Laughing in the Face of Danger

Jane Curtin has appeared on Broadway in Noises Off, Candida, and Our Town. Her off-Broadway work includes Love Letters and the musical revue Pretzels, which she co-wrote. She starred in the television series 3rd Rock from the Sun and won back-to-back Emmy Awards for her role on Kate & Allie. She is an original cast member of Saturday Night Live and also starred in the television film series The Librarian and its spin-off, The Librarians. Her film credits include Coneheads; Antz; I Love You, Man; I Don’t Know How She Does It; The Heat; The Spy Who Dumped Me; Can You Ever Forgive Me?; Ode to Joy; Godmothered; Queen Bees; and Jules, opposite Sir Ben Kingsley. She starred on the television series Unforgettable and has had guest appearances on The Good Wife, 48 Hours ’til Monday, The Good Fight, Broad City, United We Fall, Bupkis, and The Residence.

Mike Doyle has appeared on screen in New Amsterdam, City on a Hill, The Romanoffs, the Law & Order franchise, The Accidental Wolf, Narcos: Mexico, Jersey Boys, The Invitation, Green Lantern,Fallout, and The Greatest, among others. His stage credits include The New Century at Lincoln Center and Betrayed with the Culture Project. Doyle wrote and directed the feature films Almost Love starring Kate Walsh, Patricia Clarkson, and Scott Evans, and Passing Through, in which he also stars with Kevin Daniels and Amy Ryan. His next film, Bookends, stars F. Murray Abraham and Caroline Aaron.

Negin Farsad is the host of the podcast Fake the Nation and a regular panelist on Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me! She is the director of the films Nerdcore Rising and The Muslims Are Coming!, and her romantic comedy, 3rd Street Blackout, is streaming on Peacock. She was selected as a TEDFellow for her work in social justice comedy and can be seen in Birdgirl, Not Okay, and Hillary Clinton's Apple TV+ show, Gutsy. Farsad's debut memoir, How to Make White People Laugh, was nominated for the Thurber Prize for Humor.

Anand Giridharadas is an American journalist and political pundit. He is an editor-at-large for Time magazine and was a foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times. He is the author of India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking, The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, and The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy. Giridharadas has also written for The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. He is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC, a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, and a former McKinsey analyst. He has spoken on the main stage of TED. Anand's writing has been honored by the Society of Publishers in Asia, the Poynter Fellowship at Yale, the 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year Award, Harvard University's Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture, and the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Award.

Tony Hale is a three-time Emmy award–winning actor known for his work on Arrested Development, Veep, Being the Ricardos, The Mysterious Benedict Society, Hocus Pocus 2, Toy Story 4, Inside Out 2, The Decameron, Woman of the Hour, and Opus. Hale also starred and produced his first feature film, Sketch, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival this past September.

Robin Hemley has published fifteen books of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent books are the autofiction Oblivion: An After-Autobiography, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, co-authored with Xu Xi, and Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood). He has previously published four collections of short stories, and his stories have been widely anthologized. His widely-used writing text, Turning Life into Fiction, has sold more than a hundred thousand copies and has been in print for 25 years. His work has been published and translated widely and he has received such awards as a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, three Pushcart Prizes in both nonfiction and fiction, The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction, and The Independent Press Book Award for Memoir, among others. Hemley’s recent collection of essays, How to Change History: A Salvage Project, was published in March 2025.

Gerald Jonas is a poet and journalist based in New York City. His poems and short stories have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, among other publications. He is the author of six non-fiction books, and recently finished his first novel, RiveR: A Grandmat in 3 Landings. As a staff writer on The New Yorker for 30 years, he wrote major articles on subjects ranging from computers, basketball, and science fiction to biofeedback, psychology, aging, and the brain. As science fiction book critic for The New York Times Book Review for 30 years, he selected and reviewed over 900 works of science fiction and related books. In addition to numerous awards in journalism and documentary film writing, Jonas has been honored with a Henry Fellowship, Cambridge University, 1958; a Guggenheim Fellowship, 1975; and a Rockefeller Fellowship, 1977.

