“This is going to sound pretty awful, but I’m inspired by humiliation. My own, mostly, but also what I see in the world at large. There’s an entire TV industry devoted to humiliation at this point, though I try not to get sucked too deeply into that. Humiliation is such a raw and pervasive human experience. And it’s one we’re constantly taught to avoid, or at least avoid disclosing. My stories (whether fictionalized or not) are mostly about pushing people into humiliation and seeing them through it. The reason I write ‘funny’ so much of the time is because the comic impulse is how we forgive our humiliations.”
—Steve Almond, author of God Bless America (Lookout, 2011)