I am nothing if not a hopeful person. I try my best to not be a cynic, often harkening back to Conan’s Tonight Show farewell speech. Conan and his comedy have meant an awful lot to me over the years and, while I’m a fan of fantasizing about the big things I’d like to happen while also doing my best to make them a reality, when they do hit, I’m cautiously optimistic always, erring more on the side of strictly cautious.
This is why, last month, I was flummoxed to say the least when my buddy Will Harris (who has written nothing bad that I’ve ever read, and interviewed everyone) mentioned that he’d seen my name in the closed captions of Conan’s recent acceptance of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. It’s one of the most-deserved such prizes ever given out, if I’m honest, and I’ll be honest, much as I adore Will… I did not get the joke.
I wasn’t watching it – I didn’t even realize T-Mobile gave me free Netflix yet – and assumed that Will must have misread something. Until he sent me this photo of his screen.
Now, I don’t know about you, but no matter how cautiously anything you are, when you see proof that your name is onscreen at the same time as one of your comedy heroes, your heart is going to skip a beat. It was a “this seems awesome but I’m sure they didn’t just read my numbers on the lotto broadcast… because I never bought a goddamn ticket.” Which is it, of course. I’ve been near Conan for tapings of Late Night and Conan, and I have interviewed people from his show, but I’ve never met the man. I played him once, sure. I’m also literally the only person whose name is spelled exactly that way who is in the entertainment business, too, which is another reason Will was not the only person to text me about this.
And so, after finding out that I did indeed have free Netflix, I went there myself. I didn’t think Will would prank me, he’s not that kind of guy, but I had to see it for myself. I turn on the show, fast forward through a show I still haven’t found time to see, and shit, there it is. My name. The audio at the time – Conan brings in an auctioneer to help him get his thanks out of the way faster – doesn’t quite match up. It’s Jason someone, but it doesn’t sound like my name (pronounced “klahm”) or the more common mispronunciation, “clam.” A quick Google search of “Conan O’Brien collaborator Jason” cleared it up – the man was clearly saying “Jason Chillemi,” the name of his long-time collaborator.
My first suspicion was that I knew someone at Netflix who couldn’t understand Chillemi’s name and threw mine in instead. I only know a few people there, and no one in captions, and no one who thinks so much of me that they’d pull this and risk their jobs. It couldn’t be a “good guess” either, because my name is just not a name you’d “go to,” unless you knew me or another Jason Klamm (there are a few, but they all say “clam”). My suspicion now is that I’ve signed away the rights to something or other in the AI-based transcription service I use, and that somewhere deep in its code it knows my name and tried to fill in a blank in a really dumb way. Netflix has been rather publicly using AI for their transcriptions, but how my name snaked its way into this algorithm is beyond me.
Either way, I’m a firm believer in finding magic where you can. Not, like… actual woo-woo non-science magic, but the stuff that feels magical, especially if you can’t explain it. The fact that a bunch of random weird things accidentally synced up to put my name on screen with one of my great heroes, after years of wanting to meet the man, pick his brain, and talk comedy with him, isn’t exactly the result I would wish for, but it’s very, very, very fun.
Along with the things I genuinely dream of doing or having, I’ve also made a habit of having smaller, achievable goals like “get on this podcast,” or “self-publish a smaller book than you intended,” or “eat ice cream instead of this meal,” but when a blip like this comes along, it’s just as exciting as making any of those things a reality. It’s okay if it doesn’t, you know, mean anything in the traditional sense. It doesn’t have to mean something to make you feel good. I refuse to be cynical.