In Conversation: Breaking Up With America

Alan Zweibel is an original Saturday Night Live writer who has won multiple Emmy and Writers Guild of America awards for his work in television. He also collaborated with Billy Crystal on the Tony Award–winning Broadway play 700 Sundays and won the Thurber Prize for American Humor for his novel The Other Shulman. Zweibel started his comedy career selling jokes for seven dollars apiece to the last of the Borscht Belt standups. Then one night, despite bombing on stage, he caught the attention of Lorne Michaels and became one of the first writers at Saturday Night Live. He wrote classic material for Gilda Radner, John Belushi, and all of the original Not Ready For Prime Time Players. From SNL, he went on to have a hand in a series of landmark shows—from It’s Garry Shandling’s Show to Curb Your Enthusiasm. Throughout the pages of Laugh Lines: My Life Helping Funny People Be Funnier (Harry N. Abrams) Zweibel weaves together his own stories and interviews with his friends and contemporaries, including Richard Lewis, Eric Idle, Bob Saget, Mike Birbiglia, Sarah Silverman, Judd Apatow, Dave Barry, Carl Reiner, and more. The book also features a charming foreword from Billy Crystal, his friend of forty-five years. You gotta trust Dave Barry: “I have read the complete works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, and Melville. Trust me, Alan Zweibel is MUCH funnier.” 

Colin Quinn is a stand-up comedian, writer, and performer whose thirty-year broadcast career has included stints on Saturday Night Live as the “Weekend Update” anchor. His specials Unconstitutional and The New York Story (directed by Jerry Seinfeld) are available on Netflix, and his one-man show Red State, Blue State premiered in New York and started streaming on Netflix in August 2019. In Overstated: A Coast-to-Coast Roast of the 50 States (St. Martin’s Press) Quinn tackles the condition of our union today. As he sees it, the United States is in a fifty-states-wide couples’ counseling session, thinking about filing for divorce. But is that really what we want? Can a nation composed of states that are so different possibly hang together? And so, Quinn calls us out state-by-state, from Connecticut to Hawaii. He identifies the hypocrisies inherent in what we claim to believe and what we actually do. Overstated skewers us all: red, blue, and purple. It’s ultimately infused with the same blend of optimism and practicality that sparked the U.S. into being. The Hollywood Reported noted that his monologues “are comedy routines, to be sure […] But they’re also history lessons, and insightful ones at that.”