At a glance
Annabelle Gurwitch will appear for the Thurber House Evenings With Authors series at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Columbus Museum of Art, 480 E. Broad St. Advance tickets cost $25, or $20 for students and senior citizens; $25 at the door.
Gurwitch will lead “Finding the Funny,” a writing class, at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Thurber Center, 91 Jefferson Ave. The deadline to register is 4 p.m. today; the cost is $50. prize. What do you think the state of female humor writers is today?
First of all, it was such a thrill to be nominated. A couple of months before, ... I was at a book event about humor writing and it was all guys who said, “I don’t set out to write funny things, but if people think it’s funny, OK.”
Well, I set out to write funny, and I don’t think comedy is a lesser genre. There has been this canard that women aren’t funny and that hasn’t been true for so many years. When I was a kid, my parents took me to see Joan Rivers, and I couldn’t believe it. She owned comedy. Today, there are so many funny women, it’s ridiculous.
You co-hosted “Dinner and a Movie” from 1996 to 2002 on TBS. What a great show that was. Was it as much fun as it looked?
When we started, we were the first original programming TBS had so they gave us a free rein. We had these little story lines only we could follow. One show, we were serving sushi and I was lying on the countertop and (co-host Paul Gilmartin) was eating sushi off my stomach. I don’t remember if there was a point to it, and it was very unhygienic but madcap. The beauty of being on a low-budget show is you can get away with everything.
You have a son. What’s he up to, and how does he relate to your work?
He’s 19 and off to college (Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville, New York) and majoring in being pretentious and doing really well at it. He’d be mortified by everything I write, except he doesn’t read me.
What would you have people know about you?
I just hope people read this book and go out and meet someone from another tribe. That’s why I don’t just tell the story of my own family. The most important thing we do as humans is to connect with people who don’t look like us, don’t eat like us — to go beyond our own tribes.