It has been said that “writing funny” is harder than “writing serious” because you are always after a payoff: a laugh, a smile, even an amused, head-shaking grimace. Is that true? No one knows the answer better than Emmy Award-winning humorist SIMON RICH. A frequent short-story contributor to The New Yorker, he has written for Saturday Night Live, Pixar, and The Simpsons, and is the ideal writer to tell us about the joys and burdens of writing funny and whether he leans funny in real life. In recent years, Rich has also adapted his stories into two Broadway shows, All In: Comedy about Love and All Out: Comedy about Ambition. He will talk about the differences and similarities between comedy and other genres like drama and horror (and the recent mash-ups of those genres) and what different storytelling muscles they require.