Nick Offerman Wants You to Laugh at and Improve Yourself

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Photo provided by Nick Offerman

Nick Offerman

Nick Offerman is a man of many hats. He’s an award-winning actor, writer, comedian and wood craftsman. As such, he considers himself to be a “curious student of life.” Best known for his portrayal of Ron Swanson on NBC series “Parks and Recreation,” the mustached one is always thinking of ways to better himself and help others.

“I’m well aware of my failings as a human being, as we all are flawed by definition,” Offerman says. “We’ll never be done improving ourselves because we’re human beings and human nature would deem that we’ll never be perfect. Even Gandhi was very vocal about how he always still had work to do.”

As a result, Offerman has chosen to use his current “All Rise” standup tour as a forum to explore the human condition in the 21st century and how to better ourselves with sidesplitting results. The show mixes his offbeat humor, deadpan delivery and musical abilities with thoughtful discussion of important topics facing humanity. It’s a show where audience members laugh and think, sometimes at the same time.

“I love asking the questions of the day. What’s bothering me? What’s on my mind? What am I trying to get better at within me and without me? And I love sharing that with an audience,” Offerman says. “I consider it a great privilege to get to travel around the country, meet the population about 2,000 people at a time and say, ‘Let’s all come together and have a laugh about what jackasses we all are.’”

As a theater-trained actor, Offerman didn’t have early aspirations to do standup. But during his time on “Parks and Recreation,” colleges started requesting him to perform standup.

“I said, ‘what the heck?’ And started writing material because I wanted to take advantage of communicating directly, not through a script or through a fictional narrative, but just me sharing my thoughts with an audience,” he says. “And when I discovered that I could make people laugh doing that, it was incredibly gratifying. It’s one of the luckiest things I can imagine a person can get paid to do.”

During his standup set, he’ll occasionally bring out his ukulele that he built. Offerman has spent the last 20 years as a woodworker and has an avid obsession with building furniture and other things.

“I think the best thing I’ve made so far is my first canoe, an 18-foot wooden canoe built of mostly western red cedar and then my first ukulele that is made almost entirely of mahogany,” Offerman says. “Both of those artifacts, whether I’m paddling the canoe across a river or I’m entertaining an audience with a ukulele playing a song that I think is mostly identifiable as a musical composition, they both feel like I’m exhibiting a superpower.”

“I learned early on that if I keep the people laughing, they don’t notice quite how clumsy of a musician that I am,” he adds. “So, when you make your own instrument, there is a magic to it… It casts a bit of a glamour over the audience. It blurs their vision and casts a complimentary veil over their ears to where they think they’re hearing something good. Even though it’s just me.”

Bonus: Full Q&A with Offerman

You grew up in the Midwest. What was that time like? What were visits like to Milwaukee?

I grew up southwest of Chicago in a little town called Minooka… Growing up in Illinois, and having Wisconsin and Minnesota be our idea of God’s country, in a frugal household with four kids means that one of the highlights of my youth was visiting the Dells. But mostly we depended on a dad’s sense of two-lane county highways and mom’s nose for the best cheese curds and blueberry pie. And people often ask me in the last couple of decades for cultural and restaurant tips in Chicago, and I can usually point them to good theater shows to seek out.

But I never could afford to eat at good restaurants while I lived in Chicago. And so, I always come up short. I can tell them where to get an excellent value in a burrito or who had the cheapest cigarettes in 1991.

But when I think of Milwaukee, probably the coolest thing I ever got to do there was go to Brewers games when I was a kid and that’s back when they were in the American league. And Robin Yount, I wasn’t sure if he was a human or a creation of the Marvel Universe. But between that, the beer and the brats, I hold the city in very high regard.

I’ve also learned from afar that it’s a hot bed of great woodworking. And so, Wisconsin feels like the Maine of the Midwest, which I mean as an intense compliment.

Do you think your character Ron Swanson would ever consider moving to Milwaukee?

I think that he would find Milwaukee to be an oppressive metropolis. I think really much like myself, even though I live in Los Angeles, I long for the quietude of the countryside and I would always much rather be in the woods than sitting in traffic on the freeway. And I think probably Ron would feel that way even more than I do.

What can you tell me about your woodworking obsession?

