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How to Humanist asks life’s questions big and small with the help of brilliant humans along the way.
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SHAY:
Welcome to How to Humanist. It is Shay Leonia, your host, once again on behalf of the American Humanist Association. And we are fresh off of the close of our 85th annual conference, and this year it was virtual, so it was wonderful because it gave a lot of people a chance to attend who might not have been able to join us in person in previous years.
But the fun was all still there because we had one of our incredible honorees, which was Jordan Klepper, our Humanist of the Year 2026, to accept his award. And I figured that today we could do something a little different and give you his interview and just let you listen in if you didn't have a chance to attend this year, or if you were there in the room when it happened and just wanna hear it again, because it was that good.
So without further ado, I would love for you to hear Jordan Klepper's acceptance speech, and the subsequent interview to follow with our Executive Director, Fish Stark.
FISH:
All right. Welcome back, folks, for our Humanist of the Year presentation. Good to see you, folks. Good to see you, Bob. Good to see you, Debbie. Good to see you, David. It's so nice to see the names of people on the screen who are here when I'm not presenting a deck. Good to see you, Walter. Good to see you, Sheila.
We'll get started in just a minute. Keep on coming in. Rick, good to see you. Looking forward to seeing you in North Carolina in a couple of months. Anne, good to see you. We're gonna give it just another minute, folks.
And we wanna make sure everyone gets a chance to join in because we know not everyone is always right on time. Lisa, so excited to talk to your group in New Jersey next month. Thank you for being here. Mark, Matthew, good to see you.
Scott, welcome. Okay, so we are filling up, and I wanna get us started because I want us to have as much time as we can to hear from and ask questions of our amazing Humanist of the Year.
You know, for those of you who were here two years ago when we were having an event with Congressman Jared Huffman at our last virtual conference, he said something that I thought was really important, which is that as humanists, we need to be funnier and we need to be more joyful, right? We have a history, a tradition of Mark Twain and George Carlin and Julia Sweeney and Ricky Gervais and a whole lot of brilliantly funny folks. We sometimes lose ourselves in dour philosophizing and over-intellectualizing. We sometimes trade words for pathos.
I've been trying to take Congressman Huffman's advice and open my talks with a few jokes. I don't have very many good ones. My best one is that I don't find the Bible realistic, 'cause I don't know any guy my age with 12 friends.
But I'm super excited that today we get to bring someone to you as our Humanist of the Year whose incredible career not only reflects the rich tradition of really funny humanists, I almost left Kurt Vonnegut off the list, he used to be honorary president of the American Humanist Association, but also humanists who have used humor to critique power and expose hypocrisy. As Voltaire said way back in the 18th century, their mockery is the best response to unintelligible propositions.
And with Jordan Klepper, three-time Emmy Award winner and co-host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, you have someone who doesn't just know how to make a good joke, but knows how to use a joke to tell a story and expose the truth. He's also a recipient of the Peabody Award and the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Journalism for his work through The Daily Show as the creator and host of the acclaimed Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse series, which went over 100 million views.
He's an author of essays and op-eds for CBS Mornings and The Boston Globe on politics and civic life, and he is a nationally touring performer whose show Suffering Fools sold out theaters across the country, and recently he delivered a top-ranked TED Talk on democracy and public discourse that was viewed by millions.
I had the pleasure of meeting Jordan at an event that was hosted by the humanist community at Harvard. My friend Greg Epstein brought him in to give him the Harvard Humanist of the Year award, and I was really struck by the way Jordan didn't just reflect humanist principles, but called us to be better humanists, to use inquiry and to use our willingness to challenge authority and to use our willingness to question our own assumptions and other people's, to make America a better place, to bring people in who we might have thought were unreachable, and to have fun and look good while doing it.
So without any more editorializing, I wanna give the stage to an amazing person who represents the best of our movement. Ladies and gentlemen, our next Humanist of the Year, Jordan Klepper.
