ARC MAGAZINE

ARC: In your most recent book, in the chapter dedicated to author Wendell Berry, you quoted him as saying: “…The collegiate system and the importance that’s placed on it has demeaned and is doing away with the trades.” You added your own thoughts, “This is a topic that has always gotten me fired up. When I was in high school in the eighties, only the underachievers and burnouts were relegated to the area vocational school. It was considered a substantial demotion in life, brought on by poor grades or attitude. ‘John, I don’t think you have what it takes to get through trigonometry. How about we make you a welder?’”

What do you think can or should be done to start to get rid of the black eye that the trades have gotten as somehow being a second class vocation?

Nick Offerman: It’s funny, because I was a victim of the mentality myself. I didn’t notice per se. I mean, I noticed my uncles. One uncle that was a farmer was also the mechanic who fixed all the buses for the school. He was very heroic to me in his use of tool skills, and welding, and fabricating. The kids that knew how to do that were the kids that were in shop class, the Future Farmers of America. To me, that had a charisma, where I knew if some s*** went down in the parking lot, those were the guys I’d look for, or ladies, because I’d know they probably had a good socket set in their trunk. All of the rest of the kids had a really cute digital watch or the latest Nikes.

But I only really became aware of the disparity when I got into the trades myself as a scenic carpenter and then as a woodworker and I said, “Gosh, I’m kind of sorry ... I’m glad that I found this path on my own, but I’m sorry that nobody in our public education system is pushing anybody in these directions,” because by the time I was in high school, it had become such a disposable society. It’s something that drives me crazy, that most of our consumerist population is quite happy to just buy shoes and throw them away after a couple of years, and they do the same thing with their furniture and sometimes even their cars. They say, “Oh, I busted up the fender on my Prius. I guess I have to get a new one.” That sickens me. We live in such a world of waste.

Not only are we destroying our planet by buying all of those new fenders and Nike sneakers, but we’re devaluing so much of our population who perhaps aren’t cut out to go to get an English degree but are just incredible with a hammer or a welder or a sewing machine or what have you.

ARC: I think that one of the things that we end up missing is mentorship. There was a time when, if you wanted to learn something like welding, or electrical work, or carpentry, all you had to do was go out in your garage and stand next to your dad or your grandfather or somebody who knew better.

We’re losing the people who know better—who were willing to teach us—at a ridiculous pace. The welding industry is losing 60,000 welders a year just to old age and attrition. How do you make up numbers like that?

Offerman: No, you’re right. I will always continue to speak to this issue because it’s one of the fires that’s lit under my own life. When I first had the opportunity to speak on a touring stage or to write a book I said, “Well, I’m not as funny as my friends, the comedians. I’m not as smart as my friends, the writers, but I can talk about chisels.” I tried to make an entertaining way of pushing the world of making things with your hands. I agree. I grew up in a small town in Illinois called Minooka, and I think that I’ve lived in cities since I became a professional entertainer.

I do think that there’s a vast amount of our population that is still in the proper tradition of teaching their kids...but it can certainly look that way from an urban or suburban environment. However, I do think that there’s been a great dearth of this practice. That’s why I’m on my soapbox about it, because not only is it important to our population just being able to hold our heads up and earn a dollar with a set of tools, but it also weakens us nationally because eventually we’re going to need the craftsmen of other countries to make everything, if we keep going along this path, which is horrifying. I do think that some members of the government are aware of this deficit, so hopefully with voices like my own, and your magazine, and all of us that are trying to bring attention to this type of lifestyle, we’ve gotten the hipsters interested…

ARC: We have gotten them, yes.

Offerman: Now we have to just get them to stop being so cool and just start chopping firewood.

ARC: What kind of advice would you give to a kid who’s trying to convince his parents that he or she doesn’t want to go to college, and who may have an aptitude to do something else. What kind of advice would you give to parents about accepting that path?

Offerman: That’s all the kid needs to do is say so, and it’s the parents who need the advice. Wendell Berry writes really eloquently about it. He talks about how we’ve been sold this bill of goods that you’re on this path. If you want to succeed, you’ve got to get good grades in high school so you can go to a good college and get an office job that’s on a salary track. That sense of prosperity is a fallacy. So many people follow that path, and either they can’t get a job or they get a job that makes them miserable. Maybe they make a salary and they can afford a house and a family, but they’re spending 40, 60 hours a week driving themselves crazy in a cubicle, trying to watch numbers go up and down on the market.

There’s something important here that I want to point out, because it’s not as simple as, “I’m not good at calculus or getting grades, so I want to go build houses.” Building houses, welding, machinery, fabricating anything out of steel, or farming, all of these so-called vocational trades require just as much intelligence, if not more, and just as much artistry as writing a novel or running a business. You know what I mean?

