Adult Swim: Celeb-Nerdy with Nick Offerman

If you think nerds are defined by their inhalers and pocket protectors, you need to get with the times, closed-minded fictional person. In the distant 21st century (a.k.a. right now!) celebrities can be nerds, too.

In Celeb-Nerdy, we coax these human masterpieces out of their mansions and get them to geek out on whatever their real-life private passions are, be it collecting clown coffins on eBay or working towards opening a Pringles museum in their own home. In this edition, Childrens Hospital regular (new episodes every Thursday Night at Midnight, E/P) and Parks & Recreation mainstay Nick Offerman looks back on a life filled with a profound fondness for wood.

Nick as Detective Briggs

When you aren't doing acting gigs, you're running your own woodshop. What's your biggest goal with woodworking?

I'm a very long way from building a three-masted tall ship of 18-inch-thick wide oak as they did in the days of Her Majesty's Royal Navy, but I have completed two wooden canoes. I think basically I have a rare combination of cedar training and a love of classic literature, combined with a fascination with woodworking. When you are a student of woodworking, you can only go so far before you are reading over and over that the greatest woodworkers are wooden boat builders. The reason for that, the reason they are the Obi-Wan Kenobis of woodworkers is because most furniture you make, you're trying to make it square and level. A table you just want to be flat so that your drink doesn't slide off. All those things can be done with machines and tools like table saws, planers, and joiners.

“I have a rare combination of cedar training and a love of classic literature, combined with a fascination with woodworking.”

But on a boat, there are no straight lines. Everything is curved. All of the construction involves a lot of eyeballing, sighting things up, and making the seams flawless by hand. Added to which, it's not just the safety of your meal: it's your life that would be at peril.

How much margin of error is there in making boats? Or is there none?

Well, basically none. With advancements in glue and things like epoxy and fiberglass cloth, there is a greater fudge factor.

When did you start getting interested in this stuff?

I guess it was a combination of a good friend of mine from theater school, named Martin McClendon. We went to acting school and learned to build scenery together and eventually moved to Los Angeles and started building furniture together. I guess we started with C. S. Forester's series of Horatio Hornblower books. They are ripping great yarns with great characters, but it gives you this insanely geeky education in the world of sailing old wooden ships. There's nothing geekier than learning the name of the dozens of sails on an old sailing ship.

“There's nothing geekier than learning the name of the dozens of sails on an old sailing ship.”

It all ties together. We're both men of the theater, we love our Shakespeare, and the Hornblower books just make amazing pieces of drama. A&E actually shot a bunch of them with Ioan Gruffudd as Horatio Hornblower. Marty and I both had our roles that we wanted to play. I wanted to play the one-armed Lieutenant Bush, who was as tough a man as you could find on the high seas.

Watch the Hornblower Trailer

We really both just came into this perfect maelstrom of old-school woodworking, wooden boat building, and acting. And just then, the books of Patrick O'Brian suddenly came to light and reached us here far across the ocean. That's a series of books with 21 novels. That's what they made the movie Master And Commander from.

So did your interest sort of get planted with all these books first, both O'Brian and Forester's? Or does it go further back still?

No, it absolutely started with those two series of novels. Part of why it's so fantastic to me is I grew up in the cornfields of Illinois. The notion of sailing a gigantic wooden boat with 300 men crewing it, relying only on men's ingenuity with catching wind in huge sheets of cloth and amazing tying of hundreds of knots. [Laughs.] To me, that's more fantastical than building a rocketship and flying to Mars. Maybe it was so delicious because Marty and I could actually tie knots and we could build a paddle.

That's just funny because the stereotype of comedic actors, and comedians as well, is they're not particularly handy. Given that you've been on Adam Carolla's podcast a few times talking about manly things like drywall, do either of you have a sense there's a rise of funny performers who are also handy?

I believe absolutely not. I think as much more as a rule, people who end up in the field of entertainment have often been a clown of one sort or another all their lives. That's not usually the person who, when the bus gets a flat tire, it's not the hilarious guy in the backseat who will go, "Oh, I can do this. I'll change it. You guys just take it easy."

It's also just an anomaly. I talk about it a lot because my woodworking is such a big part of my life. Really, my generation -- just all the kids who grew up in the city or the suburbs -- our society has become so luxurious in terms of quality of life that all these kids had to do was grow up as kids. Most of them didn't have to help out with any sort of work on the farm. When the storm was coming, they weren't helping their mom or dad batten down the shingles or shakes. They never had to split firewood. When I started theater school, I was astonished to learn that nobody in my class had ever used a hammer to drive a nail. I was like, "Wow, I didn't realize I had a superpower in my knowledge of the Phillips screwdriver."

“When I started theater school, I was astonished to learn that nobody in my class had ever used a hammer to drive a nail.”

