Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello, Hello, Hello, thank you for coming. My name
Speaker 1: is Maltain Bobbo, I host History botch you by pushing industries.
Speaker 1: I think there's a whole By show. Not long ago,
Speaker 1: in a probably ill advised experiment, all of us at
Speaker 1: Revisionist History decided to do two live shows, one in
Speaker 1: New York and one in Philadelphia. All kinds of people
Speaker 1: came to watch a little treat for the die hearts,
Speaker 1: and in the spirit of the experimentation, we thought we'd
Speaker 1: share a few excerpts from those shows with all of you.
Speaker 1: The real audience we've never done. From what you're hearing
Speaker 1: is me standing up in front of the crowd confessing
Speaker 1: I have no idea what's about to happen. They tried
Speaker 1: to get me to rehearse to night. I didn't want
Speaker 1: to do it. Um, So you're all kind of guinea pigs,
Speaker 1: for which I apologize, but I'm very excited. I broke
Speaker 1: out snazzy Adidas, the seer sucker, the whole thing. Um
Speaker 1: this is I rarely dressed up, so this is a
Speaker 1: very very big occasion for me. Um. So what we're
Speaker 1: gonna do is we At the time, I was working
Speaker 1: on an episode of revisionist history about a very well
Speaker 1: known movie, almost a perfect movie, except the writers had
Speaker 1: screwed up the ending. If you want to listen to
Speaker 1: that episode, it's called star Struck. You can check it
Speaker 1: out in the feed. It goes in a million directions,
Speaker 1: Gone with the Wind, Star Wars, Born, Samuel Goldwyn, car Accidents, Atlanta.
Speaker 1: We hung out in graveyards and took a group road
Speaker 1: trip to Margaret Mitchell's archives the University of Georgia. Very
Speaker 1: revisionous history mashup. But at the live show, I just
Speaker 1: wanted to zero in on the core question raised by
Speaker 1: the episode, which is what makes an ending work? Because
Speaker 1: the truth is, most endings don't work right. You sit
Speaker 1: in a movie theater and an hour three of the blockbuster,
Speaker 1: you think did no one at the studio gave any
Speaker 1: thought about how to wrap this thing up? That's what
Speaker 1: I wanted to get at. Why are endings so hard?
Speaker 1: So in our New York show at the town Hall,
Speaker 1: I invited the comedian Mike Burbiglia up to the stage
Speaker 1: to join me in the discussion. Brilliant, brilliant comedian, a
Speaker 1: member of the famous Georgetown University comedy Mafia, which we
Speaker 1: can talk about with Mike if we want it. Basically
Speaker 1: every indie comic worth the AsSalt went to Georgetown. I
Speaker 1: don't know why to do with frustrated Catholicism. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure he's about to go on tour with his show
Speaker 1: Old Man in the Pool, The Old Man in the Pool. Um,
Speaker 1: it's a brilliant, brilliant title. Um, And so he we
Speaker 1: can start with Mike, Mike, come on out, I hope
Speaker 1: get back there, fool. Thanks. So this is my favorite podcast.
Speaker 1: So it's a very strange sensation to be inside of
Speaker 1: my favorite podcast. I don't know how it got a Mike. Um.
Speaker 1: By the way, you weren't offended when I said you
Speaker 1: were part of the Georgetown University comedy by the legit, No,
Speaker 1: it's a description. I mean, gosh, it is John mulaney
Speaker 1: and Nikrale Gavian, Nikrol Jack the Nova. Yeah, there's just
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of them. Marling, Britt Marling, There's just
Speaker 1: there's so many. And by the way, Bradley Cooper, it's
Speaker 1: kind of unbelievable, you remember that. I'll tell you a
Speaker 1: funny thing about when I was I intersected with Bradley
Speaker 1: Cooper I never knew him except that we were in
Speaker 1: theater a Georgia at the same time. I may, I
Speaker 1: think maybe one year as a little older than me.
