Daniel O'Brien's Newsletter: April '25
Hello! This is the official substack of me, Daniel O'Brien, Emmy/WGA/Peabody-winning Senior Writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, author of How to Fight Presidents and its adaptation Your Presidential Fantasy Dream Team, Head Writer for the Cracked De-textbook and editor and contributing author for You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News (a New York Times Bestseller), and co-host of the popular hang out podcast Quick Question with Soren and Daniel (now on YouTube). I co-created, co-wrote and co-starred in Cracked After Hours, which is easily the most popular thing I've ever done, but that's in the past. This is the latest issue of my substack, a thing you signed up for on purpose.
Every month I will send an email with a list of what I'm reading, updates on whatever I'm working on if applicable and that's really it!
No new creative things to announce, but one new creative thing to almost announce, which is very frustrating for me and I imagine you. Until then, books!
Werewolf Lawyer: (Shea Serrano)
I've been a fan of Shea's writing since I first came across it on The Ringer years ago, he always just seemed like someone who was physically incapable of not being funny. I'd read his writing about teams I didn't care about, sports I didn't follow, musicians I'd never heard of-- anything. He writes like he's your cooler, older sibling sharing something he finds exciting and if one day he decided to publish "The Phonebook as Interpreted by Shea Serrano," I'd be the first to preorder it. Werewolf Lawyer is either exactly what it sounds like or almost exactly what it sounds like, depending on whether or not you think it sounds like "a lawyer who is a werewolf" or "a lawyer for werewolves" (it's the second one).
Glory Days/New Teeth/Spoiled Brats: (Simon Rich)
Honestly fuck Simon Rich he's so good and so talented and is doing exactly the kind of writing I want to be doing and he seems nice and I'm very jealous and I hate his guts. "Here's a funny short story that's like what if a baby was a detective or What if Super Mario but in real life?" fuck you, I want to write that. Simon Rich thinks he can just write the kind of quick, hilarious, irreverent-until-they're-poignant short stories that I want to write-- why? Because he came up with the ideas first and wrote them? Seems unfair. I burned through these three short story collections incredibly quickly. Glory Days is probably my favorite of this batch, probably because it's written by an older and more thoughtful version of Rich, and I myself am also now older and more thoughtful.
Our American Cousin: (Tom Taylor)
So this play is notable for exactly one thing and I'd be honestly shocked if the majority of people subscribing to this particular newsletter didn't already know what that one thing was: this was the play Abraham Lincoln was seeing when actor-turned-kook John Wilkes Booth shot him in the back of that massive Lincoln head of his. I learned this fact at some point and gave it a home in my brain in case it ever came up in Jeopardy! or whatever. Certainly afterwards no one was really interested in restaging this play and giving it a second chance, but even without the assassination association it was a fairly forgettable and unremarkable play. But it occurred to me that I hadn't read it. My brain told me to read it, that's the thing about brains. I don't know if I'm going to, like, do something with it, but sometimes my brain says "Hey it might be useful to have specific familiarity with this forgettable play," and I try to respect my dumb brain when it tells me things like that. Some good lines in a show that-- I agree with history-- would not be remembered for anything if not for That One Thing. It did provide two antiquated colloquialisms that really tickled me; referring to someone who is multi-talented as "some pumpkins" struck me for whatever reason ("Wal you can sing and paint and play on the pianner and in your particular circle you are some pumpkins." "Some pumpkins. First I am small potatoes and now I am some pumpkins.") In the other case, a person is (pejoratively) referred to as a "sockdologizing old man trap," a word I think was invented by and for this play. If I were writing for The Simpsons, "sockdologizing" would be moved straight to the top of the pile of "impossibly old things to drop into Mr. Burns's idiolect." It is-- funnest fact-- the word Booth used as his cue to shoot Lincoln, because the line usually got a huge reaction and he thought the laugh break would provide cover for the gunshot. What preparation. What a thought process. What a crazy guy.
That's the thing about brains, sometimes they tell you to do something before you know why and you end up learning things and making connections and turning wheels. (Another thing brains do is sometimes they get splattered all over the place if some dickhead shoots you in the back of the skull.)
Whelp! That's it! Call your parents, take walks, support your local food pantry because food banks and pantries are all struggling everywhere right now.