Paul Rudnick's Always Been (Almost Too) Effortlessly Funny. Now He's Going Deeper

In his new novel, "What Is Wrong With You?," he continues to find the nexus between tart one-liners and a deeper hurt and healing. Is his light-about-politics sensibility the balm we need right now?

Photo by Emilio Madrid

Hey Caftaners! I hope you're having a good weekend even as we brace for Congress to slash everything we rely on. I'll keep the political stuff brief and say that yesterday, I and several friends participated in a STOP THE CUTS! march and rally in Lower Manhattan that culminated with hundreds of us doing a tombstone-wielding, ACT UP-style "die-in" in front of the stock exchange. Here I am (bottom center with the “Fatal Infection” tombstone lol) with some friends before we marched. (I think we end up smiling, incongruously, in such photos because despite the horrors we are protesting, we’re happy to see one another…an upside to activism!)

I have a very political interview lined up for Monday morning but in the meantime I have for you a chat (that actually does include a smidge of political discussion) with the inimitable humorist/satirist Paul Rudnick, whom you may know (and probably love) via his hilarious "Libby Gelman Waxner" column he's been doing since the nineties (when he started writing movie reviews for Premiere magazine in the guise of this Jewish suburban wife and mom with, blessedly, no filter) and still does occasionally for places like The New Yorker.

And of course there's his 1990s "AIDS comedy" play Jeffrey, which became a movie…

…and of course there are his beloved screenplays (or rewrites) for movies, particularly the cult-classic The Addams Family and its follow-up Addams Family Values, which features perhaps the most subversively funny scene about Thanksgiving ever in American cinema…

Paul is also a delightful novelist and has a new novel out called What Is Wrong With You? (please try to buy it from your local indie bookstore or at least here on bookshop.org, which supports indie bookstores)…

…that I am happy to say is not only tartly, satirically funny in his classic style but also quite moving, finding Paul in an increasingly emotional mode, especially when it comes to finding love later in life and after betrayal and/or loss.

It's about a 60-year-old gay New York book editor, Rob Barnett, whose husband of 30 years has recently died and who is miserable. But then his hot yet also genuinely lovable straight gym trainer and friend, Sean Manginaro, convinces him to travel with him to the lavish wedding of Sean's ex, former flight attendant Linda Kleinschmidt, who is marrying Trone Meston, a neurodivergent Jeff Bezos- or Steve Jobs-like tech billionaire.

Also showing up at the wedding is Tremble Woodspill, a cool low-income young woman from Arkansas whose first book Rob is going to publish until he is fired by Isabelle McNally, a manager half his age who (at least at first) is a cartoon of the kind of hyperwoke millennial P.C. bully we've all come to know in the past decade (but who now seems to be receding, in part due to the vengeful blowback from right-wing Trumpworld).

In our interview, Paul was a sweetheart, voluble and easygoing. Amid his busy writing schedule, he gave me not one but two calls to complete this interview. Humorous observations and rimshot one-liners flow out of him almost unstoppably. He was nowhere near as richly confessional as, say, Edmund White was in my last Caftan interview, but he was still a warm, witty delight to talk to—about his new book and so many other things. So I hope you enjoy both the chat and What Is Wrong With You? In these stressful and dark times, it's breezy and hilarious but also has a lot of heart—just like Paul.

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Paul, thank you so much for agreeing to talk today. So you still have your writing office in NYC but you live mostly now on Long Island with John, your retired doctor husband whom you've been with for more than 30 years.

Paul and John, undated photo.

What is a typical day like for you?

John gets up around 6am but I'll linger in bed until 7:30, sometimes 8. I sometimes work late into the night, so that's my legal defense for sleeping late. Then I read The New York Times. I have it online but I'm still hopelessly in thrall to the print edition. Nowadays, where we're in the age of Trump again, I read it much more quickly because the headlines are more than enough. I read the book review first. Then I have whatever for breakfast, an English muffin or a Snickers.

That is really your breakfast?

