God Needs a Hobby
On the road with Dan Harmon, the exiled creator of Community, now sharing his deepest confessions with a live audience:
“So Harmon gets up onstage, confesses to the crime of being Dan Harmon — bad boyfriend, high-functioning alcoholic, approval-hungry self-Googling6 mansion-owning gardener-having man-baby, petty, loathsome human — and somehow the results are cathartic and funny, and the essential truth that we are all shitty people and therefore we are all in this together is affirmed. Sometimes it’s like being at a weird college seminar run by a substitute teacher in the middle of a drunken meltdown and sometimes it’s like hanging out in Dan Harmon’s living room. Sometimes people from the audience wander onstage; sometimes when this happens (or when Jeff says something like How’s everybody doing tonight? and Harmon interrupts and tells the crowd that they don’t have to answer that with applause if they don’t want to) it feels like all the basic assumptions and rules of entertainment are up for debate. It’s almost never boring, it’s usually funny, and whenever the energy flags, Jeff Davis will cue up a hip-hop beat on his iPad and Harmon will start freestyle rapping, usually about fucking somebody’s mom, and dancing like a 3-year-old in footie pajamas who’s been allowed to stay up late to put on a show for cocktail-party guests.”