An Interview With Sam Hyde on His New Novel “Jaihoo’s Trip to the Future”
Sam Hyde.
Sam Hyde—highly-memed comedian, multiple-accused mass shooter, purveyor of many a prank against journalists (I type, nervously)—has turned his talent to the novel. This wild tale is told in stunning prose—an old-school lampoon simultaneously made new, illuminations from long before even a sneeze could be converted against its author’s will into politicalized social media clickbait. Hyde’s sketch comedy show on Adult Swim, Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace beat the lo-fi, pseudo-public-access, anti-comedy genre into submission, surpassing all predecessors, i.e. Tim Heidecker, who snivelingly abetted Hyde’s firing. The show performed well for executives at the height of the 2010s political correctness comeback; they returned the favor by abandoning their best contributor to honor, as almost everyone does now, a Buzzfeed hack-job article.
Hyde rebuilt his career online, independently, on the website Gumroad. For five dollars a month, he provides an inspirational podcast, comedic skits (knocking on news station van doors, frightening the shaky reporters therein), and more. Now comes his debut novel, Jaihoo's Trip to the Future. Imagine William Kotzwinkle’s early wild novels retooled by Michel Houellebecq, or Ted Kaczynski’s autobiography ghostwritten by Harlan Ellison. Hyde and crew capture an unmatched impetuosity of wrath, guest-starring our pronoun smorgasbord, a mounting shout-down at the cosmos aimed against everything impelled by neoliberal hokum. Each syllable thrashes itself abstract, decorticating into a rare and greatly needed diamond of hate. In effect, the millennial conundrum shot-for-shot.
John Pelech, the primary co-author of Jaihoo’s Trip to the Future, recalls the novel’s process. It began taking shape over a hectic Google Hangout livestream in 2015: “We procrastinated on writing the story until the day of. So we spent eight hours working on it beforehand, and by the scheduled time we had not finished the story. It was probably 60-70% finished, and I continued working on the last half (on a shared document) but Sam caught up to me live while the stream was happening. It got to the point where basically Sam was waiting for me to write the next line and improvising and stalling...” A primary theme was the death of culture: “Death is one of my favorite things to think about. I was looking at people I know from high school on Instagram, observing how age affects a person’s face as they get older, you can see the force of life desperately clinging onto itself, the nose grows and curves forward clawing at the front of the face gripping onto its youth as it's being sucked into the abyss and the hairline is pulled on by death fraying, sailing further back into the head before it evaporates their puddle of hair completely leaving baldness.”
Jaihoo’s Trip to the Future.
Sam Hyde answered some of my less annoying questions about Jaihoo and the wobbling state of the country.
Editor’s note: To preserve the integrity of this interview, which was conducted over email, Sam Hyde’s answers have been left uncut and unadulterated, only lightly edited for grammar.
Can journalism ever be made to pay for what it has done, especially over the last ten years?
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say that the anti-Semitic undertones in that question are all in my imagination. Journalists are our greatest allies and have a vibrant culture which I appreciate.
Jaihoo’s narration begins swapping from aggressive personal address (violently footnoted) to discomfiting tour guide to demented advertiser to training manual in hell to choose-your-own-adventure nightmare before the dystopian story unfolds—a vehement satire of our current conundrum taking place in a future that feels already too familiar. How many years did this complex novel take to assemble? How and when did the project begin, and did Adult Swim network mistreatment inspire any of it?
I’m pretty sure this livestream here was the first public showing of anything we (Pelech and I)’d written, which would mean we started writing sometime in late 2014.
So August 2015 for the completion of the initial draft, then I’d spend the next five years off-and-on going through and making Jaihoo’s nightmares and electro-tortures more demoralizing and insane.
The first draft was all put together in a really slapdash and linear fashion, with me and Pelech just imagining some situation—Jaihoo loses his legs in a drifting accident—followed up by whatever was the stupidest and most frustrating thing for the reader—he goes to The Future and gets “holographic” legs which work better than his real legs—so that the reader imagines the authors are two retarded men sitting in the nude and stress-eating 7/11 “food” and probably have like aggressive mental problems/are drooling gay rapists or sweating disgusting street-shambler people, the type you never want to meet, something like that. A lot of Phase 1 boiled down to “let’s make people think we’re idiots as a joke,” which I think means we are real idiots.
Then I went back and did a bunch of passes over the prose to WallaceMax™ it and make sure that every imaginary future brand or product has a lengthy and imbecilic backstory etc, and that all situations and society damage are painted with encyclopedic detail on absurd human suffering and booger-eating type stuff.
“Cynical people can be witty and have good clap-backs on Twitter and make cutting observations, but if that’s your default mindset then I don’t think you can laugh very deeply/truly.”
On network mistreat inspiration: No, not really. I always try my best not to dwell on unfixable tragedy/trauma and I think it’s best to draw inspiration/motivation from a positive place. Just for my own mental health—
—And also because the meat and potatoes of life, like the bulk of it, would seem to be more on the side of…boredom/monotony/suffering/tragedy…point being that loss/dysfunction/whatever, you could say these things are more the default mode of life than joy/success/triumph/whatever, and it’s been that way for the entirety of human history.
So these things are sort of uninteresting to focus on—at least to me, and especially for long periods of time—and it’s also like I got cancelled from Adult Swim, which compared to having a swollen prostate or something like that is not a big deal. There’s guys out there with prostates the size of watermelons, I feel like it would be a disservice to them to complain about my lot in life.
The writing process was really a joyful one and I think reading Jaihoo should ultimately be joyful…I feel that if you’re truly cynical and/or negative as a person, then that probably is a bad thing, like I think it makes you less effective as a person, it makes you less valuable to others…cynical people can be witty and have good clap-backs on Twitter and make cutting observations, but if that’s your default mindset then I don’t think you can laugh very deeply/truly. The Future is going to be so gay and horrifying, you’d better have a healthy sense of humor if you hope to survive. Or if not that then fluoridate/medicate yourself until it’s impossible for you to notice.
