Comedian Caleb Hearon Wants You Off the Internet (Mostly)

Caleb Hearon wants a landline. Specifically one of those old-fashioned corded landlines (maybe even a rotary?) so he can speak to his friends while in the kitchen and making pasta with that long spiral following his steps.

Hearon is done with smartphones. Actually, the whole internet — he wants off. But wait, it’s not that simple, because he has a podcast (So True with Caleb Hearon) and he needs you to listen to it so he can still make money. Hmmm… he’ll let you figure it out.

If you haven’t taken his advice, then you’ve seen his clips floating around the internet. Originally from Missouri, Hearon moved to Chicago after college, and then to Los Angeles and New York to pursue comedy. He rose to fame first on TikTok, where pandemic-addled viewers fell in love with his one-side POV conversations and his stand-up went viral soon after — see bits about getting roasted by children and how skinny people and fat people can coexist. So True is particularly famous for clips of Hearon slamming mean commenters and chasing the cologne details of his high school classmates (named Cooper). Oh, he was also in Max’s Thanksgiving comedy Sweethearts, and you can spot him in last year’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith and 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion… and he’ll head out on his So True Live tour next week.

Hearon is hilarious, no doubt, but his acerbic wit is also built on top of a fierce intellect that shines through his contagious laugh. After a degree in sociopolitical communication from Missouri State, Hearon is quick to point out that politics and comedy use many of the same rhetorical strategies. “What sticks is hard sticky consonants and backloading and structure,” he says. “A lot of that is very, very integral to joke writing.”

Below, Hearon speaks with The Hollywood Reporter about his many moves across and around the country, his comedy and political work and why he wants you off that phone (only partly!).

Hi, Caleb. How’s New York treating you?

New York is good. I lived in Los Angeles for four years until [last] September, and then I felt like… I don’t know how dating is going for you in L.A., or what your love life is like, but for me, dating in L.A. made me — and we can both say this together — suicidal. So I had to move to New York to figure that out.

I do have a boyfriend in Los Angeles, but I met him on a trip out of town in the Midwest.

I want to congratulate you both, and that’s pretty much what it takes. If you want to find love in L.A. what you need to do is head to the airport and get the fuck out of town.

Is dating in New York going well?

It is going well. It’s going really well. There’s just a different energy in New York. My thing works better out here — part of my thing being being fat. The energy toward fat people in L.A. is so insidious, dude. It’s crazy. I kind of thought I’d be a little immune to it. Sometimes when my fat friends will tell me that something is a certain type of way I go, maybe we’re going in with a preconceived notion. And then I got to L.A. and I was like, no I feel that I could be arrested at any moment.

You have a house in Missouri, too?

Yeah. I’m there whenever I can be. I kind of split my time.

Does the Missouri in you still change the way you see the cities?

I was actually talking to my friend the other day about this. When you grow up in a big city — I noticed this the first time I came to New York, because I was interning at Columbia University and a lot of the other students there were going to Ivy Leagues or were from big cities and I thought it was so cool and I was so jealous. And then there was a moment where I was like, actually I’m so grateful that I had my childhood, because there’s still so much meat left on the bone by the time you leave home. I think [I got] the opportunity to be bewildered and surprised by the world. The runway to becoming jaded is so much longer when you’re from a place like where I’m from, because when you move to New York or Chicago or L.A. when you’re 20, even the train is exciting.

You’ve been on tour, and you’re about to go again. What’s your take on our country’s regional differences?

The funny thing is that I spend so much more time picking up on our similarities. It feels kind of silly saying that, like am I running for office or something? But it’s reality. I go to all these different places, even other countries, and people just want to hang out with their friends and fucking have a good meal and go dancing and take care of their kids and pay their bills.

I wanted to ask you about activism. I find that pockets of the Midwest and the South — they can be so much more active in their organizing than blue states that seem to rest on their laurels.

I could do this for days. You’re so fucking onto something. I know the most formative, brilliant, incredible activists. The people I’ve learned the most from about what’s actually going to make change, the people that taught me what activism truly is, people that are so much better than me and so much harder working and have so much more mission-driven work in their daily life… and they’re all in places like Springfield, Missouri.

It’s unfortunate, but that sense of being in battle, that sense of urgency of, “Oh shit, we live in the Bible Belt and everyone around us doesn’t want us to maybe even exist.” The fact that we’re doing this tiny little “pride” parade in a city square just feels so much more vital and crucial and the buy-in is so much higher.

You said these people helped define activism to you. What’s the definition?

For me it’s that I should be allowed to make a lot of money and do nothing — everyone else should figure it out [laughs].

No, to me, what I’ve learned is that it’s about connection. It’s about human stories. When I was in college, we worked on a campaign for SOGI, Sexual Orientation Gender Identity, basically just saying that you can’t fire people from their jobs or kick them out of their apartment for being gay or transgender. We lost the campaign, but we got super fucking close, way closer than anyone thought we would. And I think the lessons I learned from that were really formative were when you say, “Hey, we don’t have to agree on everything but baseline, I’m your neighbor, I’m a human being. I just want somewhere to live.”

