Attention World

I am now cool.

How, you may ask, has this improbable event come to pass?

The explanation is devilishly simple — I have recorded a voice for an upcoming episode of The Venture Bros. Yes, it’s true, I made the trek from Santa Monica to a sound studio in Burbank, a sound studio cleverly concealed within the converted garage in the back yard of a non-descript fake-Craftsman house on an anonymous street in an anonymous neighborhood in Southern California’s most anonymous city, not far from the Bob Hope Airport and beneath a row of enormous power lines. It was here in these secret surroundings that my transition from Fool to Cool was made complete. The lines were recited, the tape rolled and magic was created.

Needless to say, the details of the plot are highly confidential and cannot be revealed, even to me. In fact, I was not even given a script to read. Rather, for security purposes, I simply recorded a series of phonemes that will later be edited together by Mr. Publick to form words and sentences.

But Todd! you will gasp in disbelief. You suck! You suck, and voices for The Venture Bros. are only recorded by the coolest of the cool! Stephen Colbert does a voice on The Venture Bros.! Can I get a sweet gig like that?

It turns out yes, you can! The process, it turns out, is startlingly simple.

First, befriend Venture Bros. star voice-actor James

  for 18 years. Then, ingratiateyourself with

  by writing and publishing long, detailed, in-depth analyses of all 26 episodes of his TV show. If your analyses please him, before long, you will be invited to meet with Mr. Publick.

Your first meeting with Mr. Publick will be in a public (pun intentional) place, a bar or a restaurant in a crowded urban area. Mr. Publick will sit with his back to the wall (assassination attempts are, sadly, a daily event in his life). You are advised to bring Mr. Urbaniak along as a pacifier, a kind of racetrack goat — Publick is a true thoroughbred and is prone to irrational fears and sudden outbursts of paranoid frenzy.   Bring plenty of cash — Mr. Publick has the appetite of several lions and can consume six chickens and a roast suckling pig at one sitting — and he will expect you to pick up the tab. 

To keep up your end in conversation, you are also advised to research the darkest, dustiest corners of popular culture — no reference is too obscure, no quip too knowing to stump the fiery and provocative Mr. Publick, whose brain weighs over sixteen kilos (counting the one he has in his upper thigh to control his lower half).

This process may need to be repeated. Mr. Publick has many enemies with false faces and more than one shape-changing alien has tried, and failed, to get close to him in the past.

Once you’ve impressed him with your knowledge of The Eiger Sanction and Colossus: The Forbin Project, you will be required to submit a highly personal cv: allergies, fears, dislikes, loves and lusts, embarrassing anecdotes from birthday parties long past. Mr. Publick requires absolute loyalty to his cause and needs to know every single aspect of your private life in order to make sure there are no skeletons in your closet that he has not put there himself. This will require the presentation of an autobiography, a minimum of six hundred pages, which Mr. Publick will have read by the scores of Korean children who draw his cartoon show.

Then there are some sexual acts you will required to perform, which I will not recount here. Suffice to say, you will know what to do when the time comes.

Then, if all goes well, you too may be chosen to do a voice for an episode of The Venture Bros. And then you, too, will be cool.