But no, Adam Carolla, even among contractors, that guy is a genius. When we take calls on his show, I'm like, "Haven't you been doing The Man Show for the last 20 years? When did you learn every kind of water heater complete with filters?" [Laughs.] His knowledge is so arcane and his facilities are so complete. I marvel in him.

When you started theater school, were you just as passionate about building sets?

Yeah, that was my whole bag. I mean, when I got to theater school I sucked at acting. Really, really. People laugh when I say that, but it's not a joke. I was terrible. I have a sense of humor and I think I must've been affable enough that they were like, "Well, we need a couple big guys to carry the good-looking people on and off stage." So I got on, luckily, and quickly learned that I sucked. But because everybody else who had been working in Chicago already -- these kids showed up to college with like eight Shakespeare plays under their belts -- what they learned was that if they gave me a small role on the show I would build the set and they wouldn't have to. That became my scam. Even when we moved to Chicago and started a professional company called the Defiant Theatre, that was my main thing. I had all the tools and I built everything. Using that scam, I started to get bigger and bigger roles until finally I became a halfway decent actor.

What publications or websites do you use to stay up to date on woodworking?

It's crazy. If you're a geeky furniture maker, your bible is Fine Woodworking Magazine. If you are a wooden boat enthusiast, it's Wooden Boat Magazine. So I started getting that. My friend Marty, he and his wife had a little girl, so I took it upon myself -- Wooden Boat had plans for a cradle that was an actual rowboat. It's a totally seaworthy, old-fashioned planked rowboat. I built that when they had their little girl. I'm g*****n proud of it.

Then we were off because I was like, "Well, I can make a boat." If we need to send your daughter down to Aruba to pick up a load of sugar cane, this boat will serve. I knew the next step was going to be a canoe.

“If we need to send your daughter down to Aruba to pick up a load of sugar cane, this boat will serve.”

So I did all my due diligence and read everything I could about building canoes. Everything kept pointing to this one book called Canoecraft by Ted Moores. This happens a lot in specialized, geeky topics. If I want to buy a kickass bowie knife for skinning a grizzly bear, eventually everybody's going to point you to some guy in Montana who makes these amazing knives. So I read his book three times, and it said, "We have 20 different sets of plans. Pick one out depending on how you want to use it and order these plans. Call us if you have any questions." They have a website, a company called Bear Mountain Boats.

I ended up calling them because I had a couple questions about what choice to make. I get in a conversation with this nice lady on the phone, who turns out to be Ted's wife, Joan Barrett. At the end of half an hour she has enlisted me to shoot a video for them in how a first timer would make one of their canoes using their book and plans. [Laughs.] So me and my buddy drove up to Peterborough, which is outside Toronto, and I spent a weekend with them. I always use this analogy because it's so apt: It was absolutely Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Getting to be in his shop, and having him talk me through everything. It turned out great.

Watch Nick’s Instructional Video

You mentioned your goal of building a big-scale boat earlier, but do you have any goals of making good on your love of those novels? Maybe to star in an adaptation of them?

Since this [interview] will be an actual available published item, this will be the official beginning of my campaign to win the role of Captain Jack Aubrey in the Patrick O'Brian seafaring novels. The role that has been once assayed by Russell Crowe, who I think is a fine, fine actor. But as any Patrick O'Brian fan will tell you, Russell Crowe does not have the sense of humor to portray the jolly Jack Aubrey. That's a big reason why that movie didn't turn into a huge franchise. It's a beautiful movie. I don't want to disparage it. Where I think they missed the boat is that there's a great, jolly sense of humor interlaced among the battles at sea, scurvy, and tincture of laudanum. There's this big funny guy who hits his head on the bulkhead going below decks and ends up winning a duel because he fell down at the wrong time.

“But as any Patrick O'Brian fan will tell you, Russell Crowe does not have the sense of humor to portray the jolly Jack Aubrey. ”

Russell Crowe in Master and Commander

That's also probably why those Johnny Depp movies are so popular. They're up to, what, four of them now?

That's the thing. The world is not a geek like I am. The audience is not full of geeks who want to hear about the puddening. They don't want to know what the mizzen-mast is. [Laughs.] If I just said that sentence to my wife, she would be asleep by now. She'd be like, "Shut up. You are so boring."

Now, I have to ask about the "beefcake" section of your woodshop's website. How did that come about?

When I was putting together my website, I thought, "God, this is incredibly boring to most people." So I added a beefcake section so there would be a little visual interest in case a walnut table didn't trip your trigger. People really enjoy it. You know, it's that word "beefcake." It's more polite than saying, "tits and ass." But if I were younger and I were re-doing it, the tab might read "hot ass." You're guaranteed seven out of ten clicks on "hot ass."