ARC: I think the argument we come up against is it’s one or the other; it’s a binary question. You’re either going to go to college and be successful or you’re going to work at McDonald’s, and there’s not a whole lot in the middle.

Offerman: It’s true. I mean that’s one of the tough questions. I don’t encourage people to go into the trade of woodworking because that’s very difficult. I also don’t encourage people to go into the job of acting because that’s a very painful, difficult percentage-wise, most often thankless job, but I do encourage people to get up on stage and entertain people or to make things out of wood. But if you try to make those your sole source of income, that can be incredibly arduous. Now, in specialized trades, whether it’s welding or electricity or plumbing or being a contractor, landscaping, masonry, you can certainly make a wonderful living if you find the right specialized niche, but what strikes me about Wendell Berry’s take on it is that you can earn a lot less money doing things with your hands, with your tools, but still have an incredibly enjoyable and prosperous life.

That’s the advice I would give to those parents you asked about, is consider your quality of life. What is it that makes you the happiest? Is it how expensive your BMW SUV is? What if you had a used Suburban? Do you think you and your family could still have a good time? If the answer is not yes, then I’d take those parents out back and give them a stern talking to. To me, it’s all part of this fallacious American dream that you have to make as much money as possible to find happiness and success. What I’ve learned through my obstinate choices of theater and some on TV and also woodworking is that the happiness and success that I feel come a lot less from the money that I earn than from the fun that I have with my loved ones, my wife, and our home, the lives that you build for yourself. That is comprised of so much more than the paycheck you’re bringing home.

Obviously, you want to afford a roof over your head and be comfortable, but beyond that, I think it’s much more important to look to spending time with your loved ones and going for a walk in the woods. That’s the tricky part with the kids. If I knew of a kid that was like, “Hey, I don’t want to go to college. I want to become a welder,” I’d say, “Let’s get that kid over here. I’ve got some things that need welding.” The scary part to me is how to attract kids to a tool belt when video games are so attractive, and all of the other distractions in modern society. That’s something I find very worrisome.

ARC: There’s a lot of movement in the educational landscape in this country to focus on science, technology, engineering, and math—the STEM platform. Where do the arts fit into that?

Offerman: I’m sorry to be a little bit of a one-trick pony, but Wendell Berry has a great book called Life is a Miracle, in which he takes down this other writer who wrote a book saying that eventually all of the educational disciplines will be separated, so science will be off on its own and a mass new frontier, and we eventually will be able to know everything. (Editor’s note: the book that Offerman is referring to is E. O. Wilson’s Consilience). His main theme is that everything is connected, that science and math involve a great deal of artistry as well.

When anybody starts asking me for advice, I say, “All right, the starting point for all of us is we can never know everything, in any field, in any discipline. We’re human beings, so we can never know everything and we can never do anything perfectly. With that in mind, whatever we choose to spend our hopefully 89 to 102 years doing will simply be trying to become better at whatever our chosen discipline is. The most interesting thing in the world is a human being. We don’t go see Michael Jordan play basketball because we know he’s going to have a 100% perfect game, but we know in his prime, he’s going to get closer than anybody, so it’s the attempt that we are astonished by. With that in mind, whatever it is we choose to spend our time at, we can only continue to maintain the attitude of students. In my woodworking, for example, I am annoyed and thrilled when 17 years into my work I see, “Oh, I need three geometric theorems that I learned when I was 14,” and everybody said, “When will we ever need to use this?” “Well, here, now I need those goddamn things.”

I get them out and I relearn them, and I’m thrilled. It’s like magic still. With that in mind, for me, that’s the argument, is that we’re not creating scientists and mathematicians, thank you. We’re creating human beings, ostensibly. I want those human beings, if not to play a musical instrument, at least have the appreciation of it. Because if we just become incredible binary thinkers, then I believe those are known as robots. You can’t have the hard sciences, if you will, without the arts as well. It’s all part of our culture.

ARC: Looking at the bios of the staff at your shop, you see a wide range of skills and experience. Can you speak a little bit to—aside from technical abilities—the qualities that you look for in an employee that might resonate with somebody who is taking on a trade?

Offerman: When I realized that I wanted to staff up my shop, it was when I got the job on Parks & Recreation. I knew having gone through Will & Grace with my wife (actress Megan Mullaly), I knew that if this show went, if it took off, that I was going to lose a lot of my shop time for seven months of the year. Rather than close the shop up and turn the lights off, I wanted my shop to thrive, so I said, “Well, let’s get some pals in here and keep dulling these saw blades.” At first, Lee, who manages the shop, came to me recommended by a friend, and we sat down and had a meeting. She was heaven sent. She worked at this great museum in San Francisco called The Exploratorium, but she had also been to the College of the Redwoods woodworking program.

