Nardwuar

Early Life & Education

John Ruskin was born in Vancouver, the son of Olga Bruchovsky, a journalist and schoolteacher, and Vernon Ruskin, an engineer. Ruskin was raised in the Jewish faith. His mother was a court reporter in Toronto before she resettled in British Columbia. During Ruskin’s youth, his mother hosted a cable access TV program called Our Pioneers and Neighbours. She also co-wrote the first biography of pioneer and saloon keeper “Gassy” Jack Deighton.

Ruskin’s first forays into music began when he was a teenager. As student council president of West Vancouver’s Hillside Secondary School in 1985, Ruskin booked musical acts to perform at high school dances. These included alternative groups like The Enigmas and Poisoned. Also in 1985, Ruskin organized his first concert, an outdoor concert called “Hillstock.” His own band, The Evaporators, made their performance debut the same year at a Hillside High variety show.

Around the same time, Ruskin began clipping articles about the Vancouver music scene from local newspapers. He has since called this the “beginning” of his life. He conducted his first interview with Art Bergmann and Tom Upex from the Vancouver punk band Poisoned after they performed at Hillside Secondary on 26 September 1985. Poisoned performed at the school because it was the band most students wanted to see, and Nardwuar organized and promoted the show.

Nardwuar the Human Serviette

John Ruskin legally changed his name to Nardwuar the Human Serviette in 1986. He has stated that the name has no meaning. He told the CBC in 1995 that it was just a “dumb stupid name, just like Sting!” (referring to the lead singer of The Police). In another account, he said that it was a funny-sounding noise he came up with one day.

In yet a third account of how he got his name, Nardwuar said he needed a name for his radio show and that “Nardwuar” was something kids used to yell at each other. In a 1992 interview with the Vancouver Sun, he recounted that “the Human Serviette” came about after an incident in Bellingham, Washington, in which he repeatedly asked a waitress for a serviette, which the waitress didn’t understand meant napkin. He has also said that “human” refers to a Cramps song called “Human Fly.”

Career Highlights

Nardwuar’s career began while attending the University of British Columbia (UBC) in the mid-to-late 1980s. He launched his radio show on CiTR, the campus radio station. Initially, the station’s director was unsure about Nardwuar, but Nardwuar persisted and was eventually allowed to be on air for one minute each Friday. This grew to five minutes, then 15. During this time, Nardwuar gained in popularity for the unusual and obscure questions he would ask people. He also contributed to the station’s magazine, Discorder, which also featured Nardwuar’s unusual interviews. He earned an undergraduate degree in history from UBC in 1990, with a focus on Canadian and American political history.

From the late-1990s to the late-2000s, Nardwuar was a freelance interviewer for MuchMusic. He had logged about 10,000 hours of interviews when he began uploading interviews to YouTube, which eventually brought him global recognition. Views of his videos on YouTube have ranked in the top 3 per cent on the platform. The first video he uploaded was of a one-question interview of former American vice president Dan Quayle in 1995. Nardwuar asked him who the prime minister of Canada was at the moment, which Quayle could not answer. Some of Nardwuar’s other notable interviews include those with Drake, Jay Z, Kendrick Lamar and Seth Rogen, as well as more than 10 interviews with Snoop Dogg dating back to 2000.

Arguably Nardwuar’s most notable moment came in 1997, when he asked then-prime minister Jean Chrétien a question during a press conference at the 5th APEC Economic Leaders Meeting, which was held at UBC. Protesters at the summit had been maced earlier in the day, and Nardwuar asked Chrétien if he thought “mace equals freedom” in a democratic society. When Chretien appeared uncertain as to what Nardwuar meant, Nardwuar explained that mace was the same as pepper spray. Chrétien then quipped, “For me, pepper, I put it on my plate… Next.” Chrétien was roundly criticized for minimizing the actions of the police and the effects on the protestors, and his response became infamous in Canadian politics.

Trademarks

There are several elements to Nardwuar’s personality, style and approach to interviewing that make him unique. The idea that a celebrity interviewer would call himself a “human napkin” (a napkin being something people use to clean themselves up, to sanitize their image) was an inside joke that many cynical, media savvy Gen Xers got immediately. The same can be said of Nardwuar’s habit of ending every interview by scatting the first few notes of the classic Vaudeville song-and-dance riff “Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits” and expecting his subject to finish the tune — an acknowledgement that celebrity interviews are essentially just carefully choreographed song-and-dance routines.

But these references were often lost on Nardwuar’s interview subjects, especially in the early years of his career. Responses varied from skeptical and confused at best to verbally and physically abusive at worst. Nardwuar also mocks the vapid, superficial nature of many celebrity interviews by asking obscure, penetrating and often illuminating questions about a person’s past that are clearly the product of rigorous research. During Nardwuar’s 2008 interview with Pharrell Williams, then with the band N.E.R.D., Pharrell declared, “This is one of the most impressive interviews I’ve ever experienced in my life.”

In terms of dress, Nardwaur frequently appears wearing a tartan tam o’shanter cap and matching golf pants. He also often presents his interviews in the style of boxing or wrestling title cards (as in, Nardwuar versus the individual or people being interviewed). He almost always has a prop or album that he occasionally offers as a gift, which tend to be significant to the interviewee. Nardwuar also concludes his interviews with the phrase “keep on rockin’ in the free world” — a reference to the 1989 Neil Young song of the same name.

Honours

Nardwuar was inducted into the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame in 2019. The hall noted in its induction that “You would be hard pressed to find a Vancouver entertainer who shows off his hometown pride on a global level more than the tireless, world-renowned Nardwuar.” To celebrate the induction, the City of Vancouver declared 29 September 2019 as Nardwuar Day.