JORDAN:
Wow, Fish. Thank you very much. That is such a kind and warm welcome. I will say a tenet of humanism is its rejection of mystical beings pulling the levers of fate, and it instead embraces a brutal rationalism so that we may focus on what is real, what is here right now, so that we may be aware, we may be attentive, we may be above all else present, which is why I'm honored to join you via Zoom.
I will say it is good to know that humanism, while not bound by archaic traditions, is still bound by capitalism, because renting a Marriott ballroom doesn't come cheap. You gotta get the big conference room, you gotta pay for catering and a projector, someone to turn on the slides with Carl Sagan quotes and clever Charles Darwin visuals. You gotta get a DJ to spin Billie Eilish tunes at the humanist happy hour. It's a whole ordeal. Perhaps we'd all believe in a higher power if Hilton would throw in just a 15% discount.
Regardless, I am humbled to be asked to accept the award for Humanist of the Year. I have to first thank Neil deGrasse Tyson, who I assume said no. I would guess his Zoom rider was just too Hollywood, and that is where I come and I swoop in. I promise, though, that I will do my best to earn this accolade, but a heads up to all you humanists out there, when you're handing these things out to comedians, it might mean the end times are near. Just food for thought.
Now, the last time Fish referenced it, I was at a humanist event, a gathering, or I think what is known as a coven. I brought my friend Sean along, who, much like myself, had no idea what to expect. Was it going to be some sort of academic lecture, or an elk horns body paint pagan sex club kind of thing? We didn't know. And as soon as the lectern came out, Sean, my friend, breathed a sigh of relief, put his edible body paint away, and then he settled in.
Now, Sean had asked me beforehand what humanism was. I told him to shut up and read a book, you stupid rube. Frankly, it is hard to define what humanism is. You end up relying on telling people what it's not. Like, you know church? It's not that. Instead of Sunday school, it's just school, you know? Or, it's a group of people who are interested in rationality and kindness. So, like Canadians? Yeah. Humanism is sort of like being Canadian.
Needless to say, despite my best efforts, my pal Sean was still very uncertain about this whole humanist thing. And frankly, finding comfort in that uncertainty might just be the best place to start. In fact, I find comfort in uncertainty to be a very powerful state.
Now, my day job is over at The Daily Show, where sometimes I'm behind the desk, and other times I'm out in the wide open chaos of America talking to other people. Now, when I'm out on the road chatting it up, I find the most frustrating quality in another person is not their anti-woke take or their flat Earther theories. The most frustrating quality is their certainty.
In fact, one of the most telling interactions I had at a Trump rally occurred in Iowa during the first Trump impeachment, when documents and testimony from Trump insiders like John Bolton were blocked by Trump himself. So I asked supporters if there was any legitimate reason for Trump's impeachment, and a woman came up and she told me, "You can tell he hasn't done anything wrong because of his demeanor. He would be trying to hide things."
So I clarified, "If you were blocking witnesses or evidence, you'd be, 'You're hiding something.'" And then she just doubled down. "Yes. He's like, 'Let them see everything.'" So I told her, "But Trump is blocking witnesses." And this woman paused, she thought, she paused some more, and then she said, "I don't care."
It didn't matter. This argument we were having over the legitimacy of the impeachment was just for show. It was part of the game. In fact, I appreciated her honesty. We can debate what we want. That's politics. Politics is essentially a negotiation over priorities. What we can't debate is who we are, and when your politics becomes your identity, then there is no negotiation. When you give over your critical thinking to a party or to a religion or to an algorithm, you're lost.
Perhaps the bravest response to being questioned by someone like me, the one that I'm hoping to hear, is, "I don't know." Humble, with the possibility of growth, and you won't find that answer on television or Twitter, mediums that reward certainty and volume. The response that worries me, the one that I see more and more, is, "I don't care." Immovable and certain and stuck.
Being open to change, to this act of becoming, is a liability in 2026. Algorithms don't push questions. They amplify the loudest answers. Every hot take on a subway is either 100% agreed with or 100% not, and I wish there was a space for 52% disagree but open to hearing more as a subway take. Maybe it's out there, but it's not getting pushed into my feed, which is a shame.
