Series / How To With John Wilson

"Hey, New York"

How To with John Wilson is a documentary comedy television series created by and starring filmmaker John Wilson and produced by Nathan Fielder. It premiered on HBO in 2020, with a second season which premiered in 2021, and its third and final season in 2023. The series follows John Wilson as he tries to give advice while filming the streets of New York City. In each episode, he tries to make a tutorial answering a different topic. Throughout the episodes, he meets a variety of interesting people and witnesses strange situations. Much of the show's humor comes from the bizarre people he meets and the Funny Background Events he films.

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This show provides examples of:

• Affectionate Nickname: John’s landlord asks him to call her “Mama”.
• All for Nothing: John spends a week filming at Burning Man and says that the footage he filmed is some of his best. However, he was unable to use any of the footage due to another show having exclusive rights to filming at Burning Man.
• As Himself: Nathan Fielder plays himself in the trailer How To With John Wilson - Anatomy of a Scene The Bread Scene + Nathan Fielder Tik Tok House, which portrays him as a creepy control freak who runs a Tik Tok house and might be a pedophile.
• The Atoner: In "How To Throw Out Your Batteries", John meets a former sex offender who is horrified by his past actions and wants to become a better person.
• Based on a Dream: In-Universe. A man John meets came up with the idea for a double dog leash where two people can walk the same dog at once from a dream. He created this business in real life. Similarly, John dreams of a laundromat with stoves instead of washing machines, and he creates this business at the end of the episode.
• Big Applesauce: The majority of the show is filmed on the streets of New York City, giving a close view of the bizarre events that happen there.
• The Big Rotten Apple: New York is shown to be a bizarre and dysfunctional place, although the portrayal is less harsh than other examples of this trope. It is shown more as a Cloudcuckooland than an actually terrible place.
• Black Comedy: This show is filmed with dark moments being Played for Laughs.
  • In the trailer How To With John Wilson - Anatomy of a Scene The Bread Scene + Nathan Fielder Tik Tok House, much of the humor comes from the implication that Nathan is a pedophile, grooming and manipulating a group of teenaged boys.
  • In one scene, we see police officers cleaning a huge pile of blood off the subway floors. Later in the same episode, we see some paramedics drop a seemingly dead body they’re carrying down some stairs.
• Brick Joke: In "How To Remember Your Dreams", John describes a dream he had where there was a laundromat filled with stoves instead of washing machines. At the end of the episode, he makes this dream a reality by opening up this business where anyone can pay to use the stoves.
• Call-Back: In "How To Remember Your Dreams", John sees a basket for recycling batteries, referencing the previous episode "How To Throw Out Your Batteries".
• Celebrity Cameo: Many celebrities make brief appearances in "How to Work Out" when John takes part in a television awards show.
• Change the Uncomfortable Subject: In one scene, John asks random business employees their views on controversial political topics. Each of them quickly try to change the subject.
• Cloudcuckooland: This series presents New York City as a very bizarre place, with all the strange things and people John comes across every episode.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Many of the people John meets throughout the show are...strange, to say the least. For instance, in one episode he interviews a man obsessed with regrowing his foreskin.
  • John himself is rather strange, as he seeks bizarre solutions to basic questions and often overreacts to minor problems.
• Crazy Survivalist: John has come across multiple disaster preppers throughout the show.
• Cringe Comedy: Throughout the show, John finds himself in some uncomfortable but hilarious situations.
• Conspiracy Theorist: John meets a believer in Mandela Effectinvoked conspiracy theories and goes to a conference filled with theorists on the effect.
• Cult: While discussing his foray into a capella singing in college, John narrowly escapes being recruited by the Real Life NXIVM cult.
• Disgusting Public Toilet: New York is filled with disgusting public toilets, and John sees many of them in "How to Find a Public Restroom".
