![]() If the shows run by TV humorists are to catch on with the public, they are lucky to have Rich as their primary representative. He is all of these things at once without being bland. He is the scion of a family that includes his father, former Times critic Frank Rich (the notorious “Butcher of Broadway”), and his older brother, Nathaniel Rich (a former editor of The Paris Review), but you could never accuse him of not having the talent to back up that transparent leg up. He is liberal but wields political correctness in a way its opponents couldn’t really complain about. That’s what people love about Simon Rich he nimbly avoids the worst stereotypes people associate with every branch of comedy. In reviewing Rich’s superlative collection Spoiled Brats (his sixth book in seven years, if anyone’s counting), the London Evening Standard hailed him as the Internet era’s answer to the accessibly brilliant humor of Thurber and Wodehouse, two other writers who maintained the “writerly” air required if you want people to refer to you as a “celebrated wit,” but who-unlike, say, Dorothy Parker-could make anybody laugh really, really hard. As Man Seeking Woman wraps up its excellent third season, it feels like a good time to reflect on Rich’s status as the nexus between the worlds I’ve described here-one that places him at the forefront of a slowly emerging genre one could call Television Humor.īeyond the comedic disparities among the institutions he’s been affiliated with, Rich’s reputation mixes and blows apart the clichés associated with both the comedian and the humorist. We call Andy Borowitz a “humorist” instead of a “comedian” when we should be calling him a “bad writer.”Įnter Simon Rich, the painfully young and successful Harvard Lampoon whiz kid who received a two-book deal as an undergraduate for his humor writing, going on to write for Saturday Night Live and Pixar before creating FXX’s Man Seeking Woman, an absurdist look at modern dating based on his own book of stories, The Last Girlfriend on Earth. Even if we agree that both are funny, we generally characterize humorists as being funny in a “smarter” way, whatever that means. The myth of the humorist involves getting free drinks at the goddamn Algonquin Round Table. ![]() The myth of the comedian involves getting free drinks at a club’s bar at 2 a.m. Is John Hodgman-a contributor to both This American Life and The Daily Show-a humorist or a comedian? Who cares? It’s also worth mentioning that, while I may find the aforementioned Internet griping on the subject insecure and a little embarrassing, I agree that there is a bit of a value judgment implied by the distinction between the two terms. What’s important to note is that swiping right and left on individual comedy writers and performers in an attempt to distinguish between these two terms is redundant and pointless. The point is, no one is really sure, but there is a difference. Others say that humorists never really call themselves humorists while comedians, obviously, self-identify themselves as such more frequently. Some people say that comedians perform live and humorists are more literary (they might cite Mark Twain, an ironic choice considering that his live performances arguably announced the fundamental idea of stand-up comedy as an authentically American art form). ![]() This is in character with the kind of people who usually engage in this kind of conversation on the Internet-people who feel that a populist strain of Internet comedy is somehow under attack and deeply resent any attempt to categorize their “style” of humor as “less-than.” A quick spin through Reddit reveals-somehow-slightly more open-minded thinking on the subject. Ask the citizens of the Internet what the difference between a comedian and a humorist is, and you’ll likely get one of a set of rotating answers, each attempting to fly in the face of the perceived cultural elitism attached to the word “humorist.” “One of them is funny,” is the gist, and it’s generally not the humorist. ![]()
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