A wealth of humor from Simon Rich
Our correspondent talks with an author basking in his ‘Glory Days’
After I read Simon Rich’s “Glory Days,” the 40-year-old’s 10th and latest collection of humor, I went back to reread one of his previous books, “Hits & Misses.”
In part that was because there are no lengths I won’t go to for my readers. But mostly I hoped I could compare the two, find some new level of maturity in his work or some other esoteric facts that I can point out, thus making me appear smart.
No such luck. He’s always been this good.
Rich was raised in a Reform Jewish household in Manhattan. His mom is book editor Gail Winston, his dad is the longtime former New York Times theater critic Frank Rich, and his stepmom is Times reporter and novelist Alex Witchel. He graduated from the Dalton School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Simon was a bar mitzvah at the Central Synagogue — “at 55th and Lexington, June 7, 1997,” he tells me in a Zoom interview from his home in Los Angeles. He even remembers his haftorah, sort of. “It was one of those incredibly boring parshas; even the rabbi was hard-pressed to figure out a way for me to speak about it in a compelling way,” he said. “I think it was just a long list of names.”
Simon went to Hebrew school from the time he was 8 until he was 16, and became entranced by the Torah. In fact, each of his collections has at least one story related to the text.
In “Glory Days,” for example, the battle between David and Goliath takes a twist of — you should pardon the expression — biblical proportions. Turns out we’ve all been fed malarkey. The kid didn’t beat the giant. Goliath threw the match because he needed cash to send his daughter to private school.
Or a previous piece in which Simon imagines a conversation between Abraham and Isaac on the way home from Mount Moriah. Abe is trying to convince Isaac not to tell his mother, Sarah, what happened.
Clearly, his work is a testament to what can happen when a writer sets forth without Waze connected to his word processor. Rich’s stories don’t go straight for the yucks. They take unexpected turns, as though he knows the obvious routes have been traveled by others before.
It took him a while to find his voice, but once he did, there was no stopping him. He ran the Harvard Lampoon, went straight from there to “Saturday Night Live,” then to Pixar, before beginning a successful solo career.
That includes creating a couple of television shows such as the late and lamented “Miracle Workers,” which starred Steve Buscemi as a slightly off-kilter God, the CEO and founder of Heaven Inc., and Daniel Radcliffe as one of his angels.
I spoke to Rich about his career and what follows are lightly edited excerpts of our talk:
Curt Schleier: How old were you when you started writing?
Simon Rich: I was probably around 5 years old, and I can prove it. I have this school assignment from kindergarten where I wrote specifically: ‘When I grow up I want to be a writer.’ Specifically, I want to be a writer like Roald Dahl. [He spelled the name Rol Doll in his homework, which was recently framed for him as a birthday gift.]
CS: How old were you when you realized you were funny?
SR: I always thought I was funny, but it wasn’t until I was in high school that I realized that other people might think I was funny. It took writing for other kids that made me realize that I can make people laugh, because whenever I tried to perform my own comedy in high school, I could never make my voice and body do the things I wanted to do in my head.
But I was lucky. I had some friends and classmates who were good actors. So I had them do the pieces I would write at talent shows, and that’s where I really started to get some confidence.
CS: Do you remember the first piece you wrote?
SR: Basically, they were absurd announcements. During assembly we had a thing where basically anyone could stand up and make an announcement to advertise their club or sports team, with little oversight from the teachers. So it was a way for us to kind of scam our way into having an audience, so we’d pretend to have some sort of club, get in line, and forcibly turn the 9 a.m. assembly into an open-mic night for ourselves.
We had one where we had an announcement trying to get people to write for our comedy magazine. Then we had a friend on the PA as the voice of God telling us we’re not funny and that we had to stop writing. And he also told us, I believe, when we were going to die. And how.
CS: Did the teachers and staff looked forward to it after a while?
SR: I don’t know if they looked forward to it, but the fact that they allowed us to keep going probably means they didn’t completely hate it.
CS: Do you have a process? Do you wait for inspiration to strike or just grind it out every day?
SR: I have this book, the Oxford Family Encyclopedia. I’ve had it since high school or college. Because it’s an encyclopedia for children, there’s nothing in it that’s going to be esoteric or obscure or that a mainstream audience would not have heard of. I kind of just flip through it and if I find a subject I think is interesting I’ll dive right in and see if any premises or stories suggest themselves
It’s been pretty much the same trial-and-error process for the last 20 years. A lot of writers — I think satirists — will start their day by looking through a newspaper. But I’ve kind of always been inspired by general interest topics — history, animals, robots, holidays. I try to come at evergreen, universal subjects as opposed to topical.
CS: Did the condom story originate in the Oxford Family Encyclopedia.
SR: Where I get story ideas from might surprise you. That actually came from the movie “Toy Story.” I was writing for Pixar and studying story structure at the time. “Toy Story” is a coming-of-age story about a child, told from the point of view of these anthropomorphic possessions that the child had. And so I thought maybe there’s an R-rated “Toy Story,” where instead of telling the coming-of-age of a child, it’s the coming-of-age story of a teenager. And instead of the toys in the kid’s bedroom, it’s the objects inside his wallet.
CS: Do you consider your humor Jewish?
SR: I don’t know that those are the first words I’d use, but yes, I think so. I’m so influenced by Jewish comedy writers, Mel Brooks in particular. Woody Allen short-story collections. I think it would be disingenuous to say that there isn’t a Jewish streak running through all these stories.
But I also write stories about specifically Jewish subjects and Jewish names. There are a lot of Book of Genesis stories in my collections.
CS: There are a couple of your stories that stuck a special chord with me. “The Book of Simon,” in which a character named Simon wonders why God, who gave him all these blessings — private schools, Harvard, great jobs — doesn’t punish him for his lapsed faith. The other is “Sell Out,” which became the movie “American Pickle.” It tells the story of Simon’s great-grandfather, Herschel, who came from Lithuania in 1912 (true), got a job in a Brooklyn pickle factory, falls into a vat of pickle brine, and is preserved for 100 years (not true).
At first he’s delighted to discover his descendant is a doctor, but that turns to disappointment when he realizes Simon is a script doctor, addicted to porn, and whose biggest problem is how slow his internet connection is. It’s not exactly a recurring theme, but it is worth my asking if his quick success came too easily, if he feels a little guilty.
SR: Yes, it’s a little bit of guilt about being able to do my dream job, but it’s also more about the guilt I feel thinking about the comparative ease of my life juxtaposed alongside the absolute horrors that my Eastern European ancestors fled from.
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