Being open is a beautiful thing. So like my pal Sean back at the humanist event, he didn't know what he was in for, but he was open to it. So Sean settles into his seat. He's uncertain about the whole humanist thing, but he's willing to hear it out. He listened, he chatted with kind people, he enjoyed it.
Then afterwards, Sean relayed an interesting moment to me while watching the humanist event. A man in front of him sneezed. Sean waited, looked around, nobody responded. Then he said, "God bless you." The sneezy man did not respond. Sean told me he felt time slowed down, and the weight of that silence sat on him for those long two seconds. And Sean told me afterwards the moral of the story is, "I don't think humanists say bless you."
And in that tiny interaction lies both the glory and the challenge of humanism. First off, kudos to the group of humanists for their steadfast attention and refusal to lean into knee-jerk traditionalism, or kudos to the group for being too uncomfortable to just say gesundheit. I mean, it is a strange word, it almost sounds too German. I get it.
But on the other side, if there's ever a reason for God to exist, it's to fill that split second of awkwardness with a moment of grace and kindness. And this is where I struggle. There are the moments where I crave a tradition or a blueprint to walk through life, to automate the little stuff with knee-jerk kindness. And what is the harm in that? Sometimes autopilot belief smooths out the difficult parts, 'cause life is exhausting. It'll wear you out if you have to offer a word of praise for every sneezy atheist who forgot to take their Zyrtec.
But then again, maybe actual kindness is not the automated response of God bless you. Maybe actual kindness has to be an active choice, an act of grace with intent. For me, and for all humanists, that's the challenge, not to fall into the trap of non-thinking kindness, automated bless yous. But also, humanists, don't be a dick and say nothing. Choosing not to believe in something isn't noble. It frees you up to be noble. Humanism is a statement of intent, but the humanist has to do the follow-up, because there ain't no institution.
So it's in those post-sneeze moments of snot-drenched silence where we must do the work to offer something. Maybe a hanky, or even a, "Bro, sorry about the hay fever," could go a long way.
So is that the answer? I bravely say, "I don't know," and I promise to keep looking. Regardless, thank you all for this honor, and if you're anything like me and you like to hear yourself speak, I think now we're gonna open it up to some questions. Fish, you wanna take it away?
FISH:
Yep. Thank you so much, Jordan. That was inspiring, powerful. I'm gonna explain humanism to my friends as, it's like being Canadian.
JORDAN:
It's just easier that way, yes.
FISH:
And don't worry, you weren't our second choice. Neil deGrasse Tyson, he actually accepted an award from us years ago. So...
JORDAN:
Oh, thank God. Okay. I was gonna say...
FISH:
So you're in good company. If he wants a second one, that's totally fair. Honestly, if he came to us and asked for a second one, I'd give him one.
Okay, so I've got a lot of great questions coming up in our Q&A, and folks, please feel free to keep suggesting them. But I'm gonna go with one from our friend Scott Wright first. He said, "I recently lived through one of my personal nightmares. A stand-up comedian asked me what humanism is as part of their crowd work. I think I flubbed it. How would you respond to communicate humanism in a quick and pithy way in such a context?"
JORDAN:
Scott, in these situations, you lie. That's what you do, okay? There's a benefit to not believing there's a god that'll send you to hell, is you can lie whenever you want, man. That's what's so great about it, you know? Just don't be bound by their rules, especially in a stand-up comedy venue, because that's, I mean, that's the devil's kitchen right there.
So feel no obligation to truth to that stand-up comedian, 'cause I'm sure as soon as you said humanism, he jumped on it. Next time just say, "I'm a Christian," and it'll sound boring, like you're just part of the masses, and he'll move on.