Speaker 1: And he was most famous on campus for being the
Speaker 1: most attractive person anyone I had ever seen that. But
Speaker 1: I'm not even kidding. I'm literally people would say, have
Speaker 1: you seen Bradley Cooper? I swear to God, not on
Speaker 1: a play? Have you seen him? Yeah, that's got to
Speaker 1: be hard. My life could be really hard sometimes, Mike. Okay. So,
Speaker 1: and the reason I wanted to talking with ennyings because
Speaker 1: I feel like I've often felt that no one's more
Speaker 1: obsessed with endings than I am. And I'll tell you why.
Speaker 1: And I say this also to say that I think
Speaker 1: you might be as obsessed as I am. I am
Speaker 1: someone who I will very often read a thriller and
Speaker 1: stop five pages before the end because I'm concerned that
Speaker 1: the author isn't going to pull it off, and I
Speaker 1: just don't want to be there for that. I was like,
Speaker 1: all right, it doesn't matter that I've spent three days
Speaker 1: getting to page tweet ninety five. Yeah, I just I
Speaker 1: can No. No, I'm similarly obsessed, you know, But I
Speaker 1: go through four or five endings before I land on
Speaker 1: that ending. You don't start with the ending of them?
Speaker 1: Then no. No. As a matter of fact, the old
Speaker 1: man in the pool, I'm deliberating right now between two different,
Speaker 1: distinctly different endings, and what weight describe the two options?
Speaker 1: Simply describe them emotionally? Is there a difference in the
Speaker 1: emotional It's I can't give away what the ending is.
Speaker 1: It's a little fundamental. But you know what I'm kidding,
Speaker 1: But you know what I'll do. I can tell you
Speaker 1: that the two different endings for my last show, which
Speaker 1: is called The New One, and and one of them
Speaker 1: is me and my wife and my daughter sort of
Speaker 1: laughing together on the couch together in our house, and
Speaker 1: you're in the show. I talked about how the premise
Speaker 1: of the show is and never want to have a child.
Speaker 1: And the show is about and it's all the reasons
Speaker 1: why I never want to have a child, and then
Speaker 1: it's about how we had a child and how I
Speaker 1: was right, uh and then and then huh. And then
Speaker 1: the emotional turn of it is that I was wrong
Speaker 1: and and uh and and and there. But there were
Speaker 1: two different endings that we had along the way that
Speaker 1: we're uh and and one of them is the one
Speaker 1: that it is, which is my wife and daughter and
Speaker 1: I were laughing together on the couch and I basically
Speaker 1: I don't say this. By say I basically become all
Speaker 1: the cliches that of parents who I find so annoying,
Speaker 1: which is like I just want to see the world
Speaker 1: through babies eyes. You know, wait, we have that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we actually showed the show. Oh yeah please, yeah, okay, okay,
Speaker 1: let's show this. Let's just show this. The wh never
Speaker 1: loves the couch. He goes, couchs walk he whoa, she's
Speaker 1: a genius. Three of us sit on the couts in
Speaker 1: the department store. Noon is hiding behind each of us,
Speaker 1: and we go, where's ZOOONA, where's zoon And she's clinging
Speaker 1: into my back because I spend The more she clings,
Speaker 1: the more I'm committing, like where is U? Where is it?
Speaker 1: And she starts laughing so hard, like the hardest I've
Speaker 1: ever seen anyone laugh my whole life. And I'm in
Speaker 1: the joke's business at this idea that she's tricking us,
Speaker 1: the people empower, the people who know everything. She's fooled
Speaker 1: us completely, at least this once and look, I know
Speaker 1: she's going to grow up and find out that the
Speaker 1: earth is singing in the ocean and we might have
Speaker 1: to live in an almond milk jug in Pennsylvania. And
Speaker 1: people can be horrible. But as I'm staring at this
Speaker 1: monkey on a couch, I feel like she might be
Speaker 1: one of the people who change. Is that trajectory. She's
Speaker 1: laughing so hard that I start laughing in a new
Speaker 1: way from my perspective and Jen's perspective and Owner's perspective
Speaker 1: all at once, we're laughing as one. And in that moment,
Speaker 1: I feel full. I'm seeing the world through babies. So
Speaker 1: what what's the work that endings doing? Oh? So that
Speaker 1: ending is cheering up here? Up you get if you
Speaker 1: churned up watching yourself. How dare you, sir at the
Speaker 1: town hall? You call me out where we have our
Speaker 1: town meetings every week, we're all adam, right, No, it is.