If there's leftover Halloween candy, that's what I'll have, but it sometimes lasts well into July. Several weeks ago, I defrosted a frozen Snickers with a blow dryer. It was like the kind of thing you'd see in any movie about addiction where the person is hitting rock bottom.

Then I'll lock myself away in my study and do a spasm of work, which could include rewriting, which I really enjoy. I work on a chaise. One of the privileges of being a writer is that you get to choose your body position.

Indeed! I work in bed myself, all propped up.

Right. If you really want to sit in a chair all day, go work in a bank. Ninety percent of the reason people become writers is so they can lie down. Then if I finish, say, another three pages, I'll reward myself with microwave popcorn or a bag of trail mix. I can work for hours.

Do you have a moment when you hit peak flow?

When I started writing my last novel, Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style, it just poured out of me.

I felt like I was using everything I've learned over the course of my career. Suddenly I felt I could express myself more fully, in a way that had never been possible before, and that felt like such a blessing. Writing became a pleasure. I don't do a lot of outlining. I let the piece guide me. I've really become addicted to writing fiction because I feel like it's using the best of me. Sometimes I can't wait to get back to the page. Maybe it's that mastery theory about doing something for 10,000 hours. So I've been having a good time writing as of late.

I'm writing a new novel right now. It's self-starting: you don't have to wait for permission or a sale or an audience. You can just keep going, which is the best therapy in a lot of ways.

One thing I liked about this new novel of yours is that it's very funny as usual, especially about the zeitgeist of the past few years, but also has a lot of deeper notes about love, about what it means to live a good life despite heartbreak and loss. Stuff like that.

Yeah. I found that writing plays and screenplays was becoming a technical exercise where it was trickier to get emotional layers involved. When I started writing Farrell Covington, I felt I was going for a far greater depth and emotional heft, which was such a pleasure. I think that because novels allow you more time and space, you can really explore every aspect of a character and a situation.

With this new novel, I wanted to show someone who's been run over by life and how they recover, or try to. The odd inspiration for it was that I read a random blog post by a stranger who was writing from such despair. He hated everything about his life—his job, his romantic prospects, his family. It was almost like a suicide note. I'd rarely seen someone who'd gone that public with their misery, but it fascinated me. So I thought, what if that became a character? How could you make a guy like that happy in a way that a reader might buy?

Yeah, that is exactly the premise on which the new novel begins for Rob, your protagonist. So proceed with the rest of your day.

If I'm in New York, I'll walk from my office to Chelsea Piers [a massive gym/fitness/recreation complex on the Hudson River].

As you get older, the motivation for going to the gym becomes a combination of vanity and good health. What starts as a means of looking good when you go out at night becomes something you do so you won't have a stroke quite as rapidly. Also, if I'm having any problems or blocks with writing, getting out of the house is always a benefit, being physical and talking to other human beings. I give myself bonus points if I'm walking to and from the gym—even if I'm walking very slowly and eating a Snickers.

How gay and/or straight is your gym? Mine here in Ridgewood, Queens, as I think I've noted here before, is a sprinkling of gays but primarily very hot straight and kind of macho young Latin guys. I really have to police my cruising to not get caught just staring at someone with my tongue hanging out, like this dirty old gay man.

The first gym I went to in New York was all straight—police officers and cab drivers who helped me learn how to lift properly because they took pity on me. Like, "Here's how you put the clamp on the barbell." My gym now is a mix of gay and straight, with a lot of finance bros.

Is there good eye candy? Do you have a gym crush?

No, but there are people who I invent lives for. There's some big hunky guy there with two phones. He's either working for Goldman Sachs or he's a drug dealer or a hustler. I should work up my courage and ask him which of those he is.

Then after the gym?

I'll buy a croissant.

Are you serious? Not something healthy and protein-based? I usually eat like a pound of roast chicken with brown rice and spinach after the gym, with lots of chili crisp.

Are you mad? Of course not! You need a recovery snack. The gym is how you earn it. I burn so many calories and now I need them right back.

