Sarah Marshall Is More Than a Disembodied Voice

Like many people, I started to listen to the history podcast You’re Wrong About during the pandemic—initially with the Princess Diana series, in my case. Journalist Sarah Marshall and then-co-host Michael Hobbes (now moved on to the podcasts Maintenance Phase and If Books Could Kill) cast aside the legends built up around the people’s princess, instead treating her and everyone else around her like human beings. It felt like a novelty in a world where we generally lean into myth-making, and as I listened to more and more episodes, I came to appreciate just how much Marshall (and Hobbes, when he was on) analyzed historical subjects not just critically, but compassionately as well. 

“[The podcast] started off with the stated goal being that we were going to look at news stories where there was some kind of major misconception about what had happened, where we would take an existing myth and then talk about the myth, and then talk about the reality,” Marshall tells me in a phone call. “And I think that over time, it has grown into a show that’s about history more broadly, but also a show that started off just by looking at the patterns of what kinds of human beliefs and behavior recurred in different stories, where I feel like now, we spend more time on it looking at the central myths that guide human behavior and the sort of the things that we consistently believe or fall back on—even when they don’t help us—and what all that’s about.” 

Speaking with Marshall over the phone, she’s just as delightfully insightful as on the podcast, telling me about a book she just bought called The Clown Egg Register (“No two clowns are supposed to have the same makeup,” she explains, “There has been since 1946 a registry where clowns have their makeup and their costumes painted on eggs, and that’s how we keep track of the clowns… Why not?”) and discussing her dream to eventually do a YWA cookbook. She’s a font of unexpected information, and she says her idiosyncratic interests (such as the 1992 pro-union movie musical Newsies) were sometimes rebuffed when she tried to cover them before the podcast. YWA confirmed that Marshall wasn’t the only one fascinated by these stories.

“These things are interesting and not just to me, but to a lot of other people… Anything can be a shared text in our attempts to sort of figure out what’s going on and why we’re like this as humans,” Marshall shares.

In those early pandemic days when I first began listening to YWA, so many of our efforts to connect with other people were through a screen or, in the case of podcasts, our headphones. Now, Marshall is taking the show on the road, making the human connection at the core of her podcast more tangible than its usual format allows. 

“Doing a podcast is like a great way to have people experience you as a disembodied voice and then possibly you can also start experiencing yourself as a disembodied voice,” Marshall says (ironically, she’s a disembodied voice as she’s opining on the subject), “And then it feels like sometimes you have to do something to remind everyone, including yourself, that you do have a body. And the stage is a great place to do it.”

“An Evening with You’re Wrong About” is coming to Gramercy Theatre and The Bell House in New York at the end of April, where Marshall will be joined by comedian and fellow podcaster (and former Paste contributor) Jamie Loftus and musician and YWA producer Carolyn Kendrick. Marshall promises that the live show will “bring the music and the history and the body horror together, because those are our three strings”—those three strings belonging to Kendrick, Marshall, and Loftus, respectively. 

“Bring your sing-along lungs,” she says of the upcoming performances, “And be ready to see a public intellectual do something disgusting—is it self aggrandizing to call yourself a public intellectual? It’s not that great. Most of the people who have the job have been complete idiots like William F. Buckley.”

Translating the podcast into a live show was a daunting task at first, but when she focused on the intimacy and ephemeral nature of an in-person performance (“You’ll be there or you won’t, like in the Vaudeville times,” she jokes), the pieces fell into place.

“Once I started thinking about like, what are the feelings that people say the show gives them? And how do we translate that feelings flavor palate into a live event? That made it a lot easier,” Marshall explains. 

Those feelings, as you’d imagine, are ones of connection. 

“My goal for the [live] show… was the feeling of like, Oh, we’re not alone, and everything isn’t so depressing. Everything is depressing, of course, we’re not taking that away,” Marshall assures me. “But like, things are also very funny, and human beings are also very connected to each other and we’re connected to each other maybe most visibly in our weakness and our vulnerability and our capacity to do terrible things. And that our gratitude for our ability to feel connection is an important feeling to sit within, and I feel like the show encourages people to do that.”

Sometimes the person who’s needed that encouragement has been Marshall herself, funnily enough during the pandemic when so many people (like me) started listening to You’re Wrong About.

“There were times when I felt like, You know, I’m not this optimistic person anymore. I’m pretty pessimistic and angry at people a lot,” Marshall recounts. “And there was a period when I really felt like I was trying to tap into a person that I no longer knew how to be. Being forced to continue doing the show, just because it was the one thing that gave me a feeling of normalcy, it was like I kept being exposed to people who listened to episodes I had done years earlier and who felt connected to it and talked about feeling a deeper sense of connection to humanity because of it… I think probably the biggest thing the show has done for me is first, give me an outlet to express connection with people and the connection that I think all people share, and then when that truth felt farther away, or harder to see, the show forced me to remember it.”

“An Evening with You’re Wrong About” is coming to Gramercy Theatre on April 25th and The Bell House on April 27th and 28th.

Clare Martin is a cemetery enthusiast and Paste’s assistant comedy editor. Go harass her on Twitter @theclaremartin.