I'm Jesse Thorn, live on tape from my house in Los Angeles.

It's the Sound of Young America from MaximumFund.org and PRI, public radio, international.

It's the Sound of Young America, I'm Jesse Thorn. You know, life is full of rejections,

but most folks try to forget theirs. My guest, John Friedman, is a New York-based writer and

comedian who's built a career out of doing the exact opposite. He founded the rejection show,

a live showcase of the rejected from rejected New Yorker cartoons to rejected late show top 10

lists to rejected Saturday Night Live sketches. Now, he's the editor of a collection of rejection

called Rejected, Tales of the Failed, Dumped and Canceled. Friedman started obsessing over rejection

after a few rough rejections of his own, but he was recently accepted as a blogger for NBC's

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Welcome to the show, John Friedman.

Thank you so much. I should, I said rejection just now over 1000 times. Yes, I've heard that word

many, many times. Many times a day. I hear that word. Holy mackerel, did I just say that word?

I did not, and that was not my intent. That's just how it worked out. You did well, you did well

with it. It seems like you almost fell into this advocation of being the bard of the rejected with

a particularly brutal spade of rejections of your own some years ago now. Yeah, I wouldn't say I

just like fell into it, but I leapt into it headlong. Kind of. It was at a time where I was just

starting out trying to be a stand-up. Actually, after I had two times of doing stand-up comedy,

somebody approached me to host a show at a club called Rafifi in New York City, which is now closed.

I didn't really know what I was doing as a stand-up, let alone as a host, but I agreed to do it.

So every week I hosted a show without really any experience, but I learned a lot just by throwing

myself in there and hosting somebody else's show. I did that for about a year and a half,

and it was someone else's show that they were producing, and I wanted to have my own show eventually.

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