When we spoke with Nardwuar the Human Serviette in the CiTR record library, we thought we were on a tight timeline. He had come to the station to broadcast a special episode of his show, Nardwuar the Human Serviette Presents …, for CiTR’s annual fundrive, and he’d need a few hours to get ready. We had set up cameras, laptops and dubiously functional lav mics on every available surface of the packed library, ready for a quick in-and-out interview. Nardwuar doesn’t think that way. After a whirlwind tour of record shelves and drawers filled with cassette tapes (“Very rare,” he assured us), Nardwuar helped us fix up our recording setup. “This is one of the number-one mistakes of people doing interviews,” he said. “They never ask the people they’re interviewing if they can help them.”
If you’re looking for help recording an interview, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better teacher than Nardwuar. Since starting out at CiTR back in 1986, the Human Serviette — who was recently appointed to the Order of Canada — has become a household name for his frantic, low-tech, highly-researched interviews with artists, politicians and public figures. You might know him from his conversations with Tyler, the Creator, Timothée Chalamet or Chappell Roan, or else you’ll remember the time he asked Jean Chrétien if “mace equals freedom” after the violent suppression of UBC’s 1997 APEC protests. Maybe to you, he’s the “Who are you?” guy from TikTok. It doesn’t matter how — you probably know him.
Back in 1986, though, Nardwuar was just a music-loving history major who spent all his time in the record library running the turntable and eating sandwiches, occasionally getting grease stains on the record jackets. He didn’t have a show then; he was “just happy to be in the CiTR lounge and explore and find all the different music.” Longtime friend and fellow journalist Leora Kornfeld compared Nardwuar to the eccentric, religiously extracurricular Max from Wes Anderson’s Rushmore. “He had been in student government in high school. He became student president and he was always throwing dances … It’s not that he wasn’t cool, [but] he was always in his own category.”
Kornfeld was a radio host at CiTR in the ‘'80s. By the time Nardwuar arrived, she had graduated from UBC and secured a broadcasting gig at CBC, but she remained an avid listener of the station and still picked up copies of Discorder, where Nardwuar’s transcribed interviews were published. Nardwuar’s show was “like nothing else [she] had ever heard before.” At first, they would only give him 90 seconds on the air (which he had to pester the program director for in the first place). He worked his way up to 30 minutes, then 90 — it was easy to get him into the booth, and hard to get him out of it.
Most journalists would go to a performance and write a review. Nardwuar, on the other hand, might gather a bunch of musicians from different genres and ask them what kind of soap they used. Kornfeld admits she never could have foreseen the popularity Nardwuar would eventually see, but even at the time, she knew for a fact that this was innovative.
In 1990, Nardwuar stopped by the Vancouver Boat Show, where Bob Denver of Gilligan’s Island fame was making an appearance. Nardwuar showed up dressed as Gilligan — a red collared shirt, white bucket hat — and recorded himself asking Denver a few questions. “Do you remember starring in a movie with Nancy Sinatra sitting cross-legged on a beach?” Nardwuar asks, to which Denver responds by putting his head in his hands and saying, “God, you’re too young to remember that!” It’s one of the earliest appearances of the Nardwuar classic: resurfacing an old memory out of the blue, maybe for shock value. Kornfeld said Nardwuar then went around advertising a “Gilligan video offer” — for five dollars, he would sell VHS tapes of that interview, because that’s simply what distribution had to be in those days. Even now, with this interaction and many others easily accessible through his YouTube channel, not much has changed about Nardwuar’s practice. “It's the same person,” Kornfeld said, “except now with global distribution and a global audience.”
That audience was hard to come by. Before the internet, even Nardwuar struggled to get eyes on his work and, back when he organized garage band gigs (which, in true Nardwuar fashion, had to start at 7:27 p.m., 7:28 p.m. — never a conventional time), he saw his fair share of flops. One had attendance so poor, his mom had to foot the bill so the artists could get paid. He remembers when he broadcast his now-iconic interview with Nirvana in 1994 on radio and public-access cable, and not a single person phoned in. “Nobody cared!” Now, he brings up that story whenever up-and-coming broadcasters get discouraged working in obscurity on the overcrowded internet. “You can spread what you do to the world! I’m still so excited about that.”
Arguably, it’s that excitement, even more than his research skills or live-wire interview banter, that has catapulted Nardwuar to success in the internet age. Station Manager Jasper Sloan Yip has worked at CiTR since 2019, and he’s seen Nardwuar move toward embracing video on the internet as his primary method of distribution. “[Video] is really his wheelhouse,” he said. “His fans may be aware he started in radio, but I don’t know if they would consider him to be a radio figure.”
When Sloan Yip started at the station, Nardwuar would come in to broadcast his show in person every Friday. His first encounter with the Serviette was through a note slid under his office door. “It was a bright orange piece of crafting paper. It had been hastily torn, and it said ‘Hullo Jasper! Welcome to CiTR. Here’s a couple records I thought you should have.’”
For the next few years, Sloan Yip would see Nardwuar around the station, often getting into hour-long conversations about music, recording tech and the radio. In 2020, COVID-19 finalized Nardwuar’s move online, and “during that time, it felt like Nardwuar’s celebrity really escalated.” When the station reopened in 2023, the CiTR team started seeing less of him, and Nardwuar had started regularly streaming his show on Twitch alongside broadcasting. Kornfeld said the ease of getting his voice out there today is a far cry from the ‘'80s and ‘90s, when “you had to be Conan O’Brien or David Letterman to have a show. You couldn’t just be some random kid from Vancouver.”
