Some people that I think are very funny think that Simon Rich is very funny, so I decided to try his newest collection of short stories. I was especially lured in by the fact that one of my favorite funny people, John Mulaney, is the narrator for the audiobook, which was also conveniently available for free on Spotify.
Unfortunately, unlike most of my favorite funny people, I do not seem to find Simon Rich very funny, at least not here. Glory Days consists of 19 short pieces, most of which would be accurately called humor pieces as opposed to short stories. They are the kind of thing that wouldn’t feel out of place in the New Yorker. Many are quite short, and the audiobook as a whole is less than five hours long. Rich likes to take a common cultural trope or archetype and invert in some way so that he can use it to comment lightly on our times, our politics, and our social mores. A somewhat clever example is “Dystopia” in which a woman and her daughter from the future are initially thrilled to discover a book on their weary travels, only to be disappointed when it turns out to be middlebrow literary fiction from the 2020s. As the mother tries to explain why people used to read such boring stories, she winds up commenting on our society in general, especially how we all wanted to appear to be intelligent without actually putting in the work to become so.
Some of the pieces are really quite trite in both concept and execution. “Mario” is a pastiche featuring the video game character as a broke, struggling adventurer unable to afford to rescue the princess yet again. It’s anti-creative in ways that trouble me. “Participation Trophy” is narrated by the oft-derided children’s award, who gets the last laugh in a mildly interesting inversion, and “Tooth Fairy” posits the titular imaginary beings as disgruntled office workers rediscovering their passion for the gig.
Since I only picked this up on the basis of Mulaney’s narration, I have to admit that he was not really an asset here. His attempts at character voices and accents were often very off-putting. In “Goliath”, his rendering of the biblical giant is genuinely unpleasant to listen to, and hampers the somewhat clever framing of the piece, in which David is a cocky young upstart beloved by fans and advertisers, while Goliath is an old vet just trying to hang on for another payday. Mulaney is similarly grating in “We’re Not So Different, You and I”, which takes the cliched phrase and turns it into a story about a super-villain suffering from loneliness and looking to establish a connection with anyone at all, including his superhero nemesis.
Rich’s humor is clever without being biting. You get the sense that Rich is making jokes designed to get an entire room of people like him to nod their heads in recognition, rather than burst out laughing.