But seriously, you're not ravenous for some real food after the gym?

No. I'm ravenous for Triscuits and M&Ms.

Is there any point in the day where you eat lean protein and vegetables?

Is cinnamon toast a form of lean protein?

What do you have for dinner?

A bagel with plenty of butter.

So you never eat an actual meal?

Almost never. One person who observed me over a certain period of time told me that when I died, I'd be already embalmed.

What about your husband?

He's a great cook. He'll make pasta, steak—all sorts of delicacies.

And you don't join him in eating real food?

Excuse me, I think of a Reese's peanut butter cup as very real food!

Sigh. Okay, so then what happens after dinner?

I'll go back to work. If I'm being paid to write something, like a screenplay, I become my own vice-principal: "You better sit down and finish that draft!" I have a lot of Zooms related to these assignments. I've gotten involved with several projects with many drafts and endless discussions with people I've never met in person.

I really resent the post-Covid normalization of Zoom calls. They're not necessary for one-on-one calls! I’m sitting up in my bed in my underwear and I don’t want to have to put on a shirt on or fix my hair.

I've noticed that a lot of younger people fear phone conversations. They either want to text or Zoom. So I'm fine with any of those. Although when you're texting, it's out there forever and will come back to haunt you.

Okay, Paul, what were you like as a kid growing up in New Jersey?

I was a theater rat before I'd even been to the theater. My parents had original cast albums which I played endlessly.

With his brother, Evan. “I’m the smaller and more confused child, sort of wearing a beret.”

They'd let me pick a different Broadway musical to see on my birthday and I'd always pick the biggest flops, like Zorba or Dear World. I loved being in that stage when you're ten or eleven and pre-taste. You aren't looking to criticize—you're just so happy to have a theater seat and listen to the overture. As I got older, my parents would let me go into the city myself on the train and I'd go see everything. There's a heightening that only occurs in musical theater, a sense of possibility and joy. If that hits you when you're little, it becomes a lifelong addiction. I try to infuse that into my writing, to achieve that level of happiness and extreme emotions.

I was also a voracious reader as a kid. I had a job shelving books at the public library. I'd read Edith Wharton and Patrick Dennis and attempted Faulkner and I just couldn't get enough. I loved narrative and character and all those good things. Then I started a literary journal in high school called Straight Teeth.

Why that title?

I don't know! It was well before Zadie Smith's White Teeth. I guess it was because it was the late sixties and early seventies and there was a sense of absurdism in the air.

Since then, you've had a very long and productive writing career across several genres—plays, screenplays, novels. Can you break that career into chapters?

My first play was called Poor Little Lambs and was done off-Broadway. I adored every minute of it, but it wasn't great. The reviews were mixed, to say the least. That was the slap in the face that I required. I realized I'd have to get a whole lot better and work a whole lot harder.

Here is the not-very-enthused 1982 New York Times review by Frank Rich.

A big revelation for me was when I wrote [the "AIDS comedy" play] Jeffrey [which debuted in 1992].

Photo from Jeffrey lifted from Paul’s own website

That was the first time I wrote about something that I cared about deeply and about a community I adored, at the peak of the AIDS crisis. Media and government were ignoring it. So when I went to see [Larry Kramer's] The Normal Heart and William Hoffman's As Is [which are both about AIDS and both debuted in 1985]—you'd see every gay guy at those shows. Jeffrey was turned down by every theater in NYC and across the country until finally the WPA Theater here in NYC agreed to produce it. I remember watching an early run-through, crying, thinking, "Oh my God, I really like this. If the world doesn't say yes to this, I'm going to be devastated." But even during previews, people were coming to see it more than once and reciting the lines along with the actors.

Did Jeffrey usher in a new phase of your career?

Oh, 100 percent. It allowed me to access gay material. For a lot of us writers then, the closet had become so obscene, when you're faced with death and illness and fear. We were like, "Fuck that—we're going to write about the people we know and love."

Paul on the set of the movie version of Jeffrey, which came out in 1995.

