True to his nerd

MONTAGUE -- The words materialized in John Hodgman's mind one day: ``Nine presidents who had hooks for hands."

He could immediately see the story. There was Theodore Roosevelt, who originally wrote ``speak softly and pierce their eyes with a golden hook," and George W. Bush, who ``replaced his hook with a chainsaw in an effort to seem less privileged."

This kernel of absurdity eventually grew into a fake reference book called ``The Areas of My Expertise," which, in January, led to Hodgman's re curring role as the ``resident expert" on Comedy Central's ``The Daily Show." A few months later, Apple called. Soon Hodgman was portraying a stiff, nerdy PC -- and stealing the show with his deadpan delivery -- in a series of high-profile Mac commercials.

For Hodgman, who reads at the Brookline Booksmith Wednesday, the experience of going from unknown author to television star has been like being ``teleported to another planet." He's been a successful freelance writer since 2000, contributing to The New York Times Magazine, McSweeney's, and public radio's ``This American Life," but being a TV personality was never part of the plan. On his first day working on the ``Daily Show" set, he says, he kept thinking: ``This is a fun adventure that will end soon."

But from the looks of things, it's only begun.

There's just something about Hodgman, 35, a Brookline native who has a fondness for the strange and a disarmingly serious demeanor that the smart, funny set can't get enough of.

His round face, one eyebrow slightly raised, jumps out of the pages of the Sept. 18 New Yorker in a full-page ad for the just-released paperback version of his book. He's also all over the Internet, including a mosaic of his face made up of illustrations based on the 700 hobo names in his book (more on that later).

Hodgman wrote most of his book at a cafe here in Montague, a small town in Western Massachusetts near Northampton. He owns a home nearby but lives in New York with his wife and two children, a 4 1/2-year-old daughter and a 1-year-old son. This summer he was back at the Lady Killigrew Cafe, which is housed in an old lumber mill that overlooks the shallow, rushing water of the Sawmill River, to work on a second volume of fake facts.

He showed up there on a Saturday afternoon wearing an untucked button-down shirt over a white T-shirt, tan Carhartt pants, and Vasque hiking shoes. When a photographer tried to get him to lie down on a couch with his hands behind his head, he politely but firmly declined. ``I'm not jaunty," he said.

Hodgman is very much a straight man, which make s the things that come out of his mouth all the more surprising. When talking about his wife, he says, ``She's always building those robots," without so much as cracking a smile -- and moves on. His dry, intellectual delivery of even the most bizarre information is so convincing that it's hard not to believe everything he's saying -- all of which plays perfectly into his resident expert role on ``The Daily Show."

In a segment about race that aired in April, Hodgman, who has dark-rimmed eyeglasses and an affinity for cream-colored suits, brought paint samples to the set. He held one up to host Jon Stewart's face and determined that Stewart wasn't white but ``Windham cream," or actually more of a ``fresh butter." Hodgman found that his own skin was ``pale straw." Tiger Woods's was ``copper mountain russet." Ted Kennedy's, Hodgman said, was ``waxy drunken pink." By the year 5500, he predicted, we'll all be one color: ``soft pumpkin."

``Daily Show" executive producer Ben Karlin describes Hodgman's humor as cerebral and slightly condescending yet likable, a tough combination to pull off.

``But with John it's just very natural to his personality," Karlin says, ``and he's very comfortable in his skin the way he is."

And the way he is sometimes is odd. As a kid, Hodgman was fascinated by hobos, and as an adult he devoted 27 pages of his book to the subject, including the much-celebrated list of 700 hobo names. (No. 53: JR Lintstockings. No. 477: Unshakably Morose Flo.) It turns out that even though he makes up all sorts of stuff, he knows a lot about a lot of obscure things. For instance, Jean Rene Lacoste was indeed a tennis star who started the crocodile-shirt craze. But he didn't, as the book claims, have aluminum legs.

The people he lists as experts at the back of the book are also real. His high school pal Sam Potts, who also designed the book jacket, advised him ``on the subject of doppelgangers, Fritz Lang, and Saturdays." And then there's old friend Vanessa Mobley, ``who once observed my child peeing in the middle of Flatbush Avenue."

Despite all the delicious fibs in his book and on the air, Hodgman is being true to who he is.

``Being honest as a writer to me is the most important thing, even when you're writing a book of lies," he says. Parts of his book, such as the section called ``Diversions for the Asthmatic Child Who Cannot Play in the Snow" (see inhaler whittling, page 61), are even autobiographical. Hodgman was an asthmatic child, the only son of a business executive and a nurse administrator. His mother died of lung cancer in 2000; his father still has a note on which a 6- or 7-year-old John wrote: ``Writer at work: Do not disturb."

He was focused, and a touch eccentric, from the start. ``He was a legend at his own elementary school," the Heath School, says wife Katherine Fletcher, and in eighth grade he was voted most likely to become the editor of The New Yorker. (People have always joked that Hodgman was ``born 40," she says). In high school, Hodgman carried an old-fashioned briefcase with a combination lock and had long hair that he sometimes wore in a bun. Fletcher graduated from Brookline High School a year before he did, and the two have been together since Hodgman was 17.

Hodgman majored in literary criticism at Yale and applied to an MFA program at Johns Hopkins University. He didn't get in, but by that time he was living in New York and working as a receptionist for Writers House, a literary agency, and eventually became an agent for the likes of B-movie star Bruce Campbell.

In 2001, he began hosting ``The Little Gray Book Lectures" at a Brooklyn bar, featuring experts speaking on themes such as ``How to Predict the Future" and ``The Animals -- Are They Our Enemies? " Fellow Yale alum Jonathan Coulton performed funny songs at these events, and the singer- songwriter also accompanies Hodgman on his book tours -- dressed in a coonskin cap, playing the role of a mountain man whom Hodgman taught to speak English.

Hodgman has no delusions of grandeur about the path he has chosen.

``Writing paragraphs about nonsense is what at least at this point I want to do," he says. He admits it's self-indulgent, but it's where his heart lies. ``Warts and hobos and all, this is what I'm interested in." And the success of his book, which has 200,000 copies in print, seems to honestly surprise him.

``It is gratifying and astonishing and shameful to me that people don't want to burn it," he says. The same goes for his ``Daily Show" gig, which he says still seemed like ``a surreal fever dream" when Apple approached him in March about the Mac commercials.

The spots, which pit Hodgman as a stodgy PC against hipster actor Justin Long as a Mac, have had a n unintended impact: People are identifying with Hodgman. Slate writer Seth Stevenson noted that Apple is trying to market its product with a familiar setup: cool kid versus nerd. ``But these days," he writes, ``aren't nerds like John Hodgman the new cool kids?"

Judging from Hodgman's omnipresence in pop culture these days, he seems to have a point.