Other Writers Seem Asleep by Comparison
I learned how to be funny from Martin Amis.I don’t mean in person—I’m not funny in person, and I don’t know if Amis was, either. Although our paths crossed a couple of times after he moved to Brooklyn, I never spoke with him for long enough to learn whether the caustic hilarity of his 20th-century novels—which I devoured in the 1990s and then studied, trying to understand how their humor worked—was a feature of Amis’s social persona or just his writing.