A CUP OF JOE

My close-knit network of family and friends has expanded to include Joe Pera, a man I’ve never met who lives over 3,600 miles away, yet who I feel a very warm affinity to. 

Joe lives in Michigan, and is a choir teacher, although he can’t sing. Brought up by his grandparents, he appears old before his time: he moves slowly and tentatively, like someone afraid of slipping on ice (Michigan is very cold). His voice is low, hesitant and cracked, like someone recounting a deathbed memoir. A single man with mainly elderly friends, Joe is both part of and apart from the community. Quietly eccentric in almost every regard, he is also sweet and kind and trusted, although he has a tendency to focus much too hard on his singular obsessions (the perfect Christmas tree; Canadian rats; The Who song ‘Baba O’Riley’). Small town mid-western life suits him perfectly. Indeed, it is hard to imagine him surviving in any other environment. He likes trees and barns and rocks, and he fantasises about sharing these enthusiasms with a wife and family.

Each episode of Joe Pera Speaks With You is just over ten minutes long, and centres around a specific topic that Joe wants to tell us about. Life fills the gaps in the monologue, and we get to meet Joe’s friends and his Basset Hound, Gus, see some amazing scenery and follow his delicately poised romance with a survivalist band teacher called Sarah Conner. It’s a warm, wonderful and often moving programme, in which little things mean a lot. Small gestures and moments have a resonance that would be lost in most dramas, but then this seems like life rather than art, despite the fact that Joe Pera is really a comedian from Buffalo, New York.

The second series is winding to a close, and has included some major events, but these are handled gently and sensitively. Joe the choir teacher is a disconnected person whose life has been shaped by loss, but saved by love, and he grows with every episode, taking slow, measured steps towards becoming the community elder he already resembles in looks, manner and voice.

I wish they’d make an episode every day for the rest of my days: each ten minute visit is like an hour of transcendental meditation.