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INTERVIEWER
Humor is so much a part of your work. Is this an easy quality to deal with? Is one problem that the response to humor is so much a question of individual taste?
MALAMUD
The funny bone is universal. I doubt humorists think of individual taste when they’re enticing the laugh. With me humor comes unexpectedly, usually in defense of a character, sometimes because I need cheering up. When something starts funny I can feel my imagination eating and running. I love the distancing—the guise of invention—that humor gives fiction. Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.
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| Authors Mentioned |
| Saul Bellow, Anton Chekhov, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, John Updike, Thomas Wolfe, Sholem Aleichem, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gustave Flaubert, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, James Joyce, John Keats, D. H. Lawrence, I. L. Peretz, Marcel Proust, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf |
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