Edmund—Tell me about your relationship to irony. How do you feel about irony?

John—Well, in the movie Pecker, I said I wanted the end of it. Irony is snobbery, but I am an irony dealer. So I plead guilty I guess. I think I say this in the book: ‘If you’re a Syrian refugee, is anything campy? Is there anything so bad it’s good?’ And then somebody said to me, ‘John, that’s an elitist comment, because, yes, I bet they do crack jokes.’ So I don’t know. It’s not up for me to decide that. But I wonder sometimes. It is an elitist taste, irony.

Edmund—I think so, too. And you deal with it sparingly.

John—Well, I really do like the things I address—not because they’re so bad, they’re good, but because they’re so good, they’re great to me. But I recognize that others might not agree.

Edmund—Andy Warhol said that pop art is a way of liking things.

John—It is, certainly, and everything in this book that I write about I do like. I like the whole Hollywood experience. They were fair to me. I like the art world. Everything. I’m even trying to like dying and figuring a way out of it.

Edmund—Good for you. We don’t want to be ironic about our own deaths.

John—It’s just me trying to be optimistic—that I’m gonna claw my way out and I know where I’m going to end up. Isn’t that the ultimate ‘glass half full’ kind of guy?