The pithiest answer to humanism I... Kurt Vonnegut is one of my all-time favorite authors. First time I ever heard of humanism was reading Kurt Vonnegut talking about accepting a Humanist of the Year award, which is part of why this is such an amazing honor to me. But he, I'm going to butcher it, but essentially was saying, acting with grace and kindness without any expectation of reward, which to me is about as good a definition as you're gonna get.
FISH:
I love it. Here's a question from Reese Shaw that I thought was really thoughtful. Satire is very effective in exposing irrational beliefs in people with whom we disagree. How do we make sure that skepticism and ridicule don't become another form of tribalism, and that humanists apply the same critical standards to beliefs held by our own community?
JORDAN:
Man, that is a great question. I struggle with that as well. I touched on it a little bit in the response I just had right there. What I fear, and I fear myself pulled into knee-jerk tribalism, is the spaces we have for these conversations. Like I said, as soon as you get online, the only way that you're gonna make any kind of noise online is if you're your most certain version of yourself. Hyperbole is the only thing that plays.
I talk to a lot of people at Trump rallies, and when I'm talking to them in front of a camera, I find them becoming their most certain, aggressive self, and you can't help but become your most certain, aggressive self within that. Again, when there's a camera there, when there's an audience, and that audience can be in front of a camera, that audience can be in front of family members at Thanksgiving, that audience can be a Twitter or X audience as well. When people are watching, you become this more performative sense of yourself, and you lose the ability to look multiple times and hard at your own beliefs, your own biases, and the flaws that could be in your own argument.
And so I find when the cameras are turned off and I have conversations with people at Trump rallies, when those cameras are off, I find nuance in our arguments, a softening in our certainty, and I also find the ability to be open about the arguments that I know less and less about. I work real hard to try to stay on top of things, be aware of my opinions, but I also know that, it's funny, when you get in conversations with people about the economy and the pros and cons of whether or not the Fed should raise the lending rates, I think a lot of times our knee-jerk reaction is to respond based on what the people we don't like say is good, so we say is bad.
But instead of being like, "You know what? I don't know a ton about Fed rates. I'd do some research. I'd like to be open to understanding a bit more about that." I think that's really hard, and quite frankly, the spaces where we have those conversations don't reward that kind of inquiry. So you gotta find spaces where you can have that. You gotta keep that thing available, because you aren't as clever as you think you are, and as soon as you do, then you're in the land of bullshit.
FISH:
I love it. And let's stay on this topic a little bit, because I think once you get out of the land of bullshit, then there's actually an opportunity for people to change each other's minds. Joe Conley asked, "Have you discovered any effective way to change an extremist viewpoint?" So once you're having that good conversation, are there good ways to get the other person maybe to move over to your side a little bit?
JORDAN:
No. Next question.
You know, what I had noticed, changing people's minds is difficult, and I think it's a bit of a liberal wet dream to think that, like, people often are like, "Do you go out there and when you have real conversations with people, do you change their mind?" And it's like, eh, that's not how it works.
I will say, when I'm doing my Fingers the Pulse pieces, that's not the intention of the pieces. I'm not there to try to convince somebody of another opinion. I'm there to find humor, satire, to point out hypocrisy, and maybe expose some of the talking points that are out there.
And I will say, in my experience, where I've found a softening of that certainty, the ability to change people's minds, is you gotta be open to letting yours be changed first. You gotta be vulnerable in that sense. The real conversations that I have with people are when I don't come at it like, "You're wrong. Let me tell you why." Facts aren't gonna change a lot of people's minds. What is, is being human in front of them, telling them, "Oh, that thing that I... You know what? I don't know as much as I should. I'm open to understanding. I'm willing to be wrong. Let me tell you what I know."
That, to me, invites a softening from somebody else. Also, for me, in my life, I have only found connections with people who are open about their own failures and the things that they don't know. And so I think that's, beyond it being a tactic to change somebody's mind, to me it's an invitation to connect with somebody else. And in that moment where you are connecting, perhaps you are open to finding a space where you can influence them to see something in a more open way. But you have to take that first step and be truly available to do so.