And then I'd say around that time, with the Addams Family movies, I started to get lucky and things started to click for me in all sorts of ways. But in a weird way, it wasn't until I wrote Farrell Covington during the lockdown where I felt like I had another seismic shift in my work, where now I'm enjoying every second of it.

I'm not asking for numbers, but can you give a sense of how you've made out financially as a writer? For example, I was very surprised when Armistead Maupin told me that he still needed to make money at this late stage in what seems like a career with a lot of output and commercial success.

I've been very cautious about savings, mostly from movies. This is true of just about every writer I know, that you can't make a living in theater, or even in novels unless you strike gold like Colleen Hoover. So I've always been aware that I had to save money whenever I was making plenty of it. John and I have a nice house, yeah, but we don't have kids. I've always known how precarious a writer's life is. I've had friends who are hugely successful and others who are not.

As a writer, you're always a self-starter. The upside is that you can think of a new idea, but on the other hand, you have to figure out where it might fit in the market. Writing movies allowed me to write plays and novels. But I inherited my carefulness about money from my parents. Whenever I'd buy my mother a present, she'd say, "I wish I had your money." If I bought her flowers from a bodega, she'd be so grateful: "I wish I had your money."

Always a real sense of caution about money.

It's called "kina hora" in Yiddish, always knocking on wood and looking both ways because the Cossacks are lurking.

The following is where we pick up the call a few days later...

How have you been since we last spoke?

I think I'm fine. You?

To be honest, not really good. I'm always sad and angry and scared about what Trump is doing to the country and the world. What's it been like for you since the inauguration?

The last time Trump won, everyone, including myself, felt that feverish, out of control panic. This time around, I have a theory, which is that there is no one better at destroying Trump than he is. If you let him loose and let it play out, as he's already proven, he starts self-immolating. And that can be a way of avoiding having that constant knot in every part of your body.

But yeah, now there's still a sense of utter despair, like, "Oh my God, what are we in for?" But it's tricky to say how productive endless anxiety is, no matter how justified. I have a certain focus on the gay people in the administration, like [Treasury Secretary] Scott Bessent…

Bessent and his husband but I can’t quite tell which one is Bessent because they look so alike.

…and [diplomat] Richard Grenell, the two gay tokens Trump has appointed.

Grennel (left) and his husband.

They've been well-behaved little house gays so it'll be interesting to see how public they become if Trump really starts to attack the gay community. They have a huge responsibility.

It's also been hard to watch how horribly Rep. Sarah McBride [the first openly transgender person elected to Congress] is being treated by the Republicans—despicable and so unnecessarily cruel.

Here is Rep. McBride being publicly misgendered on March 12 by GOP Rep. Keith Self of Texas and then being defended by Democratic U.S. Rep. Bill Keating of Mass.: (Deliciously, McBride replied to Self, “Thank you, Madame Chair.”)

You really have to go out of your way to be that hideous to another human being, and yet McBride has been handling it superbly.

The way that everyone has become so politicized since the first Trump term is fascinating to me. I've never seen people so informed. It's like hearing straight guys talk about sports, just the obsessive memorization of stats.

But I don't think everyone is that informed or engaged. Do you mean in the relatively educated, liberal New York world that we live in?

Yes, everyone in the liberal Manhattan sphere, but also throughout the country. What's funny in a dark way is that I have a lot of friends at the moment who've tried to swear off the news, but when I sit down to dinner with them, in three seconds [we're talking about politics]. I think it's good to be aware of what's going on, but on the other hand, trying to change the political landscape by having a breakdown isn't going to be effective and it's only going to harm you. That's why it's nice to see people who are starting to fight back by booing Vance and his wife when they showed up at the Kennedy Center… (Tim here: the dialogue on this video is hilarious.)

—or the protests at the Tesla dealerships [against Elon Musk].

There are a lot of protests going on. Are you going to protests?

I have in the past. This time not so much, I think. I should be—Lord knows everyone should be—but I sense that other people [are better at it]. I'd be useless.