I’m a lifelong carpenter, and then I became a fine woodworker about 20 years ago and I have a wood shop in Los Angeles called Offerman Woodshop. We have a really plum website you can check out, offermanwoodshop.com, and so that was how I made some of my living before I got my big break on Parks and Rec, building custom furniture pieces for people.

And when we were creating the show, “Parks and Recreation” and the writers were developing all the characters, I was on the phone with them and I said, “Hang on, sorry, I got to turn off the table saw. I’m at my wood shop.” And they said, “Oh, what’s that all about?” And I said, “Oh, I’m a woodworker. I’m a deep nerd for woodworking.” And they said, “That sounds hilarious. Can we come over there?” And I said sure. So, they all got in a bus and drove to my wood shop and I showed them around and they said, “Yeah, this is hilarious. Can we please make your character, Ron Swanson, a woodworker? We think people will really laugh at that.” And I said, “Yes, I would take that as an intense compliment.”

So, the thing I’m best known for, just playing this guy Ron Swanson on “Parks and Recreation,” he was a woodworker and that’s because I was a woodworker. So, through that sort of a life history of making things with my hands and tools, that’s why Amy Poehler chose me to cohost the show Making It with her.

Since the advent of social media, I now follow woodworkers all over the country, some of whom are in Wisconsin. And I’m pleased to inform you a lot of their best wood comes across the lake from the upper peninsula of Michigan. That’s a hot bed of hardwoods and sawyers.

Why do find most satisfying about being a woodworker?

[Woodworkers] are blessed with the ability to coordinate our brains with these prehensile thumbs. We’re able to do things like write out arithmetic and geometry and then translate that into using tools to alter the shape of wood and puzzle the pieces of wood together in ways that will hold our beer up off the floor. Or they will hold us up off the floor. We can put a bunch of us in this construct and sail it across the ocean and form a new nation. Or we can put strings on it and tune them and play a song to entertain people. So, it feels incredible.

You’re using woodworking to help the less fortunate in Los Angeles. Can you talk about your efforts there?

I had had very great teachers in my life, mainly my mom and dad and their parents and their siblings. I had an incredible theater teacher, a Japanese Zen master who taught me so much wisdom. And then a current teacher is my favorite writer, a Kentucky farmer named Wendell Berry. And all of these teachers, all of the sort of life changing wisdom that I’ve gleaned from them is all sort of based in the same simple human truths that have to do with decency and work ethic.

And so, as an entertainer, as someone who’s communicating to an audience for a living across my career, I’m not brilliant enough to just come up with great ideas. Otherwise I’d probably be a filmmaker, or I would be like writing a TV show. But instead, I’ve learned that I’m much better at passing along great ideas that much smarter people have had. And so, as a maker, my main channel for that communication is through woodworking.

And so, I use my woodworking and the way that it inspires my life to encourage people to find what their jam is. And maybe they will be woodworkers or maybe they’ll make incredible leather cowboy boots. And in Los Angeles, I’m aligned, and my shop is aligned with this great program called Would Works. And some really sharp, civically minded people came up with this program. It serves the homeless and people on Skid Row. It’s a program through which they can sign up, not to be paid, but to receive something on a credit.

So, anything they need to try and get back on their feet. So, they’ll sign up for a pair of glasses or a suit of clothes or first month’s rent and so whatever the price is, let’s say they want first month’s rent to try and get an apartment, let’s just say it’s 500 bucks. So, we figure out how many hours they need to work performing labor on these wood products. Would Works mainly makes cutting boards and coasters, and these simple but really attractive and charming sort of wood gift items. So that through the program, the person will perform the labor and at the end of it when they successfully have done it, then he or she will receive their first month’s rent.

But more importantly, then they have a work reference. Because when you lose your home, which happens to so many people. When you hear homeless, you kind of immediately think drug addiction or criminal lifestyle or something. But really the vast majority of our homeless are just people who were really unlucky.

There’s one woman whose story just blew me away here in Los Angeles. She was a single mom, working single mom, and her 13-year-old son got in a car accident and his arm was shattered. She didn’t have insurance. The medical cost of him getting his arm fixed, through that, she lost her home, she lost her son, she lost custody of her son. She ended up homeless because she couldn’t [pay]... It takes a sharp left into our terrible health-care problems. But what I’m driving towards is there are all these people who just have been on the receiving end of really bad luck.

