Guest host Andy Borowitz presents four hilarious pieces featured in his anthology The 50 Funniest American Writers. He admits that “trying to rank artists is a tricky business,” but there’s something for everyone to love in this quartet of classic and contemporary funnies. First James Naughton reads S.J. Perelman’s noir parody “Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer.”
We close with a story to keep you up all night—which is the problem the woman in Jenny Allen’s “Awake,” is having. The reader is Jane Kaczmarek.
ACTORS & ARTISTS
Jenny Allen is a writer and performer. Her works include the fable collection The Long Chalkboard and the essay collection Would Everybody Please Stop?, a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. She wrote and starred in the award-winning one-woman show I Got Sick Then I Got Better, which was produced by the New York Theatre Workshop in 2009, and performs stand-up in New York City. Allen’s writing has been featured in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Vogue, The New York Times, Esquire, New York, Good Housekeeping, and Huffington Post, as well as the anthologies Disquiet, Please! and In The Fullness of Time: 32 Women on Life After 50.
Andy Borowitz is a New York Times best-selling author and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. In 2001, he created The Borowitz Report, a satirical news column that has millions of readers around the world, for which he won the first-ever National Press Club award for humor. The Borowitz Report was acquired by The New Yorker in 2012. He created the classic sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, winning the NAACP Image Award. Additional Hollywood credits include the Oscar-nominated film Pleasantville. He edited The 50 Funniest American Writers, which became the first title in the history of the Library of America to make the New York Times best-seller list, and is the author of a memoir, An Unexpected Twist, a number-one bestseller. As a comedian, Borowitz has performed sold-out shows around the world and has made countless television and radio appearances, on National Public Radio, VH1, and Comedy Central, among other places. His solo comedy show, Make America Not Embarrassing Again, began touring the U.S. in 2018.
Dave Hill currently hosts the podcast Dave Hill's Podcasting Incident. He is the author of the humor works Dave Hill Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Tasteful Nudes, and most recently, Parking the Moose, and his writing has been featured in The New York Times, GQ, Salon, Vice, McSweeney’s, and Guitar World, among other publications. He is a contributor to This American Life and has appeared on many television shows, including Inside Amy Schumer, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and The Tick. He has toured nationally as a singer and guitar player.
Jane Kaczmarek is best known for her role as Lois on Malcolm in the Middle, for which she received 7 consecutive Emmy nominations as well as nominations for the Golden Globe and SAG Awards. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin and Yale School of Drama, Kaczmarek made her television debut on The Paper Chase and Hill Street Blues and most recently can be seen on The Big Bang Theory, This Is Us, Carol's Second Act, and Mixed-ish. In New York, Kaczmarek has appeared on Broadway and off at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Second Stage, the Public Theatre, New York Theater Workshop, and 6 seasons at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Her recent theater credits include in Long Day's Journey Into Night, Our Town with Deaf West Theatre, and The Year to Come at La Jolla Playhouse. Kaczmarek’s favorite job is raising her three kids and reading/hosting Selected Shorts across America.
James Naughton has won Tony Awards as Best Actor in a Musical for City of Angels and Chicago. On Broadway, he directed the Tony-nominated productions of Arthur Miller’s The Price and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, starring Paul Newman. He also directed the television production of Our Town for Showtime and Masterpiece Theatre. He has appeared in numerous films and television shows, including The Devil Wears Prada, Damages, Gossip Girl, Ally McBeal, Planet of the Apes, Hostages, The Blacklist, The Affair, Equity, Odd Mom Out, The Tap, The Independents, and The Romanoffs.
Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She is the author of eight books, including Saturday Night, The Orchid Thief, which was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film Adaptation, Rin Tin Tin, The Floral Ghost, and most recently, The Library Book, which was nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Nonfiction Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In addition to The New Yorker, Orlean has contributed to Vogue, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Outside, among other publications. She was a Neiman Fellow at Harvard University in 2003, received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Michigan in 2012, and was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014.
S. J. Perelman (1904 - 1979) was a humorist and screenwriter, best known for his decades of contributions to The New Yorker. He authored more than twenty books, dozens of individual humor pieces, and several Broadway plays. Perelman received an Academy Award for Screenwriting for Around the World in 80 Days. Additional screenwriting credits include Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, Hold ’Em Jail, and Sitting Pretty, among others. Perelman was awarded a special National Book Award in 1978 for his unique contribution to American letters.
Isaiah Sheffer (1935 - 2012) was a writer, director, cultural entrepreneur, and impresario. He was co-founder of Symphony Space in New York City, served as the organization’s Artistic Director until 2010 and Founding Artistic Director thereafter, and was widely known as the host of Selected Shorts. In addition, he was the creator of Wall to Wall and Bloomsday on Broadway, as well as the co-creator of The Thalia Follies political cabaret.
Jean Shepherd (1921 - 1999) was an American raconteur, radio and TV personality, writer, and actor. With a career that spanned decades, Shepherd is best known to modern audiences for the film A Christmas Story, which he narrated and co-scripted, based on his own semi-autobiographical stories. His short, roughly autobiographical humor stories were assembled into books, including In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories: And Other Disasters, The Ferrari in the Bedroom, and A Fistful of Fig Newtons. Shepherd was posthumously inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2005.