FISH:
I like that. I think that, well, it's a truism, right? That finding common ground is really important for building relationships, and our fallibility is a source of common ground. It's key to the human experience.
I've got a good question here on that theme of connection, from Ash Boo, who is the president of the Undergraduate Atheist, Humanist, and Agnostic group at Harvard. She asks, "What, in your experience, is the best way to connect with someone on the basis of humanism beyond a sometimes shared antagonism towards religion? How can we find common cause without being about what we're against all the time?"
JORDAN:
That's another great question, and something I struggle with articulating, and you guys are, I would say, much deeper in the fight than I am. How do you find a collective, a shared identity within humanism that can bring people to the table within it that's not just based on something that is anti?
I think acts of kindness and generosity are attractive to people across the board. Getting out and into spaces together is going to do that. I think a college campus is a great place where you're actually in the same building, in the same space as other people.
At The Daily Show we talk a lot about this, and we talk about tribalism, and we had Robert Putnam, who wrote Bowling Alone, which I think is sort of a seminal text on the modern era, where we find ourselves alone in our own little struggles. And in some ways it doesn't matter what group you join as long as you find something that connects you.
And so you are right, anger and frustration is sometimes a way to get out of bed in the morning, but I think finding shared commonality through kindness, strength, and excitement, good deeds, is something that can do it as well. But I wouldn't be ashamed of the small little things that pull people together. I think the connections I've had with the MAGA supporters on the road are more often than not over Bob Dylan and The Band, albums that came out in 1972. We are excited about a thing, and that makes us human. We reveal ourselves and we're vulnerable about the things that we love. Finding those little things, don't be embarrassed by that little thing that pulls you guys together, and trust that in that there's space to find. I mean, I think that humanism is a wonderful umbrella of kindness, inquiry, and curiosity. And so being open to find curiosity outside the political lens will bring more people in.
FISH:
Jordan, I've got a question from Lawrence McFarland here about a time the tables have been turned. Has anyone come up to you and asked you similarly probing questions about your worldview, hoping that they would catch you in an inconsistency? He says, "I fully expect that you'd be prepared for that, but I'd love to hear a story about it."
JORDAN:
Nobody has changed my mind. Not a single soul. I am strong like a steel trap. This is, don't let them get you guys. These are all tactics to use to change other people's minds.
I've told this story before, but it sticks with me. I did a Trump rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and was heckled by a man known as the brick suit guy, who dresses in a brick suit, and he's brought up on stage by Donald Trump, and the suit is emblematic of Trump's southern border wall. He's a celebrity at Trump rallies. And I was at this event, and he was live streaming it. He was swearing at me. He was telling people, "Don't talk to Jordan Klepper, he's fake news." And to his credit, he's 100% right. And it was a hellish day.
Cut to the next day at the airport, Green Bay Airport. I arrive alone. My flight is delayed for three and a half hours, and who do I see but the brick suit guy. And I spend three and a half hours with the brick suit guy at the Green Bay Airport, and that's a lot of time with the brick suit guy.
And once we get past this initial trepidation that we're being watched, because there's a camera or there's a performative nature to the conversation that's being had, we get into it. We talk politics, and all the things I'm talking about right here come into play. And I mentioned economic theory, I mentioned foreign policy at the time. And about two hours into that conversation, we actually had a real discussion about the things we do and don't know about leadership and what we want from our leaders.
There are many things I have against the MAGA movement, and there are plenty of things that I find abhorrent about the president. But there are things within tactical international relations that I know less and less about. And more often than not, when you're engaging in a conversation with somebody who might be in the MAGA movement, maybe a family member, you're not engaging in a good faith conversation. You're engaging in a tête-à-tête. You're trying to fight with somebody about something. But a couple hours into a conversation like that, I was swayed by his passion, his insight, and again, his vulnerability for the things he didn't know. He admitted to me that he didn't think Trump won that last election. He wished he would move on, something he would never admit on camera. Why? Because we finally found that space.