Post-inauguration, what’s the journey looking like for you? Where’s the energy going?

I’m gonna run! [laughs]. No dude, I’m feeling more hopeful than ever. I really am. I’m not going to let these fucking nut jobs convince me that my neighbors aren’t worth fighting for, that life isn’t beautiful.

I think there’s a really good criticism of this perspective, that maybe I am just a privileged guy living in Brooklyn who gets to have this perspective, but it’s not rooted in non-action. It’s not rooted in unreality. I know what’s going on, I’m involved in the tenants union in Kansas City. I know the issues, and I know how bad things are. Hopelessness to me feels like the more privileged perspective. When I hear people going, “I’m so hopeless, I don’t know what we’re going to do,” I’m like, isn’t that just an excuse for you to continue doing nothing as you are?

And how does all this become comedy?

It doesn’t. I’m not very funny. It really doesn’t [laughs]. No, I think it’s funny that people are getting so bent out of shape over such stupid stuff. If you just step back from the hateful, self-serious rhetoric of these losers, these fucking grifter psychopaths like JD Vance… the more we poke holes in these little freaks and talk to each other about it and laugh about it, I think there’s real change in that.

How frequently do you still think about your sociopolitical communication college classes?

I’m still friends with several of my college professors — Dr. Holly Holladay, please print her name! I think about it a lot. There’s really intangible stuff. A big part of my degree was persuasion and argument making and putting together and taking apart fallacies and things like that. Political writing and understanding political discourse is — it’s a lot of the same stuff as jokes. Effectively it was a degree in how to deal with people, and that’s what I do.

And I’ve read you don’t listen to podcasts.

Never.

Never ever?

Never ever.

So why did you decide to start one?

Delusion [laughs]. My podcast, I started it out of a bit of frustration. I was tired of how much [business] is based on how many followers you have and what currency you have to get your movie made. I was like, OK, then I’ll start something and make it about other people. It’s an interview show.

Well, it’s a delight to listen to.

It’s so funny because I don’t listen to podcasts and I’m also big on saying we’ve got to get off the phones. Put the phones away. The phones are killing us. Get off the internet. And then every once in a while, I make maybe too compelling of a case to put the phones away, and I kind of want to walk it back, because I’m like, well not so much that I don’t make money.

The pod can be separate from the internet.

Well do you know about the Light Phone?

Is this the phone that the teen luddites are using?

Yes, I love the teen luddites. I want to be like them. I messaged the Light Phone and asked them to send me one, and they didn’t respond which I actually think is so fucking chic and cool of them. It makes me want them worse. The Light Phone is a no blue light screen that only has texting and calling. You can download podcasts and music onto it, but you can’t surf it. I want one so bad and also I want landlines again.

My mom has a corded landline. It’s very old though, the reception is quite fuzzy.

That’s sick. I’ve been on this kick lately where I’m pursuing obstacles. Just think about going to dinner with your friends and then going to a concert. We look ahead at the menu to make sure we’re going to like everything, we get a reservation so there’s no chance we’ll have to wait, we look at the artist’s Instagram Story to see when they’re going to hit the stage so that we don’t have to sit through doors and the opener. We remove all these tiny little uncertainties. So it’s cool the phone doesn’t work all the time.

You know, it’s also my mom’s rule that we don’t look up things at the dinner table. If a question comes up in conversation, you don’t need an answer. You can look it up if you remember it later.

And that obstacle unremoved is what led to the future delight of remembering it! I need to hang out with your mom. And if you do anything for me in this interview please print this: Restaurants, I’m going to fucking crash out if we don’t stop with the goddam QR code menus.

I hate those, too. So, are you ready for the tour next week?

I’ve actually been thinking a lot about what we’re talking about: How to cultivate community. I’ve just been reflecting, on any given night we might have two thousand people, most of whom probably live in the same city and have at least somewhat similar interests. I’m trying to figure out how it can be more than just a masturbatory exercise in vanity that I get to sell tickets and tell my little jokes. What else can we do make it special and help people connect beyond the jokes?

Last topic: What’s the update on Trash Mountain?

Well, people just keep sending us money. They want us to make it so bad. We’ve got probably two billion dollars in the budget at this point.

Oh, so you’re making a Marvel movie?

Yeah it’s actually the first ever coming-of-age Marvel indie [laughs]. It’s so good. I love it. I wrote it with my friend Ruby Caster. She’s a genius. Colin Trevorrow’s producing. Lilly Wachowski is set to direct. We’re just trying to track down the funding.

It’s based on you, right?

It’s about my dad who passed away a couple of years ago, who was a hoarder, which is a beautiful thing to be. I get so fucking revved up about the the opportunity to be an artist right now. So many people just need to hear about weird people in the middle of the country. I wrote the movie with Ruby in the months immediately following my dad’s death — like still doing the paperwork about the ashes — and I was just sitting in cafes sobbing over Final Draft every day. It’s been a very cathartic. I mean, that’s objectively funny to choose to write in a cafe when you know you’re going to cry.

One step up from crying in an airport.

Only below crying on the train. Yeah, I’m excited about it. Thank you for asking about it. That’s the thing I’m most excited about right now.