Nick Offerman – the actor best known as the plaid-shirted, straight-faced, libertarian public servant Ron Swanson of Parks and Recreation – is a few minutes into his explanation of how to build a canoe.

He’s really hit his stride, leaning forward in his seat to emphasise a point about something called a spokeshave, and inwardly I’m starting to panic that I might have to admit I’ve no intention of following through. A bedside table from Ikea that took me a week to assemble barely functions; a canoe is definitely beyond my capabilities, no matter how simply Offerman breaks it down for the “beginner woodworker”. (“A great place to start is actually a paddle.”)...

I’d brought up a role of his that predates Parks and Rec: presenting a 136-minute instructional DVD called Fine Woodstrip Canoe Building. It was before he came to be seen as a comedic actor, he says – though “the canoe video does have a few laughs in it”.

Offerman still doesn’t consider himself a comedian, even while doing press interviews during his standup tour of Australia. His career began in professional theatre, around 1991; his breakout role in Parks and Recreation, which first aired on NBC in 2009 and concluded early last year, was one of his first in comedy.

Offerman has much in common with his character by both character and design: Swanson played the saxophone before the writers knew the man who’d portray him could, too. But the character’s passion for woodwork came about after the entire writing staff paid a visit to Offerman’s wood workshop in east Los Angeles.

He is a master carpenter and rhapsodises, in an entirely pragmatic and not at all patronising way, of the transformative power of “successfully shaping wood with handtools”. I know I don’t have a canoe in me, but if I did, Offerman would be the man to find it.

He is as at ease in the great outdoors – using his hands, building receptacles for babies (a cradle resembling a little rowboat, “but I stand by it because it’s seaworthy”) and illicit substances (small, coffin-shaped boxes “to secretly hold people’s marijuana”) – as he is uncomfortable in the digital world.

He tussles with his teenage godchildren in Los Angeles over screen time: not how much, necessarily, but how big.

“We’re constantly wrestling with their propensity to watch everything – TV, films – on their laptop. We’re like, ‘you guys, it’s a film. Even watching it on a screen this size” – he gestures to a large canvas on the wall – “in your living room is doing it a disservice. It’s made for a stadium, to have it wrap your peripheral vision. And they’re like, ‘are you done?’”

It sounds like a last-ditch bid for compromise in a battle that’s already been lost. And Offerman – reluctant tweeter, Walt Whitman fan, proponent of slow living before it was a movement – seems resigned to it.

“I recognise what a luddite I am, but it’s sincere, in the same way that I prefer a tangible book to an ebook,” he says. “On the one hand it’s amazing we can look up any information that we seek. On the other never being able to say ‘I don’t know’ is, I think, inherently damaging to the human psyche.



“I certainly have it in me to just surf online and entertain myself, to eat fast food and be a lazy consumer. I also understand the pull of the pub and the bong, and part of life is learning when to enjoy those escapes – how much of them is healthy, how much of them is detrimental.

“For me, the more I am able to curb my use of screens, the happier I am.”

He brings up a scene from season four of Parks and Rec, in which Ron learns of cookies tracking his movements online. “It just cuts to him throwing the whole computer in a dumpster.”

He lets out the first gurgle of his distinctive laugh – a sound so amorphous, so bodily in its joy, there are 10-minute supercuts of it on YouTube. “I really understand and applaud that feeling.”

In which Ron does not go anywhere near far enough

Chalk it up to defensiveness of my own addiction to Twitter and burgeoning repetitive strain injury, but Offerman’s combination of practical skills and disdain for technology can verge on sanctimonious.

American Ham, a live taping of his one-man show at New York’s Ton Hall theatre that premiered at Sundance in 2014, is structured around his top 10 “tips for prosperity”, which include “avoid the mirror”, “eat red meat”, and “go outside”.

It was the most life advice I’d ever received in 78 minutes on Netflix, I tell him. “Good,” he says. I don’t add that I would never knowingly take instruction from someone who shares an email address with their spouse, as I’d read Offerman does with his wife of almost 13 years, actress and comedian Megan Mullally.



As long as I mention my balls every few minutes, people are like ‘he’s a comedian’

For the past 18 months, the couple have been touring with their two-person show Summer of 69: No Apostrophe (if you don’t get it, I’m sure someone in the comments will explain), but Mullally had to pull out for the Australian and New Zealand leg due to a filming conflict.It’s the first time they have been apart for more than two weeks in their 16 years together.

The follow-up to American Ham, Full Bush – Offerman’s second solo show – promises “cautionary tales” and “lessons in manliness”, some accompanied by him on his handmade ukulele. In the press release, Offerman said he was “throbbing with anticipation” to taste his first koala.

He hadn’t heard about their rampant chlamydia. He has now.

“If properly prepared, the clap is not transmitted through the digestive system,” he says in the same tone he used to describe chisels, at length, earlier. “You don’t want to see any pink” – there’s that gurgle again – “when it comes off the grill.”

He’s bound for Taronga Zoo later in his stay in Sydney, actually. “I’m taking my matches.”

He pauses. “I understand that one can have sex with a wallaby at this zoo?”

Definitely not, I reply.

“I was told I can engage in a ‘Tim-Tam slam’ in the wallaby section, which I assume meant some pretty heavy copulation.”

Offerman stresses once again that he’s not a comedian; he’s “an artist who tries to get people to love one another”.

“I said, ‘I really would like to talk to the young people, I have some things I’d like to tell them. I’ll write up a show and I’ll call myself a humourist.’

“As long as I mention my balls every few minutes, people are like ‘he’s a comedian’, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.”

As impressive as I find Offerman’s principles, sincerity, and knowledge of hand tools, it couldn’t be more at odds with my capital-M Millennial mindset. It must be exhausting to not only stand against the tide, but exhort others to come on in.

“I’m always impressed by humankind’s ability to take a shit on progress,” he says. “I’m frankly astonished that we haven’t had a more planetary nuclear conflict by now.”

He bets me $666 Australian dollars that the world as we know it will end through “some sort of plague” brought on by overpopulation (“Chris Pratt and I have a survival plan for when this goes down”). I’d suggested $10; I’ll have to have a whip round.

“You’ll probably have time to save up for the loss,” he says, and gurgles.

• Nick Offerman performs his solo show Full Bush on 30 January at Theatre Royal in Hobart; on 31 January and 9 February at Hamer Hall in Melbourne; on 2 & 3 February at Astor Theatre in Perth; on 4 February at Festival Theatre in Adelaide; and on 5 & 6 February at QPAC Concert Hall in Brisabne