Simon Rich just might be the coolest geek you'll ever meet.
At 24, the Harvard alumnus is the youngest-ever staff writer on Saturday Night Live. Pretty damn cool, but that's only part of his story: Rich also boasts two published humor books to his name. The first, Ant Farm, was published in 2007, before Rich even graduated from Harvard, to critical praise from the likes of People, the New York Times and Jon Stewart.
His new release, Free Range Chickens, is sure to secure at least as many accolades thanks to Rich's quick-witted (and quick-reading) comedic style. Like Ant Farm, Free Range Chickens features a collection of unlikely, hilarious scenarios drawn from everyday situations.
Rich's revelations about the trials of high school romance and the embarrassing truth about just how frequently some of us check our e-mail (every three minutes sound about right?) are stories to which the dorkiest among us can relate. "Believe me, I'd like nothing more than to reach out to the cool kids," Rich asserts. "I'm definitely reaching out to that Hopkins crowd."
Apparently there's a call for this brand of humor, because it was Rich's first book that so impressed Lorne Michaels and friends at Saturday Night Live, and, just months after publishing Ant Farm and graduating from Harvard, Rich had himself a job as a staff writer for the classic sketch series.
Now in his second season on the show, Rich gets paid to do exactly what he's always dreamed of: to sit around and be funny all day long. And is there really any better place for a fledgling comedy writer to start his career than the longest-running comedy show around? Rich doesn't think so. Despite being the rookie, Rich has yet to feel the need to prove himself worthy of being a member of the circle of writers.
"The one thing about being the youngest writer is that I feel like I have the most to learn," he said. "I'm always asking people for help, and they give me great advice. ... I have a lot to learn, and it is the best place. [Head writer] Seth Myers ... always helps me solve problems I couldn't figure out on my own."
Contrary to the earlier days of the show, the environment at SNL today doesn't appear to be a hostile, cutthroat world where writers battle one another to land their material in a spot on the weekly broadcast. Today's SNL is about working together to generate the funniest end product possible at the end of the week, Rich explains.
"The thing about SNL is that everyone is so good at collaborating. It's a real meritocracy. You never feel like you're being judged for anything other than how funny you are."
Working on a big-time network show has other advantages, too. Rather than feeling constricted in his creativity by the censors and a tangle of red tape, Rich explains that SNL has actually allowed him plenty of room to grow.
"They really give the writers a shocking amount of freedom," he said. "You get to collaborate with so many writers and performers, costume designers, directors, and it gives you way more tools to use to make jokes. So it's like having all the freedom plus a whole lot more weapons."
So, how exactly can you follow Rich and land a similarly fantastic job right out of college? In Rich's case, it was simply a matter of doing as much of what he loved as he possibly could while at Harvard. He wrote constantly and joined the staff of famed humor magazine the Harvard Lampoon (He acted as president of the publication during his senior year). Knowing that all he wanted was to write in the future, The Lampoon, he admits, was a large part of his decision to attend Harvard.
"I just knew that it was a place that was serious about jokes," he said.
Harvard's academic structure also allowed Rich a large amount of freedom to write as much as he wanted. Like Hopkins, he explained, Harvard is a place that allows its students to embark on whichever track they choose to follow, so Rich declared English as his major but took a wide array of courses the school had to offer.
"I took sort of the Discovery Channel [curriculum]," he joked, adding that "what I was really paying for was the incredible opportunity to be allowed to not have a job and write all day, which was the most amazing luxury."
The less-than-vibrant social scene at Harvard (perhaps some of us here can relate) was also conducive to keeping Rich focused on writing comedy.
"I like to think that I'm very disciplined but the reality is there isn't very much to do at Harvard, so I wonder if I would've gotten so much writing done had I gone to a fun party school," he said. "So it's not like there was always some loud, wild party going on and I was in my bedroom with headphones on trying to write. It was more like there was nothing going on anyway, so I was in my bedroom trying to write."
By his senior year at Harvard, Rich knew he'd never be satisfied doing anything but writing, so he intensified his efforts at getting published and working toward a writing career.
"The Lampoon had taken over my life to such a point that I was at a place in my head where I just knew I didn't want to do anything else but write full time ... Once you're in a place where you sit in a room and write jokes all day, it's hard to then go and work for Lehman Bros. or whatever, like a lot of my friends had to do. More than anything, it gave me an idea about what I wanted to do in the world and motivated me to write more than I had before," he said.
And writing as much as possible is exactly what Rich has done since - with a paycheck these days. In his books and in the sketches he writes for SNL, Rich's goal is simple: "To write things that are as short as possible, which can lead to embarrassingly short books. It comes from my education, being made to read really long boring books," he explained. It's true that Free Range Chickens is short, but it certainly fulfills Rich's goal of being something people will voluntarily read to the end. In fact, the quick jokes and relatable scenarios in the book happen to serve as the perfect reprieve for college students bogged down with midterms.
Free Range Chickens, by Simon Rich, is available from Random House, Inc., as is Rich's first book, Ant Farm and Other Desperate Situations. Saturday Night Live airs every Saturday at 11:30 p.m. on NBC (WBAL-11).