• Fan Disservice: In one scene, John talks with an old man trying to regrow his foreskin by attaching a weight to his penis. We get a very unflattering view of his naked penis and butt as he's showing how the devise works.
• First-Person Perspective: The entire show is filmed by the camera John holds as he walks around New York. Since he’s never on screen, this gives the show the appearance of being in his perspective.
• Funny Background Event: Much of this shows humor is based on this. John constantly films random, bizarre events happening on the streets of New York City.
• Halfway Plot Switch: The trailer How To With John Wilson - Anatomy of a Scene The Bread Scene + Nathan Fielder Tik Tok House starts out as a discussion of the show and how it was made by John and Nathan Fielder, only to randomly shift halfway to focusing on Nathan running a Tik Tok house filled with teenaged boys, with the implication that he is grooming them.
• Hypochondria: John meets multiple people who believe they have electromagnetic hypersensitivity, meaning that they are sensitive towards electromagnetic fields. There is no scientific basis towards this. Although one woman claims that others with the condition are faking it, she believes that she truly has it. In reality, it is a psychosomatic disorder.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Every episode title starts with "How to".
• Irony:
  • When John goes to Burning Man, theoretically a celebration of free expression, he's forbidden from using any footage he shot because another documentary crew have "exclusive rights" to film the festival.
  • One woman who claims to have electromagnetic hypersensitivity claims that a lot of other people are faking it. However, electromagnetic hypersensitivity is not a medically recognized disorder, meaning that neither she nor the people who she is skeptical towards really have it.
• Loud of War: In "How to Clean Your Ears", there are multiple people who express annoyance at their neighbors for being too loud. One was playing annoying loud music in the middle of the night, while another randomly shoots a cannon.
• Mandela Effect: Discussed In-Universe in "How To Improve Your Memory". John speaks to a creator of grocery store inventory software who mentions various false memories. For instance, he remembered the Raisin Bran Sun wearing sunglasses and Febreze having two “e’s”. This leads to John attending a conference on the Mandela Effect, in which its attendants believe that their misremembering of details comes from them being transported to an Alternate Universe.
• Mood Whiplash: Many episodes will start out talking about a mundane or lighthearted issue before randomly shifting to a much darker topic and sometimes back again.
• Murder-Suicide: A man John met at a vacuum collector convention says that someone killed his wife and then shot himself, and the bullet went flying into the vacuum collector's aunt's house and hit the vacuum. He still owns the vacuum.
• Naked People Are Funny: The series contains multiple instances of nudity, always played for laughs.
  • In one scene, an old man shows his penis as he’s trying to demonstrate how to use a device to regrow his foreskin.
  • In "How To Put Up Scaffolding", John talks about scaffolding before cutting to a gay bondage porn scene featuring a naked man tied to scaffolding while masturbating two other men.
• Nice Guy: John is generally polite and friendly to everyone he meets.
• Old Shame: In-Universe. John is embarrassed of a film he made after graduating from high school called Jingle Berry. For years he tried to destroy any evidence of its existence.
• Precision F-Strike: While John doesn’t curse much, one of the few times he does is when he’s at a grocery store and the only employee there to help him is a security robot.
  John: Unfortunately, this fucking machine could not accept questions.
• Put on a Bus: John’s landlord moves to Las Vegas in "How To Invest in Real Estate".
• Realistic Diction Is Unrealistic: John often stutters, pauses, or coughs during his narration.
• Running Gag: Throughout one episode, John pans the camera to dead rats on the sidewalk at random times.
• Shout-Out: One scene shows the outside of the cafe from Seinfeld as a riff similar to ones on the show plays.
• Stunned Silence: John is left speechless after a personal trainer who unknowingly trained one of the 9/11 hijackers was proud of his former client for achieving his goals using his training.
• Turn Off the Camera: John sometimes comes across people who get angry at him for filming him and try to force him to turn it off.
• Visual Pun: This show is filmed with visual humor. Often, what is being shown on screen matches up with John's narration to create a pun.