Comedian Joseph Scrimshaw is terrified of messing up when his new museum job requires him to bake.
Joseph Scrimshaw is a comedian, writer, and host based in Los Angeles, as well as a Story Collider producer. As a comedian, he’s appeared at SF SketchFest, Chicago Improv Festival, Dragon Con, headlined on Jonathan Coulton’s JoCoCruise, appeared on Wil Wheaton’s TableTop, and more. Joseph has written for Adult Swim, the movie riffing group, RiffTrax, Screen Junkies, and was a writer/performer on Wits, where he wrote sketches for Paul F. Tompkins, Dave Foley, Neil Gaiman, and more. Joseph’s plays Adventures in Mating, An Inconvenient Squirrel, and My Monster (written with Bill Corbett) have been performed all over the US, the UK, and strangely Bulgaria. His popular comedy podcast Obsessed is part of the Feral Audio podcast network and has been listed as a Staff Favorite on iTunes multiple times. Joseph also co-hosts the Star Wars podcast feed, ForceCenter. Joseph has released multiple comedy albums including 2015’s Rebel Scum and 2013’s Flaw Fest. John Hodgman said of the album, “I am glad Joseph Scrimshaw has the power of thought and audible speech, or else this very funny album would not exist.”
This story originally aired on September 14, 2018 in an episode titled “Following Directions: Stories about improvising.”
Story Transcript
I think it probably tells a lot about my relationship with science that I want to begin my story by saying something about Star Wars. In the most recent film, The Last Jedi, there is a scene towards the end where our triumphant heroes, the Resistance, are making their desperate, final stand on this exotic, alien world called Crait.
They are dug into trenches and one brave Resistance fighter, whose name is Sergeant Sharp, he reaches out his finger, he runs it across this weird, white substance that’s covering the planet and reveals the red earth below. Then he takes that white substance on his finger, he brings his finger to his mouth, he tastes and then he says, “Salt.”
I loved that moment because it is bizarre and stupid. Because as soon as I saw that I said, “Why?” Why did he do that? Why did he pause the action of this epic space fantasy to just taste some dirt? And then I realized, oh, well. It’s probably just to make sure that the basic facts are clear, to make sure that the audience knows that white stuff isn’t snow, it’s salt, and this is why there's cool, red ground underneath. He really just wants to make it clear to people who have not read the entry for the planet Crait on Wookieepedia.
If you're not familiar with Wookieepedia, it is Wikipedia but just for Star Wars. And I am absolutely certain that it is far more accurate than actual Wikipedia by like a lot. I am dead certain of that.
So this scene really stuck with me because it is a good snapshot of my relationship with science. It is a fantasy that is briefly interrupted by basic facts. A basic fact about me is that I love Star Wars, I love Star Trek, I love Doctor Who, I love Moonraker, the James Bond film where he goes to space. It’s terrible, but he goes to space. So I love all of these things and I always have. Things that make me very, very interested in science but also make me too distracted to actually learn science.
Since I was a very young kid, I remember being in classes and the science teacher would be telling me something very interesting about the dirt on Mars. And I would just be imagining space wizards cutting each others’ limbs off with laser swords, on Mars. It made me develop a bad habit where I always focus on the romantic and the narrative and have a hard time focusing on scientific precision and the basic facts.
Well, I got a job a while back where I had no choice but to face this bad habit of mine. I was living in Minneapolis, Minnesota at the time and I got a job at a place called Mill City Museum. This is a brand new building that is built inside the ruins of the Washburn-Crosby A Mill, which is this old flour mill that was built in the late 1800s. This building had exploded once and burned down twice, so it was a very exciting place to work.
My job title there was ‘Interpreter’, which meant I was literally supposed to interpret the stories that were being told at the museum. The museum had all of these interesting stories to tell. It told the story of the Saint Anthony Falls, the only major waterfall on the Mississippi and how the power of that waterfall created this new technology in flour milling, which made the flour milling industry explode which basically created the City of Minneapolis and how then Minneapolis became the Flour Mill Capital of the World.
And because people kept getting injured in those flour mills, it also became the Artificial Limb Capital of the World at the exact same time. That fascinated me because of Star Wars and all the lost limbs there so I was really, really engaged with all of these cool stories we got to tell.
The company that owned this mill, Washburn-Crosby Company, eventually became General Mills. So we also told the story of Betty Crocker and the Pillsbury Dough Boy and the science of baking convenience foods. And the early history of advertising as we know it was partially created there.
There was an early advertising campaign by a man, and I’m not making this up, an ad man named B.S. Bull. Actual name of one of the people who gave us modern marketing. Very, very perfect.
So I was very engaged by all of the fun, narrative, romantic stories to be told but I was also faced with, to use a technical term, a metric-shit ton of science. There were a lot of older, I'll just say it, older men. A lot of older men who really questioned the physics of how the mill actually worked and made flour.