Speaker 1: It's emotional because it's it's about when my daughter was
Speaker 1: eighteen months older and uh and she said, you know,
Speaker 1: seven years old now, So it's yeah, so that part
Speaker 1: of its emotional. But but yeah, so the goal of
Speaker 1: this ending is the show really mocks to the point
Speaker 1: of it mocks people with children so mercilessly. If you
Speaker 1: never want to have children and want to mock people
Speaker 1: who have children, you're gonna love the first half of
Speaker 1: the special. For example, like when I like a year
Speaker 1: after this came out, This came out a few years ago,
Speaker 1: I was sent a Reddit thread that was from like
Speaker 1: a child free community on Reddit, and I have never
Speaker 1: seen a group of people more excited about the first
Speaker 1: half of a comedy special because they don't know it
Speaker 1: turns to me having a child, and then they feel
Speaker 1: completely betrayed when I have it. Then they hate it.
Speaker 1: It's you know, that's one of my definitions of a story.
Speaker 1: The difference in a story and an anecdote is a
Speaker 1: story is a narrative that betrays the read the listeners expectations. Right,
Speaker 1: there must be an active betrayal for the story to
Speaker 1: work interesting. But wait, so there's so there is a betrayal,
Speaker 1: and then but then ultimately, with this ending, the goal
Speaker 1: is to point out after all the cliches of like
Speaker 1: seeing the world through baby's eyes and all this stuff,
Speaker 1: and it's the most joy I've ever experienced, all these
Speaker 1: things that you hear, these annoying parents say all the
Speaker 1: time I concede. Then I have a moment of that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: a moment where I'm seeing the world through of his
Speaker 1: eyes and and and to me, that's the essence of
Speaker 1: the type of ending I enjoy, not everybody enjoys. I
Speaker 1: enjoy an ending where there's a hint of we understand
Speaker 1: that the that the emotional journey of the story is
Speaker 1: this big. We've we've swung to ball over the pendulum,
Speaker 1: but ultimately the person, the character who we invest in
Speaker 1: changes this much. So like one of my favorite endings
Speaker 1: of all time is from the movie Big, you know,
Speaker 1: Penny Marshall movie with Tom Hanks, and I wish I
Speaker 1: was big, And then he goes to the carval and
Speaker 1: then he's a grown up and he has a girlfriend
Speaker 1: and then a job and all these things, and he
Speaker 1: lives and he does the whole thing. And then he
Speaker 1: gets to choose at the end, and he's gonna be bigger,
Speaker 1: he's gonna be small again, and he chooses small. And
Speaker 1: there's this devastating moment where she looks back at him
Speaker 1: and it's his child self in a suit, and it's
Speaker 1: the visual meta for of what we've experienced because he's both.
Speaker 1: He's both of those things, and the change in him
Speaker 1: is imperceptible, but we know he's changed probably this much.
Speaker 1: I want to go back to to your show for
Speaker 1: a moment. When you were doing that show, did you
Speaker 1: have that turn in mind and that idea that you
Speaker 1: were going to be moving just a little? Was that in?
Speaker 1: Did you start with that? Yeah? I think yeah, we
Speaker 1: because we the alternate ending. I've literally never spoken about this.