Jean Marple is a pen name for Renata Adler. Adler is an American author, journalist, and film critic. She was a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker for more than forty years and the chief film critic for The New York Times in 1969. She has also published several fiction and non-fiction books, and has been awarded the O. Henry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the PEN/Hemingway Award.

David Sedaris is a humorist, author, comedian, and radio contributor. He is the author of Happy-go-Lucky, A Carnival of Snackery, The Best of Me, Calypso,Theft By Finding, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Holidays on Ice, Naked, and Barrel Fever. He is also the editor of Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories. Sedaris’s pieces appear regularly in The New Yorker and have twice been included in The Best American Essays. His original radio pieces can be heard on This American Life, and he is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4. Sedaris and his sister Amy have collaborated on several plays under the name “The Talent Family,” including Stump the Host, Stitches, One Woman Shoe, which received an Obie Award, Incident at Cobbler’s Knob, and The Book of Liz. In 2013, A feature film adaptation of his story “C.O.G.” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and the art book David Sedaris Diaries: A Visual Compendium was published in 2017. In 2019, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the recipient of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, the Jonathan Swift International Literature Prize for Satire and Humor, and the Terry Southern Prize for Humor.

Miriam Shor starred in the hit series Younger, for which she received a Critics’ Choice nomination. Shor was most recently featured in the Academy Award–winning film American Fiction, starring Jeffrey Wright, as well as Oscar nominated Maestro created by Bradley Cooper, The Midnight Sky, directed by George Clooney, and Lost Girls, directed by Oscar nominee Liz Garbus. Additional television credits include And Just Like That…, Mrs. America, The Americans (SAG nomination), High Maintenance, The Good Wife, GCB, Swingtown, Mildred Pierce, and Damages. On stage, Shor has starred in productions of Sweat; Merrily We Roll Along; Almost, Maine; Scarcity; The Wild Party; Dedication or the Stuff of Dreams; Boy; and Book of Days. She created the role of Yitzak in the Off-Broadway production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch and starred in the film adaptation, which received multiple awards (Sundance, Berlin International Film Festival) and for which she received the Screen Idol Award. Shor can currently be seen in the Apple TV+ series Before, starring Billy Crystal and the forthcoming film Magic Hour.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing and Literature Program at The Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook University, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive for emerging novelists. Wolitzer, who was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, is the radio and podcast host of Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts.

On screen, Jessica Keenan Wynn played opposite Tony Hale in the Paramount feature Clifford The Big Red Dog and garnered rave reviews for her role of Young Tanya in the global smash hit film Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again. Prior to that, she made her Broadway debut as Cynthia Weil in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. Additional theater credits include her New York debut in the cult-classic adaptation of Heathers as Heather Chandler, the Les Misérables 25th anniversary tour, Hairspray at the Hollywood Bowl, and Life Could Be a Dream. Her television and film credits include The Mimic, Play Therapy, The House of Americans, Go Green, Billions, The Knick, Forever, The Mysteries of Laura, and The Golden Girls. Wynn is a prominent voice actor, currently voicing Mrs. Davenport in the Disney animated series The Ghost and Molly McGee and the upcoming podcast titled The Patel Motel by Maulik Pancholy and Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video.

CREDITS

“Clicking on Heaven’s Door,” by Anand Giridharadas, from The New Yorker (March 4, 2023). Copyright © 2023 by Anand Giridharadas. Used by permission of Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

“The Stand-in,” by Gerald Jonas & Renata Adler, under the pseudonym Jean Marple, from The Paris Review (Issue 47, summer 1969). Copyright © Gerald Jonas and Renata Adler. Used by permission of the authors.

“Farnsworth,” by David Sedaris. Commissioned by Symphony Space. Copyright © 2023 by David Sedaris and Symphony Space.

“The Last Customer,” by Robin Hemley, from The Big Ear (John F. Blair, 1995). Copyright © 1995 by Robin Hemley. Used by permission of the author.