So on the floor we had this big model of the actual functioning mill and a lot of these men would come up and they'd go like, “Well, I don't know. I don't think that actually worked. I don't think that could have worked. You need like, you know, PSI that’s like a hundred pounds square root to fulminate the chaff.”
They knew just enough to be dangerous but I had to try to be polite and I'd say, “Well, yeah. That’s very interesting. It did work because we’re here. The City of Minneapolis is here. This is not a group hallucination or anything. This is real.” I try not to say that last part.
So it was very trying because I had to know the facts rely well because there were all of these older men who felt it was their natural birthright to somehow intrinsically know exactly how flour milling technology from precisely 1887 worked. And they had to know it better than the employees, so I had to really study up.
But that was nothing compared to the challenges of working in the baking lab. So we had this actual functioning kitchen where we were supposed to bake bread and cookies and all sorts of things and then share them with the audience and display our knowledge of the actual science of baking, and this terrified me.
I grew up very, very nerdy so I was used to being mocked. But because being verbally mocked is a precursor to actually physically being bullied, being verbally mocked sets off my fight-or-flight response. The thought of being in this baking lab and having 70- and 80-year-old people who have spent their entire lives baking, staring at me and judging me, made me want to either run away or physically fight them, which is obviously not a good choice for keeping my job.
So I had to start small and one day I was asked to please just make some brownies. Not even brownies from scratch, brownies from a box. I was supposed to just make these and set these out for children to eat and I was truly honestly frightened that I would accidentally poison and murder children because I had no cooking skills whatsoever at that point in my life. At that point in my life, the only thing I had actually made is a frozen pizza and I had messed that up.
Now, you may be asking yourself, “How do you actually mess up a frozen pizza?” I find it to be very simple. Be in your 20s and also be drunk. This is a thing I've been many times and I've messed up frozen pizza many, many times.
So I was assigned a helper to help me make the simplest thing ever. My helper had two jobs. He worked at the museum and then in his other job he was a chemist. So I would try to ask him questions and he didn’t understand. The questions were so incredibly dumb and basic he literally could not comprehend what I was asking him, so I was very much left to my own devices.
I did the first step, which is I get this big tub of sugar and pour out two cups and then mix it with the brownie mixture and some eggs. That’s the first step. That’s actually pretty much all the steps. That’s about all there is to it. Then I started mixing it together. As soon as I started mixing it all together I realized something was not right. The mixture began to harden and clump, like concrete. Like delicious, delicious chocolate concrete.
I showed it to my helper and he's like, “Yeah. That is not right. How did you do that?” He actually sounded impressed that I managed to screw this up. “How did you do that?”
I said, “I have no idea.”
And he said, “Well, put it in the oven and see what happens.”
So we put this pan of brownies in the oven and we were treated to an amazing show. The brownies began to sparkle in the oven. It looked exactly like the transporter effect from the original Star Trek. I called my helper friend over again and I asked him to look and he's just like, “Wow!” He honestly seemed like he was high and literally watching these lights like they were a Pink Floyd laser show as these brownies went off.
Suddenly, he went, “Wait. Wait.” And he went over and he got out that tub of sugar and he ran his finger through that mysterious white substance. He brought his finger to his mouth, tasted it and said, “Salt!”
I had made brownies with two full cups of salt. And this immediately spread through the museum incredibly fast so people came down, like, “How did he do this? Like literally, physically? And how can he be that dumb?”
The big question on everybody’s mind is, “Is it any way that these are possibly edible?”
And for some reason I felt it was my duty, my penance for my stupidity to eat a salt brownie. Why not?
So I carved out a brownie and I took one bite and everybody laughed and was very entertained and all of that. Then immediately all moisture left my entire body. I believe the word ‘moisture’ actually disappeared from my vocabulary, sucked out.
I decided I needed to excuse myself to the bathroom. So I went to the bathroom and I just started drinking a glass of water, a glass of water, and it was making no effect. It was like my entire digestive system was now just this sponge and there was just nothing that was going to happen.
So I kept pounding the water to try to fix it and then suddenly I realized, “Oh, wow. I might need to vomit up all of this salt-brownie-water that I have created inside my body.” But I did not vomit. I contained it.
Got to the end of the day, destroyed the brownies, just got rid of them. The legend spread and everybody was happy. I was very proud of myself. Overall, like, hey, I think that went okay ultimately. And then I had the epiphany that if your day at work becomes the proudest thing that you've done is successfully not vomit because of your own stupidity, that is not a great day at work. That is not a thing to be proud of.
So I really did buckle down and I got much better at learning the science of baking. I did actually successfully bake bread in front of people and then serve it to them and they claim to enjoy it. They did not die so that was a huge success.
I really carry that story with me not only in working at the museum and not only for science type stuff but just for basic life to remember that it’s great to be connected to the romantic and the exciting and the narrative but to try to have, if not great knowledge of science, to have respect for the most basic part of the scientific process which is just checking the details. Just to always check and to always be that resistant soldier and run your fingers through the white stuff, because it might be salt.