Speaker 1: We I performed an alternate ending because I tore these
Speaker 1: shows for like numbers of years, like Old Man in
Speaker 1: the Pool, the show I'm Harry Now. I've toured for
Speaker 1: you know for probably three plus years, probably three and
Speaker 1: a half years, have been workshopping at and so this
Speaker 1: one was called the new One. I had another ending
Speaker 1: where this true story where my wife and daughter and
Speaker 1: I are on we go on a vacation together to
Speaker 1: the beach in California and we're on the beach and
Speaker 1: we're having this beautiful moment on the beach and UNA's like,
Speaker 1: it's similar to this. It's like it's like sand, you know,
Speaker 1: like ohsha water, you know, it's similar as like she's
Speaker 1: a genius, it's the same. It's sort of the same joke,
Speaker 1: but then she picks up like a piece of plastic
Speaker 1: from the beach and she's just plants garbage, and it
Speaker 1: invokes it evokes all of those feelings I have about
Speaker 1: like we're just living in the dystopia and why are
Speaker 1: we having children? This is insane? Right, I could see
Speaker 1: why you didn't go that end, Malcolm, How dare you
Speaker 1: in the location of our weekly meetings? You know, I
Speaker 1: know it was it was too sad. It's too sad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's too much movement. You want a little movement, Yes,
Speaker 1: you don't want to. So that's why that ending went
Speaker 1: away because ultimately people would leave the theater and they
Speaker 1: would go like that made me feel sort of bad
Speaker 1: about stuff. But the ending, but the ending that we
Speaker 1: went with. Just to be clear, I mean, endings are
Speaker 1: very personal for people. Like some people, I don't in
Speaker 1: that ending. You just watch some people left the theater
Speaker 1: and said, you're still kind of a jerk, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean. Like I would get very personal responses
Speaker 1: where people are like, yeah, you're like an ungrateful dad,
Speaker 1: You're a bad dad, all this stuff, and I'm like, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm being honest with my experience, and this is
Speaker 1: pretty close by. This is exactly what we're talking about,
Speaker 1: which is that endings carry massive disproportionate weight. You don't
Speaker 1: go to a show or a movie or read a
Speaker 1: book and decide after the first ten pages that you
Speaker 1: love it. That's it. I mean, you might say that,
Speaker 1: but it's a contingent conclusion. You will rescind that opinion
Speaker 1: in a heartbeat if the last five pages or the
Speaker 1: last five minutes don't work. And what's weird about this,
Speaker 1: of course, is that it's the opposite of the way
Speaker 1: we evaluate human beings. There's a famous set of studies
Speaker 1: about college professors where they take student evaluations of their
Speaker 1: teachers that are generated over an entire semester and compare
Speaker 1: them to teacher evaluations made by students who've only seen
Speaker 1: a tiny video clip of the professor, like ten seconds.
Speaker 1: What do you find that the two sets of evaluations
Speaker 1: are the same. In other words, you're sitting in a class,
Speaker 1: you listen to your teacher for the shortest moment, and
Speaker 1: you decide I like them, I don't like them, and
Speaker 1: you never revisit that conclusion. The ending doesn't matter if
Speaker 1: you have thirty classes with your history professor, Your experience
Speaker 1: in the final class, or the final five classes, or
Speaker 1: even the final twenty nine point nine nine classes does
Speaker 1: not alter your impression about the teacher. Our evaluations of
Speaker 1: other people are frontloaded. That's why, correctly, our parents told
Speaker 1: us again and again about the value of making a
Speaker 1: good first impression. But our evaluation of stories is the opposite.
Speaker 1: It's backloaded. What happens in the last five minutes colors
Speaker 1: every conclusion we drew in the first two hours. Now,
Speaker 1: why is this? I have no idea, but I will
Speaker 1: guarantee you that every screenwriter and author and podcaster frets
Speaker 1: endlessly about how their stories begin, rewrites the beginning a
Speaker 1: million times, but aren't nearly as fastidious about the ending,
Speaker 1: which is nuts. We're all idiots, with the exception, of course,
Speaker 1: of micro Biglia. When we come back Endings Part two,
Speaker 1: a week after we did our town hall show, we
Speaker 1: took the train down to Philadelphia, rented out the Filmore Theater,
Speaker 1: eight cheese stakes, got into the mood, and for the
Speaker 1: opening of the Philly show, I decided to reflect back
Speaker 1: on some of revisionist histories most and least successful endings.
Speaker 1: What we're talking about tonight is endings, because I happen
Speaker 1: to be obsessed with endings. If I'm watching a movie
Speaker 1: and you know, three quarters of the way through there's
Speaker 1: just too many balls in the air, I'm I'm out.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to be party to that kind of
Speaker 1: destruction of the narrative form. You know, I can go
Speaker 1: on forever about this, and we will, actually this evening
Speaker 1: be going on forever about this. But you know, the
Speaker 1: crucial distinction in my mind is a distinction between an
Speaker 1: anecdote and a story. An anecdote is a narrative that
Speaker 1: conforms with your expectations. So the craziest thing happened to
Speaker 1: me last night I found one hundred dollar bill on
Speaker 1: the street. That is not a story. That is an anecdote.
