An Interview with Dave Nadelberg

Dave Nadelberg: Quick clarity; I am a writer but I’m not *the* writer of Mortified. The premise of Mortified is that adults are getting on stage and sharing some of their most embarrassing childhood things that they wrote. If anything, I am the editor and curator. It’s a team of us all around the country who are stationed to kind of help people in local cities…in fact, we’re opening up a Mortified here in Minneapolis and I’m so excited. In early 2016, there’s going to be a Mortified show in the Twin Cities. Tomorrow, I’m going to be training a team of local producers in what makes bad writing good writing so they can meet people who wrote awful things when they were teenagers and help them figure out which ones are good for strangers.

D: I like that that’s my ‘background’.

D: “My background is that when I was 15, I wrote a love letter.”

D: Yeah, I did. I wrote a love letter to a girl when I was 15, growing up in Michigan and I found that letter in my early 20’s and I started reading it to friends…

D: Oh, you’re a good researcher…that’s right.

D: The back of a poetry magazine submission form?

D: I’ll say this: the name of the poetry…it was for my high school poetry magazine…

D: It’s getting better…which I was the editor of, which would imply I’m a better writer.

D: But anyway, the magazine was called Etchings.

D: “Every year, we’re going to take submissions for Etchings. Sweet, sensitive poetry and artwork for Etchings.” So, I submitted to Etchings…”Etchings”…and on the back I wrote this love letter to this girl Leslie. I have no idea what happened to her, but for the past 15 years of my life, I’ve been doing this project because of a crush on some girl who does not have any clue. How creepy is that?

D: Not a clue. I mean, I don’t know what happened to her.

D: This is the most elaborate stalking project ever.

D: We laugh ‘cause it’s true.

D: That’s right. So, Mortified began as a stage show in Los Angeles and since then we do stage shows all over the world. We’re opening ones up in Dublin and London. We just did some in Amsterdam recently and the very international spot of the Twin Cities coming soon. But also we’ve done a film and you mentioned TV, we did a TV spinoff a couple of years ago where it was the Mortified sessions which was like a talk show. But, the main thing that we do now is the Mortified podcast.

D: You can find the Mortified podcast at getmortified.com, iTunes, Stitcher and it’s a weekly series and it’s free. I think it’s the culmination of so much of what we do and it’s one of the best expressions of what we do and I’m so excited that now we have a version of Mortified that anybody can access for free, regardless of their geography, their age, they don’t have to be 21 or over to get in…

D: Well, we don’t have 18 year olds performing in the show…

D: I just meant enjoying it.

D: No! You’re not an idiot. It’s a fair…

D: Wait, are you *mortified*?

D: Did you make that mistake on purpose to promote my…that’s amazing!

D: Very clever.

D: Yeah, I meet with strangers all the time, they give us their…and not just me, the whole Mortified team…childhood diary entries is our main bread and butter…love letters, lyrics, poetry, home movies, bar mitzvah videos, whatever you got…

D: That’s right.

D: Exhibitionistic.

D: It’s a hard word.

D: We curate everything as opposed to doing an open mike because not everything we saved as kids is actually funny to strangers. Some of the stuff we wrote, it requires a certain context. For instance, yesterday, here at Nerdcon: Stories, I read aloud a poem I wrote about an imaginary bagpiper, which is a very bizarre thing for a kid to have written. And it is only funny, in my opinion, when you know a certain context which is that I wrote this poem not wanting to write a love poem or a sex poem, because lots of teenagers were writing that and for whatever reason, when you hear this poem about a bagpipe, not about sex, there are certain moments that sound very sexual. It’s funny only when you can hear it through that filter…

D: Yeah. And so we try to help people with that filter. We say “here’s what’s going to help people invest and laugh at your childhood writing.” And for whatever reason they agree to that.

D: Did you write anything as a kid?

D: You think you really did?

D: Do you live close by?

D: I’m stalking you now.

D: Alcohol?

D: Basically, when people come to us and this is very nerve-wracking when they say, “Hey, I’ve got some journals and stuff to share with you”, the good news is when something’s ten years old, it feels like a lifetime ago, though it’s revealing and raw and it’s sort of like an audition but it’s not. We’re not here to judge your stuff. One of the rules we have is no “Simon Cowells”. I do not want us to be judging someone, like “you’re not good enough”. They didn’t write this to impress us or to be impressive and our job is to help them…we’re looking for ‘minutes’. At worst, we’d find one minute of good stuff, so our ‘rejection’ would be that we didn’t find enough; we found a little, but we’re looking for 8 minutes of material that can make an audience laugh.

D: The primary function of Mortified is to make people laugh. That said, I think the reason we’ve been able to survive and be around for over 14 years is that people show up for the laughter and we sucker punch them with pathos and poignancy. It’s something that…I wouldn’t say is therapy, but it’s therapeutic. There are Mortified people, especially if you watch Mortified Nation (which is on Netflix), there are moments in that…we tackle anything a kid deals with, including things as unfunny as child abuse.  But, we’ll find a way to balance heartbreak with humor. And I find that very…politically, even though our show is not political, I find that very uplifting. I find it very upsetting when I see things in pop culture where people have an illness or they’re facing a hardship and it’s presented intensely dramatically and that’s not how life is. There’s a range of emotions and we try to show the roller-coaster.

D: It’s the Transformers fanfic…

D: (laughs)

D: I think that there’s something about…obviously they have to reveal some sort of availability…I think there’s something that when you listen to the writings of people when they’re young, as opposed to a ‘memoir’ show when you’re writing about a past time, they don’t have an adult perspective. It’s like a kind of time travel. It’s like a Jedi mind trick. That kid who wrote about their pain and struggle, he has no clue…it’s cliché to say “it’ll get better” and “I will survive” and some people may roll their eyes but it’s something I firmly believe in and that people can latch on to. I think that’s what it is.

D: Yeah, the thing you don’t know when you’re a teenager, if you’re going through depression, life doesn’t ever get perfect…sometimes it gets worse, sometimes it does get better, but what’s different about you as an adult as opposed to when you were twelve is…it didn’t kill you. That’s an important message I want people to walk away with. At the end of every show, we say “that’s today’s show and we’d like to remind you as we do on every edition of Mortified, we are freaks, we are fragile and we all survived”. That’s something I believe in.

D: Is that too heavy?

D: All right.

D: Hilarious.

D: Thank you.

Idiot’s editor’s note: As another in a string of mea culpas, I want to say we turned the mics of *way* too early, as Dave stayed and talked with us for twice as long as we had been recording about Mortified, the Mortified Sessions TV show, the Mortified Nation documentary, pitching for humorless Comedy Central executives, why LA gets a bad rap sometimes and more about Mortified expanding to the Twin Cities and beyond. So, “sorry” from an interviewer still learning the ropes and it looks like I owe Dave some Transformers fan fic. Thanks again!