But that random kid wouldn’t quit. He found out Nirvana would be coming to town while he was with Kornfeld in her office at CBC. In those days, information was much more contained; the pool of people who were in the know, and who had the ability to access certain spaces, was Limited — and Nardwuar certainly wasn’t one of them. This led him to places like the washroom of Kurt Cobain’s dressing room, where he hid for hours in the hopes of getting an interview.
“He would have to insert himself in situations in ways that were not part of the … official channels,” Kornfeld said. “You have a person who had every constraint imaginable on them now becoming — I think it's safe to say — one of the most interesting, one of the most popular all-around media personalities in the world.”
As one would expect, Nardwuar’s borderline stalkerish commitment to his work has earned him a good number of “‘go away’/‘fuck you’ letters,” and many of his efforts have seen no response at all; at least until the Nardwuar renaissance sparked by platforms like TikTok, where short-form video amplifies the shock value of him pulling out the interviewee’s childhood stuffed animal. Nardwuar is pseudo-telepathic — or that’s what he’d like you to think. The popular theory is that he phones up interviewees’ families to get the dirt, but Kornfeld is of the opinion that it’s a lot simpler than that.
“You think you can call A$AP Rocky's mother? … No, you can't do that. It's not possible,” she said. “I'm going to tell you a secret. He just outworks everyone.” No one else could do what Nardwuar does, said Kornfeld — especially not all by themselves, as he chooses to do. He’s been able to keep going for so long because he has never perceived his career as ‘work,’ and probably never will.
Nardwuar said he owes that talent for interviewing to his mother, Olga Ruskin. Ruskin was a court reporter for the Toronto Star who, like her son, got her start in student media at UBC — a few of her gallery reviews from the ‘'60s can still be found in The Ubyssey’s archives. Though his mother’s sources tended to be less renowned than his own would be, Nardwuar said he always admired how she was able to “bring out their stories … She taught me that everybody has a story. It’s up to the interviewer to make the interviewee exciting.”
In the time since that talent first caught Kornfeld’s eye in the pages of Discorder, she’s joined him at gigs around the world, including the recent tour he did promoting his shoe collaboration with Nike. She doesn’t work for him, per se — Nardwuar’s brand is a one-man operation, which is highly unusual for a creator, even the smaller ones. There are people all over who would throw themselves at the chance to work for Nardwuar without getting paid a cent, but he refuses to tour with anyone beyond his inner circle of friends who he knows well and trusts. Kornfeld becomes a tour manager, a camera crew and an assistant, all in one. Having worked for the country’s biggest broadcaster, Kornfeld is well aware of where her technical skills fall short. “What do I know about that stuff? Enough. I know enough.”
When Nardwuar interviewed Lil Uzi Vert, Kornfeld was there, filming the entire thing with a phone attached to a selfie stick. The low production quality of Nardwuar’s videos has remained constant through his career, even as technology evolved and he began speaking to higher-profile artists and politicians. “[People] love the things that are just captured in a real, spontaneous way,” Kornfeld said. She thinks if Nardwuar’s content was professionally shot, it wouldn’t resonate with viewers in the same way. Nardwuar brought this up, too, as he was fiddling with the settings on our partially-defective mics — that short-form content has lowered people’s standards.
Back when he was trying to do freelance work for different stations, the standards for audio and video were too strict to accommodate his usual style. Now, it wouldn’t be a true Nardwuar interview without a camera shake or an awkward cutaway. Apparently Timothée Chalamet specifically requested that his interview with Nardwuar be just as low-quality as all the others.
“He didn't want Nardwuar to show up in L.A. with a professional crew,” Kornfeld said. “The fact that it looks like it's real, like it's just one person doing stuff, really appeals to people.” The slapdash, make-it-work style is one of CiTR’s most recognizable influences on Nardwuar's work today. With campus radio, you don’t need professional training or production values to get your voice on the air — just passion and a topic. “If I can do it, anyone can,” said Nardwuar. “They gave me a show!”
That’s what sets campus radio apart from commercial broadcasters. Because of the financial support CiTR gets from your student fees, they can afford to run programming that might be less attractive to traditional advertisers. Experimental midnight ambience, shows about African literature, queer music or local indie art, a program dedicated entirely to songs with horns in them — these aren’t the kind of shows RBC or Honda is likely to run ads around, but they’re vital opportunities for niche or marginalized communities to get their voices on the air.
That’s not to say campus broadcasters don’t need to worry about money; upgrades to the station (and now, its website) are a constant, but necessary money sink if CiTR wants to keep up with the times. Back in the ‘'80s, CiTR struggled to get its airwaves across campus, let alone the world. Kornfeld said that when she started, you could only really get a signal in the Walter Gage Towers and in a few rooms in the Life Building. Over the years, grants and student fees allowed CiTR to upgrade their antennas and start streaming their shows in real time online.
Sloan Yip said there are still young people like Nardwuar at the station today, people who “think of themselves as going to CiTR” — their classes are the side gig. It’s not all that different from the ‘'80s, when Kornfeld would watch English majors debate the intricacies of Pride and Prejudice in the lunchroom. “I guess you could say they were misfits, but they were still pretty cool. There were a lot of good haircuts, a lot of interesting Fluevog shoes.” It has always been a community space, but Sloan Yip said promoting that has been a more conscious effort in recent years.
Though he doesn’t haunt CiTR like he used to, Nardwuar still does his part to promote that community spirit at the station. After our interview, he stepped out of the record library and was immediately swarmed by dozens of adoring students. Sloan Yip said he gets that a lot when he comes to the station these days, but he would never dream of swapping that tartan tam for a baseball cap and sunglasses. Even with the start of his show fast approaching, he stood in the station lounge, taking photos and talking about music. He could have stepped out or excused himself — but Nardwuar doesn’t think that way.
