Interview: Rachel Forman and Dodge Greenley on Friendship
Plus a special Chortle announcement!
🚨 ALERT! ALERT! 🚨
We interrupt your regularly scheduled Chortle for a special announcement.
After five months of hilarious comics and endless moral support,
has decided to step away from creating weekly posts to focus on other projects. I’m grateful for his contributions, and hope that we’ll be able to feature more of his work in the future.In the meantime,
will be stepping into Dodge’s place to write weekly columns. Rachel is one of the funniest people I know, and I’m excited that she’s joining the team—even though, if the world were fair, she would be making big Hollywood buck$$$ by now.Check out these posts she wrote for Chortle recently:
Luckily, it should be an easy transition, as not only are Dodge and Rachel both talented artists—they’re also good friends with each other! So I thought we should make the hand-off official with a dual interview about friendship.
As a reminder, Three Quora Questions is our series of interviews in which we field strange and interesting questions posed on Quora.com (the internet’s oddest knowledge repository). Here we go!
What do you value most in a friendship?
RACHEL: I mean, top of the list is making me laugh. Like, sense of humor, for better or for worse—with friendships, with relationships—that is like top tier for me. Because that keeps life interesting. It really is like a true love language for me.
DODGE: For me, it's even stupider. For me, since COVID, it is like purely like, what's the word I'm looking for? Not even proximity, just like... convenience.
Is the friend there? Have you spent any time with me? Like, you could be the dumbest person I've ever met, you could be the least funny person I've ever met, and if I get to spend any time with you right now, I'm like, “That's amazing.” The most important thing for me in friendship is human contact.
RACHEL: Showing up. We can distill that to showing up.
Why do friendships fade?
RACHEL: They're not fucking funny enough.
DODGE: I mean, the real reason is they don't take the time to learn how to play Magic the Gathering with me.
RACHEL: They keep flying into LAX, not Burbank.
DODGE: Oh, yeah, that's real.
RACHEL: I read something a while ago that was maybe a little cheesy, but it was like, shed the things that don't serve your soul. I think there's an internal knowing. Are you craving time with this friend?
DODGE: What you're saying is that you don't want friendships to be homework. You want them to be comforting, right?
RACHEL: Also, I just want to do a PSA for allowing friendships to fade. I think sometimes people come into your life for a certain amount of time, and not everything has to last forever. I have friendships that, you know, maybe they did fizzle or just contact has diminished, but there's still a lot of love there.
How can I covertly test people for their friendship, loyalty, or honesty?
DODGE: You poison them and then hold off the antidote while you quiz them about their knowledge of you.
Or you poison them and hold off the antidote until they learn how to play Magic the Gathering.
RACHEL: Once I had a wild night out, and I woke up randomly in someone's house. And I just dropped a GPS pin to my friend and she came and scooped me. The Pin Drop Test. You just drop a pin to your friend, and if they just show up, then they are solid. If they either don't show up or demand any more information, cut them out.
DODGE: I think that's amazing. You should never test your friendships—and the pin drop is actually a perfect example—because your friendship will be tested naturally. You don't need to make up a test.
i love this, mostly because i am friends with both of them. for both proximity and humor! AND NOTHING ELSE. we will miss your weekly twisty turn-y look at things dodge, and are excited to see your loopy brain thoughts, rachel. you guys are the best.