John Hodgman’s current Facebook profile picture.

Making up fake facts is easy. But making fake facts so detailed and nuanced that they sound real and well researched is a challenge best left to a smart comic like John Hodgman.

Of course it’s too limiting to call the Yale-educated Hodgman just a comic. He’s a well published author, his most recent book, That Is All, completing his Complete World Knowledge series. He’s riffed with Jon Stewart as a correspondent for The Daily Show, personified a PC in Mac commercials, collaborated with They Might Be Giants, filled the role of civilian neurosurgeon on Battlestar Galactica and settled disputes for regular folks as Judge John Hodgman in this podcast series and New York Times mini-feature.

And as if that weren’t enough, he owns the Internet. Or, at least spends a lot of time on it: tumbling, podcasting, tweeting, and responding to readers and fans constantly.

In advance of his nearly sold out show (get tickets soon) at the Birchmere next Friday, February 10, we had a chance to chat with him about the end of the world, D.C. vs the moon, the impending space launch of the Washington Monument, his desire to be on Game of Thrones, and how his mustache might kill him.

Thanks for getting in touch.

I thought it might be wise to alert the local -ist, because I’m a reader of Gothamist. And so I contacted you, and now the show is close to selling out and that is very gratifying to me. And maybe you will make all the difference and sell all the tickets.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they sold out, I think you have a lot of fans in the D.C. area.

Well, I’ve had some very fun events in D.C. in the past. The previous two books and you know I didn’t intend to skip it for this book and now I’m glad to be able to come back and visit with my friends in the nation’s capital.

You’re on your This Is All tour, which goes with the book. What is the format for the show? Do you pull from the book, or is it something entirely different?

Well, the show is more of my imitation of a standup comic. I’m standing all the time and most of what I’m speaking is hilarious comedy. Much of it is drawn from the preoccupations of the book, but not exclusively. Preoccupations of the book being, you know, what someone of my age thinks about all the time, which is to say wealth, wine, sports, death, and the end of the world.

Since this is the final book in your trilogy of Complete World Knowledge, if the end of the world doesn’t happen this year, will you have to keep going?

Unfortunately, we all will. We all will have to find new things to do, if the Mayan prediction and my own predictions for the end of human history do not happen, as I have laid out. But I think that they probably will. But hypothetically, if they don’t, I suppose I will be happy. But I almost certainly won’t write another book on world knowledge, because I do think I’ve covered it at this point.

You know, I avoided wine and sports for a long time because, wine I just thought is so…you know, I like alcohol plenty, but wine has such a complex flavor palate and such a long storied history I thought it could only be enjoyed by assholes. And in fact, it’s pretty good. And sports, I just felt, if you want information on sports you could dredge the rest of the culture. I figured it was pretty much covered in every other book, magazine, TV show, film, symphony orchestra, everything. Sports, sports, sports, it’s all people care about. Also, sports, sports is covered in sports.

So what changed your mind, to start including wine and sports in this final book?

Well, you know, my book is predicated on not just the world ending but my own personal impending mortality, now that I’m a 40-year-old human. And as a rational man clings to religion at the end of his life so I too reached out to that which I’d previously rejected: sports. In a hope that it would somehow come to some peace with it. I learned a lot about sports, a lot of interesting facts about sports that I will reveal. You know, I cover all of the major sports: baseball, football, basketball, and falconry, but I’m not going to talk about falconry, cause everyone in D.C. knows about falconry.

Haha, yeah, totally. To kind of switch gears a little, as Judge John Hodgman, we were wondering if you could settle a Newt Gingrich-inspired debate for us.

Well, for us, who do you mean?

I mean for DCist, and our readers, and D.C. in general, actually.

You know, I settle debates between humans, not hypotheticals. Is this an opinion you have? An opinion that someone else disagrees with you on?

It’s more of a question and a debate than an opinion. I’ll just, just throw it out there…

You know what, I’m gonna make this one exception for you. I will allow this irregularity because I want to see where you’re going with this.

Okay, great. Which do you think should get statehood first, D.C. or the moon?

Well, that’s a good question.

