CD: I remember in 7th grade, I went to at least two bar mitzvahs every weekend. It always struck me that some kids get lucky and their Torah portion is actually meaningful, but other kids end up with a really esoteric passage with, like, instructions on how to feed your goats.
SR: Right, right, right! And then they have to give a speech about it. My Torah portion was an incredibly dull list of names. I mean, the Old Testament is full of incredibly boring passages but I think mine was easily top ten most boring passages. Literally it was the results of the first Jewish census. And I had to expound in front of my friends and family for ten minutes about why God had decided to dictate this.
CD: For me, one of the hallmarks of a Simon Rich piece is the way you create voices or accents for your characters. The New Yorker recently ran a monologue you’d written, called “Unprotected,” where an unused condom describes his life in what seemed to be an Eastern European accent. Or some of the funniest scenes in What in God’s Name involve Raj, an Indian restaurateur. How do you go about creating such clear voices using only the written word?
SR: I don’t really know if I have a strategy other just that I love to eavesdrop. My entire life, I’ve loved to listen to people talk. Often, I’ll wear an iPod on the subway but turn the sound off so I can spy on people. I spend a lot of my life listening to people and I’ve always been really interested in the different ways people talk.
CD: Do you see the character Sam as a version of yourself?
SR: When I’m writing fiction, I see every single character, including the ones that are mostly evil, as a version of myself. I think it would be impossible to write a character that I had nothing in common with. I don’t know how I would do that.
How I come up with characters is I take an emotion that I’ve had or a way I’ve been and heighten it to the point that it becomes its own streamlined version of myself. I actually don’t know if that’s how other writers do it, but that’s how I have always done it.