Joe Lyons is damn happy and honored to be part of the Hodgepodge Society. A lifelong stage and commercial actor; Joe has been active in the Pittsburgh artistic community as an actor, playwright, and humorist. His most recent roles included Nigel in the Summer Company’s production of Relative Values, Skeeter in Thank You Felix Productions’ Lonestar, and Steve in Jetlag, for Thank You Felix Productions as well. His first play, Purgatoriography, debuted at 2005’s Future Ten festival.

But enough about that official bio type stuff. So how did the Hodgepodge Society come about, you may ask? Some say it was the will of Thor himself. Others believe that the Hodgepodge Society was forged within a Pentagon subbasement, designed to infiltrate the Inuit menace. The rest feel the Hodgepodge Society is nothing but a grown up, masculine version of the Girl Scouts of America. In all honesty, they would all be right…but more specifically, they’re all wrong. The Hodgepodge Society was born in my car in January 2005 as Robert Isenberg and myself were driving around looking for a copy of the early 1990’s television show The Flash on DVD.

It’s true. Being an avid collector of all things from my childhood, Robert and I had driven to nearly all of the Best Buy’s in the greater Pittsburgh area looking for the seemingly elusive DVD. Some stores were sold out; others hadn’t gotten their shipment in yet. Now usually, in this situation, I would have broken down into tears, cursing the heavens as they kept me from finding a TV show that lasted only 1 season. But this night was different. Robert and I had got to talking about the sheer volume of humorous writings we had between us. Robert being an accomplished writer and journalist and myself being an avid blogger and comedy writer, we both realized that we had enough stuff to fill up a book. We’re both writers, we’re both actors and we’ve got all of this stuff we’ve written. Why not put it up in front of people?

I’ll tell you why, because nothing makes me want to slip into a coma more than the phrase “live reading”. It’s like a play, but without any of the exciting stuff. So there had to be some way around it. There had to be some way for us to capitalize on the very pretension implied with a live reading, all while preserving the fun and escapism of a stage show. Thus, the Hodgepodge Society is born.

Instead of trying to downplay the pretentious reality that Robert and I would be reading our humorous writings in front of people in an art gallery, we’d overplay it. Dressed in tuxedos and wearing bright green sashes emblazoned with the word “Hodgepodge”, we’d be, as Robert likes to put it, the Masons meet the Muppet Show. Instead of making our essays be the funniest part of the evening, we wanted to introduce our audience into an ancient organization that has been around since the dawn of time…they’ve just never heard of them. Using humor to further humanity, the Hodgepodge Society would be a mysterious cult bent on changing the world…it just happens to be run by the Marx Brothers.

The Hodgepodge Society has now become about establishing humor as a valid art form. It’s an excuse for people to head out for an evening, pretend to be fancy and laugh together. It’s about having fun while trying to absorb culture.

Or at least we like to tell ourselves that. Well, that’s the Cliff Notes version of the real history of the Hodgepodge Society. It’s been a crazy trip so far and as long as we’ve got something to laugh about, there will always be a Hodgepodge Society. It’s been a successful experiment so far and I’m eagerly awaiting the day when there are Hodgepodge Society chapters in different cities.

It will be at that point that I will go insane, move to Tibet, and start a professional Lawn Dart team. It’s always good to have plans.

So thanks for stopping by this website and please keep coming back. You never know when you’ll get that mysterious phone call and be asked to join our legendary ranks.

So keep an overnight bag handy.

Back to Sir Joseph Lyons Esq.'s Bio Page