[Inside the Twisted World of AOC Deepfake Porn]
Who of the listed authors handled which sections? How difficult was it to compile and lay out the final manuscript?
Pelech and myself did most of the bones of the thing, and then everybody else listed in the credits (I think) kinda went through and peppered the funny situations with funnier stuff…mercenary style. Hitman style.
There were one or two people hired as editor-editors (they’re not listed in the credits) who gave suggestions on uh, making it more normally written, removing the page-long run-on sentences and keeping it down to twenty semicolons per page, but I mostly undid those suggestions…I wanted the book to read like what future people might think a Wikipedia article or technical manual would look like (if they had the ability to read/write). I really wanted to typeset it in LaTeX but I wasn’t quite smart enough to figure that software out so that didn’t happen.
It took mad long though, hella hours :-O like Whoa.
In this pissy climate, and considering your established name, was there ever any consideration, or second-long interest even, in submitting this book to a major press?
Having major distribution would’ve been sweet, however that process is a little daunting or at least annoying seeming, and I seriously doubt any of the people in charge would really vibe with the book. It might also be crappily written or something, it probably is.
Then on top of that as you mention there’s the problematicness of my name—the submission process would probably have stopped at the Googling phase in most cases, so I wrote that off early as a dead end.
We did OK with sales for an eBook—$45k gross—so it’s a net loss but not a terribly embarrassing one. I think if we sell a physical version, it will do better—people enjoy having books as objects more than they enjoy reading them (How to Bomb did $250-300k for the physical and $30k for the eBook).
I really want to do a physical release of Jaihoo but just don’t have the time right now.
Were there any specific literary inspirations for, or influences on, Jaihoo? Are you reading anything lately and what were early favorites of yours and the crew’s?
I’m sure there’s influences in there but that might be up to you to uncover—I didn’t have any one author or handful of authors in mind while writing…my general purpose comedic influences were probably more powerful in the process: Wonder Showzen, Paper Rad, CBoyardee, a bunch of other shit I’m too brain-fogged to recall right now.
Actually now that I think of it, definitely Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
I’ve been reading Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Philip K. Dick, R.A. Lafferty. I probably hadn’t read any Lafferty until halfway through the process of making Jaihoo but the final product has a bit of Lafferty-ness to it.
I’ll also add here that the funniest thing I’ve ever read is Tales of Houdini by Rudy Rucker.
Is there a path back from where political correctness has stranded us and will it be possible to stomp it out with comedy, for instance, as happened in the 90s?
No, only war with China. War with China is the only way the racial schism in America will be healed (or possibly via Soundcloud rappers), and it’s the only thing that will really show the pea-brains what’s up.
How would you characterize the millennial generation? A series of chinless ghosts, wandering the vestiges of a once-valid past, passing blindly toward an unobtainable future, trapped and retreating, wholesale, back in utero—might this be something like a summary of any relevance?
Uhh man, I would characterize the millennial generation as a bunch of faggot losers I would say if you want to get technical. It’s really more severe and insane than anything I could ever write…Reddit people asking Am I The Asshole in the context of some weird open relationship thing where their girlfriend is asking them to get male birth control and having massive toy collections and shit. Someone I thought was cool or at least semi-OK told me recently that they’d spent thousands of dollars on Hearthstone. Eating garbage plastic food and making TikToks while being brand managers for micro-brands etc. My generation is cooked and totally irredeemable...
[Review: “CUCKOLD SIMULATOR” Lets You Roleplay as a “Beta Male Cuck”]
In a hypothetical self-defense situation, how might you physically protect yourself from a big-bodied free-roaming Lena Dunham or a hug-happy Joe Rogan high on DMT?
Lena I would have no problem with. If she was a little less long-in-the-tooth and diseased I’d just take her to bed and calm her down that way, like Calanctus does with Llorio in Rhialto the Marvelous, but now she’s like this monstrous flap bag gum woman sour milkers and I’d say probably easiest way would be to have my ghetto black chicks beat on her ass outside a McDonald’s.
Joe is a little bit tougher because obviously if you get near that guy he’s gonna be climbing all over you like an anxious toddler with all that fruitcake BJJ shit. I rented a PowerKube and came within a few thousand points of Joe’s roundhouse record (this is true), on my weak leg, and furthermore shortly after having nearly broken my ankle by kicking a Seagram’s bottle (my foot hit the heel of the bottle which is why).
Honestly I have strikes that Joe just wouldn’t be able to deal with…I have switch kicks, question mark kicks, all that fucking shit—tricky Mike Winklejohn shit like feinting the overhand right into a head kick, weird lead leg head kicks that come from nowhere, not to mention I’m a competent boxer with good timing for counters and a surprisingly-fast-for-a-big-white-dude jab that is usually a hybrid of a Larry Holmes loose-fisted flick jab and a Bruce Lee backfist that I like to throw from the waist so it’s hard to see coming.
I have way more range than him, I have good movement and range control and honestly his only hope would be to dive straight into the gay molestation (BJJ) shit, which if anyone does that to me I will be dropping elbows on their spine and punching the back of the head, biting, whatever illegal shit I feel like—would never let some creepy craKKKer put his hands on me like that. I would never be the first to make a fight dirty but if he makes it bisexual I’ll have my hands in his pants like Gary Goodridge, no homo. Also he’s 4’7” so I could probably just bop him on top of the head like they do in old cartoons.
Read “Jaihoo’s Trip to the Future” on Gumroad.
Follow Sean Kilpatrick on Twitter.