Speaker 1: The first sentence, craziest thing happened is the equal of
Speaker 1: the second sentence, one hundred dollar bill on the street right.
Speaker 1: A story, by contrast, is a narrative that betrays the
Speaker 1: audience's expectations. So a story would be the craziest thing
Speaker 1: happened to me last night? I found one hundred dollar
Speaker 1: bill on the street. I gave it to a tried
Speaker 1: to give it to a homeless man. And he said,
Speaker 1: I don't want your effing money. That's a story, right.
Speaker 1: It betrayed your expectation. That's not how you expected it
Speaker 1: to end. And the challenge of Revision's History is we
Speaker 1: always want to tell a story. We always want in
Speaker 1: some way to betray our audience's expectations. So I wanted
Speaker 1: to give you a couple of examples of how we
Speaker 1: approach that at Revision's History. You know, a couple of
Speaker 1: years ago, seasons ago, we did an episode called Free
Speaker 1: Brian Williams, which some of you will remember, and you'll
Speaker 1: remember Brian Williams was the NBC anchor who was fired
Speaker 1: from his job because he went on Letterman one night
Speaker 1: and he told a story about being in a helicopter
Speaker 1: during the Gulf War, flying low over the desert and
Speaker 1: he was fired upon by the enemy and he was terrified,
Speaker 1: and it turns out he wasn't fired on, and so
Speaker 1: all kinds of people brought this up and called him
Speaker 1: a liar and self aggrandizing, and he was forced to
Speaker 1: he was forced out of his job. And if you've
Speaker 1: listened to it, the whole episode is a defense of
Speaker 1: Brian Williams. It's a sort of argument about memory that
Speaker 1: says that our memory, particularly in high stakes moments like that,
Speaker 1: is profoundly flawed, and all of us make mistakes of
Speaker 1: memory along the lines of Brian Williams. So he wasn't
Speaker 1: a self aggrandidizing liar. He was just a human being.
Speaker 1: And now none of that, of course, trace the expectations
Speaker 1: of the audience. Right, the show's called Free william Brian Williams.
Speaker 1: You know I'm going to defend Brian Williams. But here's
Speaker 1: here's how it ended. It's a clip of the very
Speaker 1: end of the show. It's a clip of Brian Williams
Speaker 1: apologizing for his mistake looking back. It had to have
Speaker 1: been ego that made me think I had to be sharper, funnier,
Speaker 1: quicker than anybody else, put myself closer to the action,
Speaker 1: having been at the action in the beginning. Oh, please
Speaker 1: stop apologizing for a crime you didn't commit. Free Brian Williams.
Speaker 1: Now do you see the betrayal there? You thought this
Speaker 1: was a defensive Brian Williams. But the last thing I
Speaker 1: do in the entire episode is attack Brian Williams for
Speaker 1: not defending him off. He's not a liar, but he's
Speaker 1: a coward. Stand you didn't do anything wrong. Stand up
Speaker 1: for yourself, big man. Stop all right. Now, we don't
Speaker 1: always pull us off. There are times when the endings
Speaker 1: don't work. And really good example of this is we
Speaker 1: did an episode last season called I Love You. Weymo,
Speaker 1: which was you know. Weymo is a division of Google
Speaker 1: that makes autonomous cars, the kind that drive themselves, and
Speaker 1: they have them in Phoenix. You can go to Phoenix
Speaker 1: and you can order a Weymo and it just shows up,
Speaker 1: it's no driver, and you hop in. And so we
Speaker 1: went there May my trouser Jacob when we drove around
Speaker 1: these Weymos, and our whole point was that people worry
Speaker 1: about autonomous cars because they think that they are will
Speaker 1: make a mistake, you know, and run over pedestrians. They
Speaker 1: think they're imperfect, but that's actually completely wrong. The problem
Speaker 1: with autonomous cars is that they're perfect. They don't make mistakes.
