In your life before Night Vale, I’m curious how much of a role the bizarre or the weird played. Was it something you gravitated towards a lot, or something you just discovered you were interested in while working on Night Vale?

I've always liked weird. Not weird for the sake of being weird, but I've always liked things that are out of context or don't make sense. Maybe I like it in the same way that weight lifters love ammonia sniffers, it really energizes me to see something I can't explain. That was always the allure for a lot of people, me too, of David Lynch films and Twin Peaks, and as a child I read Alice in Wonderland a lot. So I've always loved stuff like that, and in some ways I guess that's Lovecraftian too, the idea that there things so terrible you can’t even conceive of how evil they are. For whatever reason it makes me excited to see something I can't puzzle together, and as long as I know that’s intentional by the artist, there’s some really cool stuff.

Coming into Night Vale I think Joseph and I really love the juxtaposition of things that mat not belong together or something odd that may suggest something else that's not being talked about, those sorts of things. I think often about a very, very early Simpsons episode. There's a moment where Lisa and Bart turn on the television and then you have Kent Brockman the newscaster, and right when they turn on the television all you hear him say is ‘and thus leaving the vice president in charge. And now, a look at sports.’ And it’s one of my favorite jokes of all time because it has this really, really horrifying implication but then it won’t let you see that. And for whatever reason that’s truly funny and sort of galling at the same time. I’ve always gravitated towards things like that.

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