COVID Check-In with Michael Gerber

Virtual Memories Show
COVID Check-In: Michael Gerber

Michael Gerber, editor/publisher of The American Bystander, a.k.a., the last great humor magazine (subscribe today! & get their Quarantine Cavalcade e-mail!), checks in from Santa Monica, where he’s busier than ever. We talk about finding humor and sharing laughs during the pandemic, the Bystander‘s viability and how its distribution model is built to survive this sort of situation, his background in history and how it helps and hurts right now (including the lesson of the Rome’s Gracchi brothers), his upcoming binge of I, Claudius and the novel of ancient Rome he’s threatening to write, Dan Savage’s (non-sexual) advice about keeping perspective during the pandemic, and his realization that making The American Bystander may just be his calling (as opposed to CIA analyst, which he considered once upon a time). Give it a listen! And go subscribe to The American Bystander and its daily Quarantine Cavalcade e-mail!

You can listen to all these COVID Check-In episodes at The COVID-19 Sessions.

Listen to the conversation! Then check out the archives for more conversations from The Before Times.

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About our Guest

Michael Gerber is editor and publisher of The American Bystander, the all-star comedy quarterly. Called “the world’s only expert on print humor magazines,” Gerber has spent 30 years as a comedy writer, editor, art director and magazine consultant. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, SNL, and many other venues; his novels have sold 1.25 million copies in 25 languages. In 2003, Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parody fried the brains of a generation of English teens, and now we have Brexit. Sorry.

Credits: The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Cloudlifter CL-1 and a Mackie Onyx Blackjack 2×2 USB Recording Interface. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Michael by him. It’s on my instagram. Covers of The American Bystander by John Cuneo and Arnold Roth.

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