And so it's been little moments like that. It's not a full cloth, like I went from this side completely to this side, but more so like these are the things that I don't fully understand and I'm willing to understand better.
FISH:
Love it. And it actually reminds me of another question that's in the chat, like, it's easy to build a bridge by listening deeply to somebody's strong beliefs and admitting what you don't know. How do we deal with apathy, right? When somebody cares deeply about something, that's one thing, and we can hear them out and build a bridge through listening to their strong beliefs. But what do you do when somebody says, "I don't know and I don't really care"? This is from Elena Howells.
JORDAN:
Well, I empathize with apathy. I think it's a tactic that is being used and wielded right now. I'm sure a lot of people feel this. I turn on the news and I have to watch the news. I like to engage with the world around me, but I find it exhausting, and there's just a barrage of stories and chaos and tragedy that is constantly at your fingertips at all times. In some cases, you're balancing mental health with the ability to be plugged in.
And so I've not found an answer for it, but I've tried to find a balance to it, because I do think there are bad actors who use the nonstop barrage of news as a tactic to make people feel like they have an inability to connect.
Now, to me, what I was moved with, I was moved during COVID, which was a complicated, strange time, but I was moved by the BLM protests. I've been moved by the March For Our Lives protest and how a bunch of high schoolers got together and a million of them showed up in Washington, DC, and beyond that, not just showed up, but were articulate about those issues. It's a tactic to make you not care, and so you have to get out, you have to touch grass, and you have to show up.
From a political standpoint, the only places I have truly seen change is where people do actually show up, and showing up on your phone doesn't count. It's a way to signal. It might be a way to connect, but I've watched things in the gun rights movement, which has gone through ups and downs, it's in a bad spot right now for people who want safe gun regulations. But where I've actually seen small incremental change is when people do the boring work of democracy, and citizenship, which means showing up on a Tuesday when those hearings are taking place. It means getting your friends together and sitting in those pews when people are talking about those things. It means showing that you are a person in real life, and I think as much as you might wanna recede into the faux reality of our phones and our screens, wherever you could take that step into the brutal reality of sunlight with another person, I think you have the ability to connect, to reconnect, and to make the world know that you are there and you are a citizen and you vote and you care.
Minneapolis is another amazing experience where I've spent time seeing a community that was being attacked through cruelty, and they showed up and they found ways in which to connect and work around that cruelty. I did a piece where I spent some time with a naked bike ride where they used comedy as a way to push back against an ICE narrative that was trying to label all these people as Antifa, and so they're like, "We have nothing to hide. We're gonna be naked and we're gonna also dress as chickens just so people see us as comedy. We're gonna use this sense of humor as a way to push back against that narrative." And that to me gives me hope against that apathy.
FISH:
Wow. Using humor to push back against demonization as a way to create hope against apathy. I can't think of a better way to end this, and that's our thesis for why we wanted to recognize you with this award this year, Jordan.
So thank you again for being here, for taking the time to answer questions, and for talking about humanism in a way that I think is exciting, meaningful, and pushes us to be our best selves as a movement. We're grateful that you wanna stand up and be counted as a humanist. We're grateful for your work taking on authoritarianism and absurdism with the wit and the compassion that you do. Thanks for being the best of us, and we're glad to welcome you into the Humanist of the Year family, joining people from A. Philip Randolph, the organizer of the March on Washington, to Carl Sagan, to the founder of Planned Parenthood, to all sorts of really amazing folks. We're glad that we have you in the movement, Jordan, and thank you so much for being here.
JORDAN:
Oh, I am truly honored and humbled. Thank you for having me be a part of the team. God bless you all.
FISH:
Thanks, Jordan, and thank you all for being here. And if you're having a good time, if you wanna keep on building the humanist movement behind amazing leaders like Jordan, make sure you shoot a donation to support the work that we're doing to make sure that these kinds of messages reach people all across the country. We want more people to hear about Jordan's humanism and why he's a humanist, 'cause I think they'll be inspired just like we were.
All right, folks. Thanks.