SIMON RICH

Simon Rich begins his latest novel, What in God’s Name, with a verse from Genesis 1:27,  “So God created man in his own image…” That ellipsis is what sets Rich apart from just about every other American comedy writer today: he’s able to mine even the oldest and most familiar sources for material that feels revelatory and exciting. What in God’s Name is an often hilarious examination of what it would mean for God to be like humans, really like us. In Rich’s second novel, God is the uninterested CEO of a holy corporation, whose real passion is opening an Asian-fusion restaurant, and who created life on Earth while procrastinating. One of the most memorable sequences involves Vince, an archangel, explaining that all human choices can be explained by “what they had eaten for breakfast, whether or not they had slept well, and how long it had been since their last satisfactory orgasm.” Whatever he’s eating for breakfast, Rich’s choices seem to have worked out remarkably well. He went straight from the Harvard Lampoon to being the youngest writer hired on Saturday Night Live. He’s a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and currently writes for Pixar. Wag’s Revue contributor Chris Duffy spoke with Simon on the phone.

 

Chris Duffy, Wag’s Revue: Where do you get the ideas for your humor premises?

 

Simon Rich: The World Book Encyclopedia and Wikipedia are huge influences on my writing. I click the random article button to see what comes up. When I was writing Ant Farm, a big thing I would do is go to the library and they have bound volumes of old Life magazines and I would just go through page by page until I saw something that triggered a premise.

 

I read a lot of nonfiction. I read a lot of books about weird historical figures like Ivan the Terrible and Caligula and strange historical time periods like the Dark Ages. I read a lot of Popular Science about robots and monkeys and early human history. I love big old books like Grimm’s Fairy Tales and the Bible and A Cultural History of America. These are the subjects I’m obsessed with.