And so, Would Works allows them to get a work reference where then a potential employer can call Would Works and say, “Hey, Judy is trying to get a job working here at my chair factory.” And we can say, “Well, she showed up for work three weeks in a row. She was sober.” That’s why it’s called Would Works because these people would work if they could. They just need a helping hand because they don’t have an address. They don’t have the simple building blocks that it requires to just fill out a job application.

So, my platform, my wood shop and the fact that I have some visibility in the world, I’m very grateful that we can help out with that idea. And it’s a really cool program that I wish every city in the nation would adopt because these people are our brothers and sisters. They’re part of our community. And so rather than try and hide them away or ignore the problem, we can help them get set up. They’re people just like us. They just want to have a chance to take care of themselves. And the way our society is set up, they require a little bit of help, getting into an apartment, getting a job that they can hold down. So, I’m glad to pitch in and it’s really charismatic. If you go to wouldworks.com you can see some great videos and see just what I’m talking about.

What did you enjoy most about writing The Greatest Love Story Ever Told: An Oral History, your most recent book with your wife Megan Mullally that came out last year?

Well, it was my fourth book, so I had written three books by myself that I’m very proud of and Megan had been bugging me to do a book together. And so, my favorite thing about doing it is the marriage lesson. The three books I had written were topics that I was obsessed with, that I was like, I have to work really hard for several months and do a ton of homework to produce book one, two or three.

And so, then when my wife said, “Hey, let’s do a book together.” It wasn’t in the same category where I was like, “Okay, well what is this idea about?” And she said, “Well, it’s just like it’s a book about us. It’s like sort of a memoir of our marriage. It’ll be funny and inspirational.” And I was like, “Well, this isn’t working like my other books, like you need to hook me on something I can freak out about.”

And so I sort of put her off for a few years... Something that I’ve learned, we’ve been together almost 20 years and I’m not proud that it took me so long to learn this lesson, but the lesson is when your wife asks you for something or your husband two or three or four times, if it’s not going to hurt you, just say yes. It doesn’t have to be your complete jam or if it’s something that they really want and it’s no skin off your nose, say yes. Collaborate with your spouse.

And so, I’ve done this a few times in a few different arenas with Megan, and so it turns out she has an incredible talent for curating a book. She was in the driver’s seat. She chose the chapter headings, the theme of each chapter, the shape of the book. She literally designed the book start to finish. We did a huge photo shoot of these incredibly beautiful and hilarious photographs that are in the book.

And so just by giving over and saying, “Okay honey, let’s do this together. You take the reins and I’ll ride shotgun.” And it turned out incredibly and people went crazy for it. It’s a bestselling book.

We’ve toured together as a comedian husband and wife. And now we’ve written this book together. And so, it was yet another lesson for me and what a lucky husband I am, especially when I have the wherewithal to shut up and tell my ego to sit down and follow my wife. So that’s my favorite thing about it is just that it is the continued lesson of listening to my spouse without needing to put my oar in, as it were.

“Parks and Recreation” premiered 10 years ago. How does it feel to have your character Ron Swanson continue to live on in pop culture?

It’s pretty hard to fathom, frankly. We made a wonderful show that really reached a large audience and continues to do so because of the streaming…. Because of the timing of this show, it just happened to coincide with the advent of social media and GIFs and memes. And so we just had the incredible good fortune of being in the right time at the right place so that our show, and particularly my character Ron Swanson in a lot of cases for some reason, was just the prime cut off the cow of television for people to enjoy, like putting funny words underneath.

We just made a show in the best way we knew how, and it worked. But then, all of the subsidiaries stuff sort of keeps it alive, with people sending each other all kinds of different content with characters from the show and notions from the show.

And so, it just has become this weird thing of like shrugging and saying, “all right.” I’m just grateful that the world seems to use my image for the power of laughter rather than somehow for the power of darkness.

Every once in a while, people send me stuff where they’re like, “Have you seen this? They put your face on all the characters in the ‘Full House’ television show opening credits.” And I say, “What a time to be alive. This is some crazy world.”

Nick Offerman performs at the Riverside Theater on Thursday, Sept. 12, at 7:30 p.m.