There are a few weighty and profound tomes out this month, tackling crucial issues like racism, identity, landscape and myth. There are also a couple of significant novels with illuminating insights into love and loss. (Everyone knows you can’t go wrong with love and loss.) However, with temperatures still hovering exhaustingly above the annual norm, I find I barely have the energy to lift a 600 page tome, even if its philosophical heaviosity justifies its literal one. And so I find myself seeking out new work which succeeds in making me do the one physical thing I still have an inkling for; laughing out loud.
Those with a particular interest in prodigious comic writers of the most outlandish kind will already be aware of Simon Rich. The thirtysomething New Yorker was one of the youngest writers ever employed as a scriptwriter by Saturday Night Live, and went on to pen a number of gratefully received short story collections and novels. He also wrote bits of Pixar’s sublime Inside Out and an episode of The Simpsons.
You already hate him obviously; but the annoying thing is – as his latest collection, Hits & Misses, shows – he really is extremely funny, in that whipsmart, zeitgeist-savvy way that east-coast Harvard-educated Jewish jokesmiths often are.
There are times he sounds like fellow nebbish Woody Allen, his similes are so perfect, his dialogue so zippy
You’re probably thinking of that other snappy NY-born storyteller David Sedaris, but Rich is faster and looser, more surreal and less autobiographical (as well as about half Sedaris’ age.) He’s also funnier. One of his most vocal fans is east coast Harvard-educated Jewish jokesmith BJ Novak, who co-wrote the sublime American version of The Office. Rich is that kind of funny. There are times he sounds like fellow nebbish Woody Allen, his similes are so perfect, his dialogue so zippy.
There are precious moments on every page. A father-to-be becomes distracted, and rushes through the once tender ritual of massaging his wife’s belly ‘like a squeegee man at a red light’; the devil deflates God’s self-esteem by pointing out how many Bar Mitzvahs now have themes like ‘Broadway’ or ‘New York Sports Teams’, showing him Bill Maher YouTube clips, and asking in an aggressive manner ‘Sup now?’ A flailing novelist nurtures resentment for his unborn son when his ultrasound reveals the foetus to be writing an audacious Great American Novel about General Custer (who, in woke Lin-Manuel Miranda style, he has made ‘not a little gay, fully gay’). Such gems make this collection enormous fun to read, the only downside being that you’ll devour it in a day.
Silicon Valley casualty Corey Pein’s Live Work Work Work Die isn’t quite laugh out loud, but the story of journalist Pein’s experience of failing in the tech capital of the world is as amusing as it is horrifying.