Speaker 1: I mean, they got twenty cameras and light ar and radar.
Speaker 1: They're so perfect thick that they allow everyone else to
Speaker 1: misbehave so that if you're if you see it, if
Speaker 1: you're a jaywalk, you want you want to cross the
Speaker 1: street and you see a Weymo coming, you just jaywalk
Speaker 1: because you know it will stop. Right, It's perfect. And
Speaker 1: if you're a kid and you're playing soccer in the
Speaker 1: middle of the street with your friends and a Weymo comes,
Speaker 1: you keep playing soccer. You don't move. And if you're
Speaker 1: a cyclist and you want to cycle to work down,
Speaker 1: I'm ninety five. You cycle to work Down ninety five
Speaker 1: because the Weymo will drive very patiently behind you. It's
Speaker 1: not ever. So it's been sold to us by Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley as this kind of epical technological breakthrough. It's not.
Speaker 1: It's it's a complete non starter. You can't drive a
Speaker 1: Weymo through any urban area because people are just gonna
Speaker 1: go nuts when they see the weymou. So we thought
Speaker 1: the Weymo was the I Love You Weymo was sarcastic. Right.
Speaker 1: So here's how it ends. Jacob and I order a
Speaker 1: Waymo to this park, to this parking lot of the
Speaker 1: Almo Steakhouse in Tempe, Arizona, and it comes and then
Speaker 1: we just start, forgive my language, fucking with the Waymo
Speaker 1: and we throw beach balls at it, and it like
Speaker 1: a four dollars beach ball. And it just stops because
Speaker 1: it's Waymou. It's like super polite, not gonna harm a
Speaker 1: hair on the head of the beach ball. And then
Speaker 1: then I decide what I really want to do is
Speaker 1: I want to run next to the Waymo and then
Speaker 1: just constantly cut in front of the Waymow to see
Speaker 1: what the way Moo will do. Right. So here the
Speaker 1: run the cliff always taking. Oh we come through, ha
Speaker 1: ha ha. Waymoys freaked out, freaked out. He thinks he's
Speaker 1: going he's got ahead of me. I'm gonna catch him.
Speaker 1: Hold on, hold, let me get in. Weymo stop. Weymo
Speaker 1: was the perfect gentleman. He let me be the crazy one.
Speaker 1: Remember this the next time some Silicon Valley visionary promises
Speaker 1: you a future of perfect mobility, efficiency and clarity from
Speaker 1: the back seat of an autonomous vehicle. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's much better than that. It's me and Lance and
Speaker 1: Jonathan Vaughters and Jacob with his beach ball taking back
Speaker 1: the road. I love you, Weimo, So retweet out the
Speaker 1: announcement of the show, and you know what happens. Weymo
Speaker 1: retweets the tweet. They're like, we love the show. It's fantastic.
Speaker 1: So we said that autonomous vehicles don't actually work, and
Speaker 1: Weymo is, like you called the show, I Love You Weymo,
Speaker 1: that's all. They refuse to have their expectations betrayed. Right now,
Speaker 1: whose fault is that? I think it's my fault. And
Speaker 1: then we started to get emails from I'll reading some
Speaker 1: of the emails we've got from readers, big fan of
Speaker 1: Revisionist history. I'm trying to figure out if I Love
Speaker 1: You Weymo is sponsored content? Wait, I love were exacting
Speaker 1: Weymo email number two. I'm sure Malcolm and whoever is
Speaker 1: managing the show is smart enough to disclose when they're
Speaker 1: being sponsored. But this really felt like an AD. No,
Speaker 1: it wasn't an AD. Number three. At first, I thought
Speaker 1: my podcast episode didn't download correctly. BLA, it was just
Speaker 1: a thirty minute Weymo love fest. No, it went on
Speaker 1: for thirty eight minutes. You had to listen to the
Speaker 1: last eight. Number four? What the hell was that? Number five?
Speaker 1: Was that an infomercial? Fur work? Now? Are these people dumb? No?
