Rich, Simon. "The Wisdom of Children." The New Yorker Mar. 26, 2007: 42-43.
This is unorthodox, but I'm going through the New Yorkers that have piled up over the past few months and just came across this in the Shouts & Murmurs department and found it to be the funniest thing I've read in a long time. Very playful and smart. I thought I'd, like, share it:
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* Looking at the Random House page for this guy's first humor book, Ant Farm, he doesn't seem so promising on the whole, despite behind the one-time head of Harvard Lampoon. This: "If your girlfriend gives you some 'love coupons' and then breaks up with you, are the coupons still valid?" isn't even one bit of funny.
I. A Conversation at the Grownup Table, as Imagined at the Kids' TableThe rest of the piece falls pretty flat, I guess,* but man what a start! Someone should try to write a novel or maybe just a short story from this perspective. I wonder how long it could be sustained.
MOM: Pass the wine, please. I want to become crazy.
DAD: O.K.
GRANDMOTHER: Did you see the politics? It made me angry.
DAD: Me, too. When it was over, I had sex.
UNCLE: I'm having sex right now.
DAD: We all are.
MOM: Let's talk about which kid I like the best.
DAD: (laughing) You know, but you won't tell.
MOM: If they ask me again, I might tell.
FRIEND FROM WORK: Hey, guess what! My voice is pretty loud!
DAD: (laughing) There are actual monsters in the world, but when my kids ask I pretend like there aren't.
MOM: I'm angry! I'm angry all of a sudden!
DAD: I'm angry, too! We're angry at each other!
MOM: Now everything is fine.
DAD: We just saw the PG-13 movie. It was so good.
MOM: There was a big sex.
FRIEND FROM WORK: I am the loudest! I am the loudest!
(Everybody laughs.)
MOM: I had a lot of wine, and now I'm crazy!
GRANDFATHER: Hey, do you guys know what God looks like?
ALL: Yes.
GRANDFATHER: Don't tell the kids.
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* Looking at the Random House page for this guy's first humor book, Ant Farm, he doesn't seem so promising on the whole, despite behind the one-time head of Harvard Lampoon. This: "If your girlfriend gives you some 'love coupons' and then breaks up with you, are the coupons still valid?" isn't even one bit of funny.
posted by Dusty at 11:23 PM
4 Comments:
I remember reading that piece and thinking how wildly it went downhill after that opening section. I also read this article:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2007/04/01/scared_silly/
The excerpt they use has a funny premise--what if you were actually forced to live on a deserted island with the pretentious items you name at a party--but the writing is so startlingly bad that it's almost unbearable. To point:
"Well, it turns out the girl was a government research scientist. It's a long story, but basically when the drugs in my cocktail wore off, I woke up completely naked on a sandy strip of land in the middle of the ocean. A few hours later a jet plane whizzed by..."
Well, it turns out he can't write very well. It's a long story, but basically he ruins his own bit by using cliches and inane pleonasms like 'jet plane.'
And don't even give me that John Denver bullshit. Nobody says jet plane anymore.
Of course, he's 22, went to Harvard, and is the child of the NYTimes's Frank Rich and an executive editor at Harper Collins so there's really no reason to hate him.
Ohhhhh. I wondered what must have happened for a 22-year-old with no prior publishing experience to get something only moderately good published. He's Frank Rich's kid.
Were I another kind of blogger, I s'pose now would be the time that I would rant about the incestuous NYC pub scene and the New Yorker's obsession with any flash-in-the-pan nine-year-old it can hail as the next big thing, but to do so would be to betray an embarrassing naievete about the way the world works, one I like to think I grew out of ages ago.
I came across this opinion while Google-searching Simon Rich and "Love Coupons" because I had heard the piece on the radio and wanted to see if there was free text available. I thought it was one of the funniest things I had ever heard.
What is funny to some is lost to others. I take it you've probably lost your sweet tooth as well.
I have, actually, and I think I can blame booze for it.
That or plain-old growing up.
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