You can read the interviews, book, music and film reviews of today's Pop Quiz taker every week in the Onion AV Club, where he is Head Entertainment Writer. You can also catch him tonight on his show "Movie Club with John Ridley" (how many clubs does this guy belong to?) on AMC. Thanks to the AMC website by the way for the photo.

When you're conducting an interview for the AV Club, do you have any particular questions or strategies when the interviewee is especially blah?
That's a good question and by "good" I mean "difficult". When I'm doing an interview what I generally strive for is a moment of real connection, where we just sort of click and develop a natural easy rhythm where it¹s clear we're headed on the same path, we're going on a journey together rather than just talking for the sake of talking. When that doesn¹t happen it can get pretty unnerving.

Sometimes when an interview isn't clicking dogged persistence is the way out. I interviewed Louis C.K a while back and the first twenty minutes were kind of boring but I just plowed ahead and by the time we reached the hour mark the interview had really taken off and he was giving me great stuff. Sometimes the stuff you think an interview subject will want to talk about the least: scandals, flops, bad relationships-are in fact what they want to talk about most. In this case Louis C.K really, really wanted to talk about "Pootie Tang" and ended up giving a very revealing and candid interview. It was almost cathartic, like I was his shrink and he was opening up to me about this really fucked experience. That strategy doesn't always work but when I'm given a time limit with a subject-say a half hour or twenty-five minutes-I just pretend it doesn¹t exist and plow ahead as if I've been given all the time in the world. If a publicist or a subject wants to end an interview they're certainly entitled to but I'm not going to do it myself or make it any easier for them.

Another strategy I use to avoid bad-interview blahs is to write way more questions than I'll actually use. Nothing's more embarrassing then running out of questions. I remember I interviewed Robert Duvall who's a great actor but a terrible interview subject. He answered all my open-ended questions with staggeringly banal one or two sentence answers so I ran out questions quickly and was reduced to asking "So, um, is there anything else you¹d like to talk about?" Not surprisingly his answer was "No". Of course it didn't help that he seemed to think I was a kid from a high school paper. As we were walking out he said to me very earnestly, "The Onion, is that some kind of paper you and your buddies put out yourselves?" Great actor though.

If an interview isn't going well I'll often resort to asking what I consider possible conversation killers. I wouldn't ask these questions if an interview was going well, out of fear of making my subject uncomfortable or causing them to clam up or get defensive, But if an interview's already DOA or nearly over then why not bite off the pin and let er rip? Like when I interviewed Paul Schrader-great writer, ornery motherfucker-I asked him about his script for "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind", which was rejected. "Would you like to talk about "Close Encounters?" I asked him. "No" he said curtly, which slowed the momentum of the interview to a halt, which didn't ultimately matter since we were pretty much done anyway.

What's the most difficult, writing book, film or music reviews?
Book reviews are the most labor-intensive. A bad movie's over in an hour and a half but a bad book can take you days to suffer through. I think music is hardest to write about though because I'm not a musician So I can't use technical terminology or anything. You end up writing about how things sound in kind of an abstract, impressionistic way.

What is some of the best and worst writing advice anyone has given you?
To be honest with you nobody's ever really given me much advice. I tend to learn by doing and I've been very fortunate that I¹ve been able to work on my craft fulltime since I was 21.

The thing that improved my writing the most was probably weaning myself off the glass teat o' television and reading more. In that respect Neal Postman's "Amusing Ourselves To Death" had an enormous positive impact on my writing and career.

You freelance as well as work for the AV Club and share your thoughts on Movie Club. Have you learned any lessons on writing good pitches or does it just get easier with experience?
You know I really don't do much pitching these days. I have a hard time with both rejection and asking people for things and I've been lucky enough that a lot of the outside work that I've done (Movie Club, Air America, NPR's Day To Day, Spin, The Tenacity of the Cockroach, writing liner notes for Home Vision DVDs) has come out of people approaching me (or the Onion) rather than the other way around. I hate to say this but for me rejection never gets easier. I just don't have the thick, thick hide necessary to put yourselves out there all the time. No doubt if I pitched more aggressively I¹d have more freelancing lined up but between the Onion and Movie Club With John Ridley (Friday nights and Sunday mornings on AMC! Catch the fever!) I don't have a whole lot of free time to do freelance projects anyway. Movie Club has been a great experience so far. Flying to Los Angeles every weekend has been a surreal experience and people really seem to like the show. Professionally it's a whole new ballgame. The TV industry and the world of alt-weeklies are as antithetical and different as Chicago and Los Angeles. With Movie Club I¹m trying to follow the strategy I have for all my endeavors: to go after every opportunity before me as hard as I can, then try and make the most of it. I'm no Yoda-like guru but that paradigm has worked pretty well for me personally.

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about what it's like working for the Onion?
I don't really know what people think about the Onion these days but I know back in the day there seemed to be a widespread misconception that the Onion was essentially put out by hard-partying college kids in between bong hits. A lot of hard work and dedication has always gone into the paper: there's nothing remotely half-ass or slapdash about it. I think there's also a misconception that The Onion is essentially juvenile or apolitical. Along with the Daily Show I think the Onion is putting out some of the most sophisticated and consistent social and political satire out there.

Also, I think the Onion's a lot more structured and formal than people probably imagine. It's run like a real business.