Speaker 1: I don't. No one who listens to Revision's History can
Speaker 1: be dumb. No, they don't believe in stories. They believe
Speaker 1: in anecdotes, right. They don't. They think that you can
Speaker 1: only have a narrative that conforms with your expectations. They
Speaker 1: don't understand that. No, no, no, no. What a real
Speaker 1: story does is portray your expectations. You screw up if
Speaker 1: that's the story you tell, right. If you can't convince
Speaker 1: people to make that turn, sometimes you really have to
Speaker 1: grab people the listener by the scrub of the neck
Speaker 1: and say no, no, you blockhead, this is going off
Speaker 1: in another direction. The perfect ending, the perfect story, to
Speaker 1: my mind, is the story will you start with the
Speaker 1: Indian work backwards? Well, you know absolutely the turn you
Speaker 1: want to make it. There's one one of my absolute
Speaker 1: favorite episodes was exactly this. It's it's called the King
Speaker 1: of Tears, from episode from season two or three, and
Speaker 1: it was about the saddest song in the world. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm rooting around leg one that on YouTube, and
Speaker 1: I run across George Jones's Funeral, which is one of
Speaker 1: the By the way, if you if you have three
Speaker 1: extra hours, like if you're incarcerated and have time in
Speaker 1: your hands, you must watch George Jones's Funeral. It's one
Speaker 1: of the most ethic extraordinary, fantastic national events. They're all there,
Speaker 1: they're all weeping, They're all it's just it's just Schmaltz
Speaker 1: upon Schmaltz upon Schmaltz. So I'm watching it like I'm
Speaker 1: weeping in my pajamas. Is two animals. Every single person
Speaker 1: in all of Nashville is there in full regalia. Cowboy
Speaker 1: hats up the wazoo. Everyone's like finding a way to
Speaker 1: weep out, weep each other onstead. But the climax is
Speaker 1: the great George Jones song was, of course, the saddest
Speaker 1: song ever written by Bobby Braddock. It's he Stopped Loving
Speaker 1: Her Today about a guy he's in love with the
Speaker 1: woman and he stops loving her today when he dies.
Speaker 1: He only stops loving her when he's and the whole,
Speaker 1: the whole song leads up to you realize you think
Speaker 1: he's alive, and you realize, oh no, no, no, he's dead,
Speaker 1: and that's why he stopped on him. So Alan, we
Speaker 1: actually want to play this, play Alan Jackson. Alan Jackson,
Speaker 1: who's at the end of the funeral. It's the climax
Speaker 1: sings he stopped loving her Today. For George Jones's wife,
Speaker 1: who's in the front row right. So it's so geniusly
Speaker 1: met play the beginning of Alan Jackson as he years
Speaker 1: when fue and you realize as he sings that Braddock's
Speaker 1: song has gotten even more specific. It's no longer about
Speaker 1: a long ago love affair. It's about right now. This
Speaker 1: is the day George Jones stopped loving Nancy Jones. Alan
Speaker 1: Jackson takes off his hat and places it over his heart.
Speaker 1: He stop loving her today. And if you aren't crying,
Speaker 1: I can't help you. I love you, George. If only
Speaker 1: every story ended as well as that one. Revisionist History
Speaker 1: is produced by Eloise Linton, leem and Gistu and Jacob Smith.
Speaker 1: Our editor is Julia Barton. Our showrunner is Peter Clowney.
Speaker 1: Original scoring by Luis Guera, mastering by Jason Gambrel, engineering
Speaker 1: by Sarah Brugere and Nina Lawrence, back checking by Keshell Williams,
Speaker 1: and live production by Kate Downey. Special thanks to the
Speaker 1: Pushkin crew who helped pull off this live experiment. Kerry Brodie,
Speaker 1: Heather Fain Blair, Gilks, Jason Gambrel, Nina Lawrence, Nicole Morano,
Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, John Schnars, Maggie Taylor. And Jacob Weisberg, and
Speaker 1: a big thank you to Mike Burbiglia, as well as
Speaker 1: the town Hall in Manhattan and the Fillmore in Philadelphia.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more of Revisionist History Live, coming soon
Speaker 1: to a city near you. I'm Malcolm Glabo.