Simon Rich is a funny man. Indeed, he is, as the expression goes, funny ha ha, and funny peculiar. Rich is a skinny, intellectual New Yorker with a Jewish background who talks at a furious pace while inhaling coffee – if you put a character like this in a film, people would accuse you of lazy ethnic stereotyping.
He is also something of a prodigy. Rich is just 27 and in that short time he has managed to graduate from Harvard, work on Saturday Night Live – one of the youngest writers to do so – and author two very funny novels. It’s the second of these, What In God’s Name, that he’s in Dublin to talk about.
What In God’s Name imagines heaven as a not very efficient corporation staffed by desk-bound angels with a CEO who has long lost interest in humanity’s troubles. God decides to destroy the world to follow his dream of opening an American-Asian fusion restaurant and only two angels, Craig and Eliza, want to save us. They make a bet with God and the world’s fate depends on whether or not they can get two rather unpromising humans to fall in love.
The novel may be laugh-out-loud funny, but its premises are somewhat bleak. This, says Rich, was not what he intended.
“I was trying to write the most hopeful, optimistic book I could, I was trying to write a love story really, a romantic comedy. At the same time I have a very nihilistic view of the world and I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason. Most things that happen are really random and horrible and serve no purpose whatsoever. Given what I know to be true, how could I create a system where hope is still possible? That was sort of the starting point.”
While most of the angels – former humans themselves – are uninterested in people, Craig, an angel in the Department of Miracles, wonders about the unintended consequences of his work.
“I tried to think about it logically. If you stop the rain for someone, it’s bad for the farmer down the road. Do you end up making things worse?”
Given the description of God, it’s surprising Rich has not been accused of blasphemy.
“I really wasn’t trying to be anti-Christian. I see it as a very Jewish book in a lot of ways, or at least an Old Testament book. The God character is extremely consistent with the God of the Torah, the God of the first five books of the Bible in terms of his irrationality and neediness.
“I studied the Bible in Hebrew school and I got bored by how aggressively needy he was and how desperate for praise he was – demanding that Abraham sacrifice his first-born child and then changing his mind at the last minute saying it was just a test. That’s some serious passive-aggressive bullshit!”
“The epigraph I used was, ‘So man was created in God’s image.’ If that’s true, if you take that at face-value that we resemble God, then logically he must resemble us – selfish, lazy, irrational and all of those things. I thought that would make for good comic material.”
As an agnostic, is he concerned about the influence of Christian right wing on political discourse and policy?
“Religion in America is a lot more heterogeneous than it seems. Even if you go to the south, there are so many different types of Christianity going on it’s hard to talk about it in a blanket way. In the novel I don’t talk about specific political issues and it’s not really a novel about religion. It’s a love story and it’s about the insignificance of humans.”
Despite his belief that the world can be a bleak place, Rich seems to lead something of a charmed existence. As he tells it, his stint on Saturday Night Live came about through a lucky break.
“I’d written this book called Ant Farm which was a collection of short comedy pieces that had been in The New Yorker and other places, in the Harvard Lampoon. Seth Meyers read it, he’s one of the head writers, and he gave me a shot. I had never written for actors before, I’d only ever written short stories for magazines. I was terrible at visual storytelling. The first couple of things I wrote were basically just people sitting in rooms talking to each other. It was a real learning curve. I was embarrassingly inept but luckily they gave me a chance.”
Rich is currently working on a script for Pixar, but at the moment it’s all very hush hush.
“I am not allowed to talk about it. It’s funny – I am willing to write an entire novel antagonising God, but Disney’s lawyers scare me. I don’t want to mess with them. You gotta draw the line somewhere – you might be able to reason with God!”

What In God’s Name is out now on Reagan Arthur Books.