudden I was working as a professional actor.

But then I got onto some TV shows, and here I was on one of the all-time great comedies. But again, while I was on the show, very little awareness of the healing properties of comedy. And I think it's something really worth exploring and digging into because, you know, the way the world is right now, It's very interesting. There's not many good comedies on television anymore.

And they're hard to find. You have to sift through a lot to kind of find them. And we need them more than ever. And one of the reasons I heard that a lot of like the streaming services and TV networks are not picking up new comedies is because people keep turning back to the old ones. They're watching Seinfeld and

and Friends and The Office and Parks and Rec and some of those old great comedies, 30 Rock, for their comedy fix. But it's healing because you cannot laugh and cry at the same time. And even if you get your fix of half an hour here or there, it can take you through a day.

Yeah, it was a coping mechanism for me. I loved the classic American sitcoms of the 70s and early 80s. I grew up and watched every episode of MASH. I watched... Cheers, Bob Newhart, Mary Tyler Moore reruns, Bewitched and Dick Van Dyke and F Troop. And the list just goes on and on. I just devoured anything having to do with half hour comedy.

Then I discovered Saturday Night Live when it first came out in the late 70s and Money Python around the same time, which they would run on PBS all the time. You couldn't just go to YouTube and watch clips. You had to really search for great comedy out there. And Mad Magazine and Cracked Magazine. And these got me through my childhood. I just was drawn like a moth to a flame.

And I think because of this kind of alienated emotional desert that I lived in, in suburban Seattle, that was a healing balm for me. Then, you know, I remember talking about, I don't know if it was in Soul Bloom, I also wrote a book called The Bassoon King that was kind of my comedic memoir. And I was such an odd child.

I remember watching other kids in school to be like, how do normal people behave? You know, I'm gonna watch people in the lunchroom. I'm gonna see how they behave and then I'm gonna copy them. And my parents were very odd, very odd people. So I knew I was not gonna like behave like my parents. So what do you do? So I'd go in the lunchroom and then I'd see Mike Wentzel

go up to John Valadez and say, hey buddy, how was your weekend? Give me a bite of that. And then like take his French fry or something like that. I'd be like, oh, okay, great. And I would literally, maybe not literally, but I would almost exactly copy that kind of behavior. But, of course, when you're trying, it's like an alien trying to fit into, you know, a human guise.

You know, when you try and go up to someone then and say, hey, buddy, how's it going? How was your weekend? Clap on the back. Take the french fry. It just, it rings hollow. And it was out of that and out of that oddness that, again, that coping mechanism of comedy came out so that I found that when I would be the cut-up and the goof-off, It worked for me.

I found when I took an improv class or took an acting class that I could make people laugh. And there was a kind of a, it's the cliche of the sad clown. There's a lot of cliche in and around what we're talking about. We're talking about comedy and tragedy. We're talking about the sad clown. We're talking about, you know, crying and laughing at the same time. But there's truth in that.

That's one of the reasons that they are cliches.

Showing 2181–2200 of 3,063 · page 110 of 154