Courtesy of Live Nation
Audio By Carbonatix
Before Nick Offerman was a famous actor, he was a woodworker.
Growing up in Illinois, Offerman learned subsistence skills from his family of farmers, including carpentry.
It served him well in theater school at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he started out, by his own admission, as not a very good actor.
“I got in and then we auditioned for the plays and they were like, ‘Oh no, you’re terrible.’ The whole time in college I couldn’t get cast, and rightly so: I hadn’t figured out naturalism yet,” he says.
Carpentry saved the day.
“We had a scene shop class,” Offerman recalls. “I started using the tools and everybody’s jaws dropped and said, ‘Where in the world did you learn how to hammer a nail?’ As though I had just built a rocket ship. And so immediately I was able to exist and earn money in the theater community with my friends, building scenery, choreographing fights, being of value with the skills that I did have.”
Carpentry evolved into woodworking; while taking building gigs in Los Angeles to make ends meet, Offerman realized that his skills could be used on a smaller scale.
Building Craftsman-style houses, “when you learn that joinery in that kind of construction, it just clicked,” he explains. “One day I was like, ‘If I shrink this down, this is how an heirloom French dining table is made. This is fine woodworking.’ And so I accidentally became a great woodworker.”
Decades on, Offerman is both a celebrated actor and a passionate woodworker. In between roles on TV shows including “Parks & Recreation” and “Fargo” and in movies such as “21 Jump Street” and “Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” he’s continued to hone his craft; his L.A.-based Offerman Woodshop employs four craftspeople and sells handmade objects such as cribbage boards, ring boxes, tables and coasters.
Woodworking is both the subject of Offerman’s sixth book, “Little Woodchucks: Offerman Woodshop’s Guide to Tools and Tomfoolery,” and his show in Phoenix tonight: “Big Woodchuck: An Evening of Comedy with Woodworking and Bookish Mirth.”
The event, which starts at 7 p.m. at the historic Celebrity Theatre, still has tickets available; prices start at $65.57.
We recently spoke with Offerman in advance of the show. Though the interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity, we thought it was best to present it in a Q&A format, and just let the man speak.
Our talk began awkwardly, when neither we nor Offerman’s team could figure out how to turn off the AI notetaker.
Phoenix New Times: We’re anti-AI around here.
Nick Offerman: Well, it’s funny. My book is basically an anti-AI screed, but I live in a way, thankfully – Megan (Offerman’s wife, actress Megan Mullally) and I talk about this a lot – we’re very grateful that paparazzi don’t bother us generally.
We kind of learned early on when I was first with her 25 years ago during “Will and Grace,” there were people around us that we realized that you kind of have to solicit the paparazzi to be plagued by them. You’re sort of complicit. … And so we feel the same way about AI. We have to figure as very visible people that most of our lives are already stolen by AI. They’re already using so much of what we’ve put into the world. And so we just are grateful that we live in a way that we’re not going to show up on the Epstein files.
Oh, Lord. That’s the least anybody can hope for in this day and age. I should stop waking up and rolling over and looking at my phone because it just sets the tone for the day. It’s weird times that we’re living in. And are you going to address any of these weird times in your show in Phoenix? What’s the show going to be like?
Well, it’s a comedy show/book tour. This is my sixth book and it’s woodworking for the family. My third book is called “Good Clean Fun” and it’s a proper woodworking textbook, and I’m really proud of it because when I sat down to write a woodworking book, I thought, “Oh, I can make this a blast.” And it is– it’s so much fun. The book is like a party, but it’s also a legit teaching text and it’s very highly regarded in that right. But I just thought, man, if every book in school was fun, I would know a lot more about biology right now.
So my new book and my co-author, whose name is Lee Buchanan, she’s doing the tour with me, we legitimately talk about the book. And the book is to encourage people – whether you have kids or not, kids can be literal or figurative, family can be the same – to get with people who make things with their hands or who want to make things together and spend time with people and make things for each other or for yourselves. It’s so healthy and so much fun to create the world around you rather than let Amazon curate your life.
They’re very good at appealing to our human laziness where it’s like, “Well, sure, I could make a lasagna or I could press this button on my phone and someone will bring me a perfectly fine medium lasagna. And the benefits of making your own lasagna are so multi-fold. It’s so much more incredible than just the convenience of the time that you’ve saved.
My favorite writer, Wendell Berry, talks about this: Our industrial nation has gotten so good at selling us time-saving. So then you’re left with this time and they’re like, “Oh, you’ve got time on your hands. How about this video game? How about this TikTok algorithm? Look at our channels, look at our channels.” And I, for one, would rather be pulling weeds in my garden or looking at the birds on my bird feeder or making a set of tongs or a sawhorse because at the end of my diversion, I’ve made something I’ve added to the world in a positive way rather than destroy fossil fuels or time or attention or what have you.
And so this is a multi-tentacled to answer to a simple question. So the show is like a comedy show. I sing funny songs that people do laugh at. Thankfully, the only way I can get away with singing for an audience, I distract them with laughter and so they don’t notice my musicianship. And then my co-author, Lee, takes part and we talk about the book. She does some actual woodworking on stage while I sing about her doing woodworking and how that’s our dynamic. She makes everything, I put my name on it, we call it Offerman Woodshop and that’s called a collaboration.
