So it’s not surprising that the Zagat quote-filled, over-the-top style has become a template for parody. Like the J. Peterman catalog in the 1990s or “The Survivor Guide to…” a few years back, a Zagat-esque take on things ranging from friends to vacation spots is pervading the country’s humor pages.
The latest entry, a New Yorker piece by movie director Noah Baumbach titled “The Zagat History of My Last Relationship” (one restaurant is located near a girlfriend’s apartment, which helps “should you choose to ’lean on the buzzer for an hour’ until she calls ’the cops’ “), has drawn the ire of Jeremy Simon, who wrote a piece for Modern Humorist in September 2000 called “Zagat Surveys Existence.” Simon was “disappointed” because he didn’t think The New Yorker piece was “good” or “original” (although he admits “others” had similar “ideas” before him).
Susan Morrison, who edited The New Yorker piece, says oftentimes humor “genres” will suddenly explode. “Other popular ones include imagined e-mail correspondence between long-dead historical figures and parodies of the Times corrections column,” she says. “What makes one stand out isn’t necessarily the format, it’s the execution and intelligence.” (Baumbach, who wrote and directed “Kicking and Screaming,” couldn’t be reached for “comment.”)
So what’s the lesson here? As Modern Humorist’s Michael Colton says, “This just proves that things in quotation marks are funny.”
