Transcript: What to Say About What Just Happened

Rob Long on how to use the word ‘huh’ in this political moment

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

There’s always a few months between the time you shoot a Christmas episode of a TV show and the season itself. Christmas episodes are shot in the late summer, long before anyone is in the holiday spirit, and there’s always a disorienting feeling of walking across the sun-baked asphalt of a studio lot into a soundstage to find a winter wonderland living room set inside, with background actors in turtlenecks and beanies drinking from mugs with two hands even though outside it’s hot and dry in Burbank, mostly.

So, right now I have no idea who the next president is going to be. And depending on when you’re hearing this, you do. So from me, now, to you, then, I hope you’re, we’re, it, is all going to be okay. And I actually think it will be. You don’t last as long as I have in show business without becoming really good at hopeful denial.

So what I’d like to do right now is tell you two stories about why we all need to learn to keep our opinions to ourselves and to stop, at least for now, trying to convert each other.

For instance, I don't like goat cheese. And I don’t think it’s a problem. It isn’t for me, anyway.

It's really the only thing I don't like to eat — which is a problem for me, but a different one. I eat everything. I'm actually a serious cook. I have been to cooking school, I like to cook complicated meals, and I like to eat out. 

I will happily travel — sometimes a long way — for eats.  

I have driven out of my way for a piece of pie. I have stayed overnight in places just because I heard about a nearby excellent biscuit. I ate my way across Central Asia, happily ate street food in Mumbai — with zero negative gastro-intestinal effects — and in Agadez, Niger someone dug up a side of mutton that had been buried for two days with hot stones, cut it into chunks, and I ate that, too.

I am not, in other words, a finicky eater. I try everything.

So when I say I don't like goat cheese, what I mean is: I've eaten it, lots of times, and I just don't like it. I don't like the smell or the texture or anything about it.