Courtesy of Dutton
I think that’s an interesting point. I see some people around me choosing to spend increasing amounts of time in the digital space and others who are consciously rejecting that in favor of “the real world.” Why do you think that some members of the population are choosing to move away from technology back into the physical world?
I think it’s always been this way, and I have no interest in disparaging people who love to live in technology because I have good friends that are good people who waste all of their time looking at their gadgets, but they’re not hurting anybody directly.
I think that there have always been part of the population that are not interested in progressive thinking, that are happy to make their living, get their food, hug their kids and if you don’t trouble me, I won’t trouble you. And they just want to be left alone. And frankly, there’s the sad statistic of the percentage of our population that doesn’t vote, that doesn’t feel they need to participate in that.
So those people are out there and our industrial system really capitalizes on those people. They don’t want to have to think about where this hamburger came from. They just want a hamburger. But I think thankfully, then, there are people who understand that it’s our responsibility, even in a spiritual way: We’ve been given this gift of a life on this beautiful planet. We have cognition, we have hand-eye coordination, we have free will. We have the ability to choose what we do with the creation.
And frankly, I got turned onto it in my 20s reading Wendell Berry and then Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver and Robin Wall Kimmerer and Rebecca Solnit and Orwell and James Rebanks and Helen Rebanks. I got turned on to this thought. And honestly, the lazy child in me, that is in all of us, will always resent getting radicalized by this writing because now I can’t escape that awareness. I would have to become an alcoholic to turn off my awareness of the world and how we’re misusing it and how we’re making choices that are healthy for a small percentage of people’s bank accounts and very unhealthy for everyone and everything else. It’s a wild imbalance.
Frankly, I’m not a great writer. I’m not Robin Williams. The fact that people will come see my show or buy my books really fills me with hope that there are people that understand like, look, I love driving a car with gasoline. I love eating a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. Those things are engineered to be very pleasing and they work for 35 to 40 minutes. But I get it. We’re all complicit in this together. As soon as you run one wire to your home, you’re part of it. And so I’m doing my best to keep us in the conversation and say, look, something that helps me a lot is to not participate in ever deepening this whole idea that AI can run our world.
What do you hope audiences take away from the show?
Well, we’re selling our book. “Little Woodchucks” is ostensibly written for parents to teach your kids woodworking, but it’s with the awareness that most of the big wood chucks also don’t know how to swing a hammer or use a saw. And so it’s meant to be a gateway. It’s an open anti-AI screed. You don’t need software. We have had such a delightful life and world before these guys ever showed up.
I can’t speak to being a parent, but I have an awareness of the kids around me and the families around me, and I’ve got five nieces and a handful of godchildren. And (the book) poses the question: How much are you looking at your phone each day versus looking at your kid? … I hear about families where everyone gets their dinner and goes in their room and turns on their own channel, and I don’t like that. I feel like the companies want to isolate us so that we depend on buying their channels, buying everything coming through, so that’s what I want people to leave with: The idea is to try something new, to get out of the rut of what your day of scrolling or staring at your devices.
Wendell Berry, my favorite writer, talks about how humans keep making this mistake where we keep making bigger and bigger messes with our technology and we keep tricking ourselves into thinking the solution is more technology. And that’s obviously fallacious. Technology is great. Obviously, all these conversations require nuance because there are wonderful things that all aspects of technology bring us, but there are also many terrible things. And I am much happier if I live with as little technology as possible. And that’s what this book is about.
You’re a humorist. How do you stay a humorist today? How do you find humor in these times? How can we find humor in these times?
My best friend is a really funny artist, and we constantly say we depend on each other to not go burn something down because we’re also capable, dumb, strong guys. And so we have a lot of the necessary ingredients to create malfeasance. And so we’re like, please, let’s keep talking. Let’s keep talking. Because you see bad actors on the street and in our political leadership that you’re like, please don’t let me ever become so unkind. Please don’t ever let me be so blinded to the plight of everybody. Everybody. It’s that easy. Everyone is your neighbor. It’s not a hard concept to understand.
So for me, this is my medicine and my salvation: my friends George Saunders and Jeff Tweedy. We have a three-way text thread and we are in touch a lot about trying to live in kindness, trying to live in humor, and we’re lucky that a lot of our work has successfully gotten that across.
I’m just going to read you a quick Wendell Berry poem that puts this much more eloquently than I was trying to.
“A Warning to My Readers” by Wendell Berry:
Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.
I love it.
Isn’t it great?
Anything else you want to tell me about the Phoenix show?
I mean, no, I think I’ve flapped my gums a good deal here. First and foremost, it’s just a really fun show, and tonight actually is the first night, and so I’m a little nervous because tonight I figure out the blend.
We did a book tour that was for families, for kids to come, and it was super fun. I’ve got video components and my songs are really fun. I love my songs. Then I did a comedy tour in the U.K. that was with the book, but it was much more adult and had some sexy songs. I have a song called “Eating Ass,” for example. And so this tour, I’m now trying to blend the two and I think it’s going to be fine, but tonight is when I’ll begin the recipe. So Phoenix is actually the last stop, and so you’ll have the most refined version. So that’s what I would say to your readership: Rest assured, by the time I get past Tucson, you should be in good shape.
“Big Woodchuck: An Evening of Comedy with Woodworking and Bookish Mirth.” 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 19. Celebrity Theatre, 40 N. 32nd St. Tickets start at $65.57.
