Live chat today! Also: where are the funny op-ed columnists?
A bit of advice for the Times, the Post, the Journal, etc ...
First things first: the redoubtable
has invited me to join him for a live chat today at noon Eastern time (so sorry for the late notice on my part). We’re going to be talking about Christianity and religion in Silicon Valley. Some reading, if you like, here, here, here, and here (this last link is a very digestible Times piece that can serve as a bit of a cheat sheet). You need the Substack app to join us, so get thee to the app ASAP. And I’ll post the video later.More funny columnists, please
Although I was a contract writer for The New York Times for six years, writing the dearly departed Beliefs column, about religion (and have also written for the Times Magazine and the paper’s travel, book, business, and opinion sections), I have no inside scoop on what’s going on in the opinion pages. I don’t know why Pamela Paul and Charles Blow are leaving, if there was more to the story of Paul Krugman leaving, whether it was all voluntary or not. I have also written a good deal for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post—and I literally just remembered that about ten years ago I was briefly a regular columnist for The Los Angeles Times—but I can’t tell you how those sausages get made, either.
But that won’t stop me from giving advice. And my advice is: please get more funny writers. As long as people are leaving (and they aren’t just leaving at the Times), and replacements are needed, may I request some decent humorists?
There was a time when the Times had two columnists who might make one laugh (intentionally), Russell Baker and Anna Quindlen. Today, Gail Collins is the only one who is regularly funny. The Post has Alexandra Petri, who can be quite funny. The Wall Street Journal has Jason Gay, a sports columnist who’s funny. I am sure there are others whom I’m missing. But in general, opinion pages are pretty serious places.
Whom would they get? My first candidate would be
, whose Substack newsletter is an ingenious blend of policy analysis and hilarity (yes, really). He’s an alumnus of John Oliver’s show, and I have to think that he would be able to name half a dozen alumni of the late-night politico-comedy world—where the shows, like Oliver’s and The Daily Show, have pretty clearly jumped the shark—who would be able to write political commentary with a dash of humor. Surely there are some dissatisfied SNL writers. Or just dig a little! Maybe you’d turn up my old friend Sarah Larson, who wrote this gem.Or how about some not-political commentary! Russell Baker and Anna Quindlen didn’t always, or even mostly, write about politics. They had platforms to opine on life—domestic life, sporting life, family life, etc. They didn’t have to be timely or current or topical. They came not from the Thurber laugh-seeking school but from the E.B. White school: if they made you smile, that was a pretty nifty thing.
It’s not purely Trump’s fault that our publications have gotten so serious—The New Yorker had basically turned its website into a news and current-events website, as opposed to a literary, essayistic, memoiristic website, before the Trump era—but certainly the new-ish idea that the media had to be the resistance did not help matters.
If humor were to make a return, it would not all be ha-ha joke-a-minute humor. Writers like
, who for a brief moment seemed to have a gig with the Times opinion section, are wry and witty, not slapsticky. I’d say the same for Rob Sheffield, known primarily as a music writer but so much more, and Chuck Klosterman. And Nick Hornby. And Rob Harvilla. Does anyone remember the back-page obituaries by Mark Steyn in The Atlantic? Often very funny.The problem with most opinion writing is that it’s predictable—which is the one thing that humor writers can’t be. Humor comes from surprise. At the very least, with a humor columnist, you turn to her work, not knowing what she’s going to say. We need more of that—more surprise, more whimsy, more laughs.
My dog turns 7 today
Happy birthday, Minerva McGonagall Oppenheimer (seen here with one of her best friends)!
