Samantha Irby Knows How to Be Funny

Critics at Large | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

Society & Culture

4.4 • 679 Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2023

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Samantha Irby’s latest essay collection, “Quietly Hostile,” cemented her place as one of the great professionally funny people working today. Her books and her writing for such TV shows as “Shrill” and “Tuca & Bertie” are distinguished by a no-holds-barred, raunchy, often scatological brand of humor and a willingness to poke fun at just about anything—including herself. In a live taping of Critics at Large at this year’s New Yorker Festival, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz sat down with Irby to unpack her approach. They discussed humor as a coping mechanism; her work on the “Sex and the City” reboot, “And Just Like That . . .,” and the ensuing backlash; and how the Internet has transformed the comedy landscape. “What people enjoy is so varied,” Irby says. “The future is you finding very specific things that delight you, and having them readily available.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, hi, everyone.
0:07.6	Hello, I'm Alexander Schwartz, a staff writer for the New Yorker.
0:11.9	I'm joined by my incredibly talented New Yorker colleagues and co-hosts Vincent Cunningham and
0:16.8	Nomi Frye.
0:17.8	Hey, how's it going?
0:18.8	Hey.
0:19.8	Okay, this is the part of the introduction that we'll put music under later. Are you guys ready? Are you ready to be part of a live podcast taping? Behind the curtain. Three, two, one. Welcome to Critics at Large, a new podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Alex Schwartz. I'm Vincent Cunningham.
0:38.2	And I'm Nomi Fry.
0:39.3	All three of us are staff writers at The New Yorker.
0:41.5	And each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture and how we got here.
0:46.1	And if you couldn't tell already, we are taping live from the New Yorker Festival.
0:49.8	Woo!
0:50.5	Woo!
0:50.5	Woo!
0:50.6	We!
1:03.5	Yeah. Okay, so, yes, what you're hearing is us live on stage.
1:08.0	It's an episode we taped this fall, as we said, at the New Yorker Festival.
1:11.8	Yep, we were on stage at the SVA Theater in Chelsea.
1:17.2	Back when we were just a wee podcast, just a babe, a small babe of a podcast.
1:17.8	Yeah.
1:21.9	And when we initially sat down the three of us to figure out who we'd want to talk to for the festival,
1:28.8	someone that we all were very interested in is Samantha Irby, who I think it's safe to say is one of the great professionally funny people working today. Yeah, Sam Irby is, I think, one of the best writers
	...

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