Because Newt Gingrich said the other day…

No, no, I know to what you’re referring. If you think I’m not up-to-date on all the various competing moon-based plans of any given day, you’re sadly mistaken. I believe Newt Gingrich pointed out that by the end of the second term there would be a permanent base on the moon and that once there were 13, I think he said 13,000 residents…it would be able to apply for statehood. With the implication that he as Supreme President of the United States and the moon would grant. Now, obviously the moon does not have 13,000 permanent human residents yet. How about D.C.? How many do they have? About 2,000, like 2,000 people live there, right?

At least, I think it’s at least 2,000 [Please note sarcastic tone in interviewer’s voice]

It can’t have too many more than 2,000, come on.

No [Interviewer sarcasm continues]

It is a major American city.

Exactly.

So, I think that of course has many many more. What’s the size of D.C.?

This is terrible, I can’t give you an exact number.

Really? And you consider yourself a DCist.

I know, they’re going to revoke my -istness.

The moon will obviously be granted statehood before D.C. is. That’s simple math. Well, not math exactly, but, the moon base will only happen if Newt reaches a second term. And, Newt Gingrich, if he were the Supreme President of the United States and Divine Dictator, that guy would deny D.C. statehood out of spite. Simple spite. And, also, you know, D.C. has a lot of urban, working class, American poor people. I’m using the same code words that Newt Gingrich uses. And those people, they barely deserve a city, let alone a state, because they have no work ethic.They may send their children to the moon to be janitors if they wish… I’m just looking at this like Newt Gingrich would, that’s all. Not my objective here.

Do you want to be a state? You, personally? I’m asking you to turn the tables.

Yes, I absolutely think D.C. should be a state.

What would be the benefit, besides from taxation with representation? I read the license plates, I get it. But aside from that, what benefits would you get?

Well, aside from that, maybe we’d be included in all those lists we get left off of.

I think there might be distinct benefits to the citizenry of D.C., which I am not aware of. So I’m not coming out against D.C. being a state per say, but as an outsider I kind of appreciate the singular nature of the District of Columbia, and its existence as a no person’s land, as it were, in the country. I think that that’s cool. It’s cool to be different, and why would you want to be the same as, you know, Wyoming? Like, would you be willing to be a state… here’s the real test. Would you be willing to be a state, if you had to change your name from Washington, District of Columbia to Washington, East Dakota?

Haha, sure.

Alright, do your referendum. If you get a super majority of DCians who want to do that, then I’ll make it happen. I’ll make some calls.

Okay, excellent. So, in your time when you’ve come to D.C., what do you find funny about D.C.?

Well, your streets are cuckoo crazy. I like walking around the streets of D.C. because of the masons. You know this right, that your streets were laid out according to secret patterns of the Free Masons? In order to conjure and awaken the Great Eye of the Grand Architect.

I didn’t know that…

You don’t even know your own city.

I love the fact that you appreciate being taxed without representation. I love the fact that those license plates are out there, the angriest license plates in the union.

The time that I have spent there has been unfortunately short, and usually it’s extremely unusual and rarefied when I’m there because aside from the great events that I did, you know Politics and Prose, obviously a great bookstore, and you know that place, the warehouse, what is it called?

There is a place called The Warehouse.

There is a place called The Warehouse? Yeah, but otherwise, you know, it’s just me hanging out backstage at the Daily Show/Colbert Report rally watching Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Tony Bennett eat shrimp. That’s not anyone’s normal experience in our nation’s capital.

I’ve never been to the White House. I’ve never been to the United States Capitol building. I’ve been to the Air and Space Museum when I was a kid. And I’ve never been to the Washington monument, because I do not want to be blown out into space. That is an ancient Free Masonic escape craft. They built that originally to house the Free Mason George Washington’s bones in the pyramidion at the top and they rigged it in the late 19th century to fire off into space if the earth would ever become uninhabitable anymore. So since that’s going to happen later this year, that thing will blow off into space. I’m just not going to take that risk, especially now that it has a crack in it.

This is important information to know, I’m glad that I know this now.

I’m really embarrassed for you that you don’t know all these things.

So, I read this great interview you did with George R.R. Martin last year about the Song of Ice and Fire series.

Wow, that’s already last year, boy oh boy you’re right.

I was wondering if you were reading any fantasy or sci-fi right now? Is that the kind of thing that you read and enjoy?