I pictured the perfect storm that I needed to be administrator of, and then we just gathered ... I mean it’s really a ragtag bunch of hippies. Some of them came to us through Lee. Some came through the world of comedy like, “Hey, my brother wants to learn woodworking. Can he come work at your shop?” This guy, Thomas Wilhoit, who’s one of our stalwarts, just cold called us. He was in L.A. for the summer, and he was bored. We were the third place that he called, and we got to talking. He’s from Kentucky. It turned out he had actually seen Wendell Berry speak, and I said, “Will you please stick around?” There’s a little bit of a revolving door. If you make a living as a woodworker, you’re very fortunate, but it’s always going to be pretty meager.

Again, your recompense or your treasures are going to be found in other places than your pocketbook. We have a really good time, and it’s a wonderful coalition of personalities. But I think some will probably end up being career woodworkers, and some will move on to other pursuits. It really comes down to if I’m around and I have the time, I like to make somebody sweep. We have them come to the shop, and we talk to them and find out their experience, and maybe they help us do some work. I like to surreptitiously ask somebody to sweep and look at how good of a job they do, because you can really tell almost everything about a worker by how they sweep a floor. Other than that, everybody works hard. Everybody has gumption, their application of their learning and their execution.

We had one guy, who is a great guy, a really wonderful artist, who had a bad temper for a while. We ended up having to ask him to move along because he was letting his temper affect the shop. We said, “Hey, we don’t have bad tempers here. If you can’t have a good time here, I don’t know what’s the matter with you, but you’d better go find someplace else to deal with people.”

ARC: I love the idea of asking to sweep the floor to find out the temperament of a person. That’s sage advice. How much time do you get to spend in the shop?

Offerman: It’s very sporadic. When we were shooting Parks & Rec, I was spoiled because I had one or two days off every week, so I’d get to drop in. Generally, when I have one or two days, I don’t get a lot of personal projects done as much as I administrate. I help out. I answer questions and help with designing our pieces. Then I’ll have a few months off, so I’ll get in there. Last year, that’s when I made my first ukulele. I was in there a few weeks, and I just did a bunch of work for the shop. I flattened a bunch of slabs. For me, I could just rearrange the hand plane drawer, and it’s such a great vacation from the fast paced world of Hollywood bulls***. It’s part of the reason that my next book is going to be about woodworking.

As much as I can, I try to engineer into my projects as a writer and actor things that I want to do. I have a film that I’m developing that would involve a lot of hiking and kayaking in British Colombia. As I said, I’m going to do this book about woodworking, and then I’m going to be required to spend a bunch of time in my shop, and I’m tricking myself into getting to do the things I love the most for pay.

ARC: The question everyone wants us to ask you is about the Ron Swanson character (from Parks & Recreation), and how much Nick Offerman is in Ron Swanson and how much Ron Swanson is in Nick Offerman?

Offerman: That’s a good question. It’s a character written for comedy. He’s a very simple man, and that’s what I think people respond to so powerfully in this day of infinite choices, that there’s this guy that says, “Look, I have three rules, and anything outside those rules, you can go to hell.” I think people crave that kind of fatherly influence like, “Oh, please just tell me I can only drink milk and I can only eat steak.” I’m a human being, so I’m much more complicated. I also have a realistic digestive system. Ron loves Lagavulin Scotch, which is my favorite scotch. It has been since 1998. It was also the favorite scotch of Mike Schur, my boss who created the show.

I do have a love of meat as well as the part of my demeanor that is stentorian, and august, and un-moving. My gravitas, if you will. All of those elements, and my mustache of course, all of those parts of me will boil down to their purest essence for comedy. Ron is a distillation I suppose of some of the sides of me that they thought would be funny. I feel like I don’t have a great deal of Ron Swanson in my life beyond that I do love simplicity, and I do love to not suffer fools gladly. I think I have a certain amount of common sense that I inherited from my dad and he from his dad, that involves an agricultural or blue-collar sensibility to all aspects of life. I think that’s something else they played on with Ron.

It is something that’s important to me, but at the same time, I’m much more bizarre, and weird, and flawed, and just human. I do love steak, and bacon, and scotch, but if I consumed as much as Ron does, I would already be dead from clogging my arteries, so I have to eat a little bit more sensibly. He’s really funny, and he’s also a much faster woodworker than I am. He turned out an Irish harp overnight while drunk. That thing would take me at least a week and a half.

ARC: I came across something recently, and I’m curious if you’re aware of this. Apparently, Bob Dylan is a welder, and among other things, he makes decorative wrought iron fences and iron gates. Does that surprise you at all?

Offerman: Wow, I had no idea. That’s crazy.

ARC: Could you ever see yourself welding and woodworking, maybe making some music together?

Offerman: I’m not sure if Bob would have much patience with me, but I’d be happy to sweep his floor.