I am a big nerd. But in terms of fantasy and sci-fi I was much more aligned with film than books. I mean I did time and I read some of the important ones. I read the Lord of the Rings and stuff, but I really only turned to the George R.R. Martin serial because I knew there was a TV show coming out and I felt like I should know what all the hubbub was about. I was initially very embarrassed to be reading it because it wasn’t a metaphor or an allegory of any kind. You know, like, there’s no question that the Lord of the Rings was about war, the mechanization of England, the industrialization of England, that it was about all these other things. You could get lost in the fact that Tolkien made up all these wackadoo elvish languages. But with George R.R. Martin this is a guy that just loves fantasy and science fiction and was just writing in the form and at first I found this to be a little unseemly.

Of course he’s such an amazing storyteller that I got right into it, and then it basically controlled my life. And I ended up realizing what I don’t think he totally gets credit for, aside from his amazing skills as what they say in the fantasy writing game as a “world builder,” as a guy who creates incredibly thoughtful, living, breathing set of cultures in an invented world, just line by line he’s one of the finest writers that I’ve read. And particularly his sense of how to pace out a scene and surprise you with where the scene goes and what happens in it. Particularly big scenes like a wedding or a feast of some kind. And for a book that’s as much about war as it is, he writes a lot in the salon and in the bedroom. And I think he’s the only person I know who actually writes culinary suspense stories.

There’s so much food writing in those books, which I can only presume is based on at least some research of the weird lampreys and duck thighs that people ate around the time of the War of the Roses, but it brings such life to those books and then the things that happen over meals are sometimes the most important. Huge feastings that are incredibly skillfully paced out in a way that from a writerly point of view I found absolutely astonishing.

So now I’ve actually decided, I’ve made a conscious decision to really fill in the gaps of my, sort of, fantasy and science fiction, and I guess you would say popular fiction and commercial fiction, sort of blindspots in my reading. So I spent in part because I was writing this book about the end of the world I finally sort of buckled down and read The Stand by Stephen King, which I loved. But actually right now I’m reading Zone One by Colson Whitehead.

You made an appearance on Battlestar Galactica, do you think you’ll make it in to the Game of Thrones series?

There’s no way that HBO, at all levels of that production, are unaware of my passion for and fascination with that show and that world. I have now stalked almost everyone involved in it, in so many different ways. From the highest levels from the executive officers to the lowest, most meaningless person involved, by which I mean George R.R. Martin. And so, I trust they know, but in case they think I have been coy or they don’t appreciate this, please put on the Internet: I would love to go there and be in it.

The small problem is they hire actual trained good actors. But they have a very large cast and I think they might just be able to find some role for some tweedy, adorable nerd with a mustache, there might be someone in there, I don’t know.

Do you have any big projects coming up that you’re excited about, or in the middle of? Or is this tour really taken over your schedule right now?

You know, it’s not taking up my schedule right now, I’m making it my schedule. It’s a tremendous amount of fun, but also a real growth for me.

This material, I was really able to speak it more than read it, more than I have before. And of course we were going more often to theaters than to bookstores, and I really found that by the end of the last couple of dates I wouldn’t even touch the book, and I’d no longer hide behind the podium. I would walk back and forth across the stage and found myself really enjoying myself a lot.

So, when the holidays were over, and I was thinking about what to do this year I wanted to just keep going. There were a lot of places I didn’t get to go to, a lot of theaters that I loved and would love to go play in, and of course the Birchmere in Alexandria is not a place I have been to before, but I know it well through the heresay from some good friends. And my colleagues Paul and Storm who open for me know that place well. So, it’s for me it’s a chance to just keep going and have fun performing in a way really I never have before. And quite honestly, at a level I don’t think I’ve done before, so that’s very exciting for me.

So, I guess one of the most important questions we have to ask is: Is the mustache here to stay?

I can’t make any promises. It emerged on my face almost exactly one year ago. It has a very firm grip on my skin at this point. My concern is if I tried to remove it it would kill me. But I will say this to the world that might want to hire me as an actor: if you’re not hiring me because I’m wearing a mustache, that can be changed. But so long as America will tolerate it, I personally find it hilarious.

Are there any other words of wisdom you can leave us with?

That is all.

John Hodgman performs at the Birchmere (3701 Mt. Vernon Avenue, Alexandria) February 10 with Paul & Storm. 7:30 p.m. $25.