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Pulled From Print My Required Reading

Comedian George Civeris Sets the Record Straight on ‘Laugh-Out-Loud’ Literature

The comedian goes in on off-menu calamari, the Gawker Slack book club, and why "laugh-out-loud funny" is a lie.

Karly Quadros

July 14, 2026

George civeris sitting down on stool — Photography by Samantha Brooks and courtesy of George Civeris.

George Civeris moved through many worlds before he landed on the stand-up circuit: academia, tech, and even a stint as the senior editor of Gawker’s relaunch (RIP). As a key figure in the 2020s Brooklyn alt-comedy scene, he’s turned mental gymnastics into a competitive sport. Look no further than StraightioLab, the podcast he co-hosts with Sam Taggart, where the pair and their guests take a topic they deem “straight culture” and dissect it at length. Previous episodes have tackled overhead lighting, monogamy, and cruises (not cruising).

If it all sounds a bit obtuse, think again. Like all the best writers and comedians, Civeris has a keen eye for specificity and human foibles. He’ll bring his stand-up to Guild Hall on Aug. 30 for his first show on the East End. Before then, CULTURED sat down with Civeris to talk about the book that made him, the Gawker Slack chat, and the most abused phrase in literary criticism.

This is your first show in the Hamptons. What’s your relationship to the place—was it aspirational growing up?

I’ve spent some time in East Hampton over the years. I wouldn’t say it comes naturally to me—I’m Hamptons-passing, if I wear the right clothes. But I’ve had some genuinely nice trips out there. I once spent a week there with Sam Taggart, and we found the things that feel normal to us and just went to those. I really like Bostwick’s. It’s the kind of restaurant you’d find in any beachside town, and the secret is the off-menu buffalo calamari. Lobster rolls, fish and chips. It’s fun to find the places that don’t feel Gagosian-adjacent.

A classic salty sea shack. So you’re not going to Larry’s bookstore?

I actually do love that bookstore. Sam and I were shopping there once and I think he ended up getting the Patricia Lockwood book Nobody Is Talking About This. I also happened to be in East Hampton during Barbenheimer, which was also my birthday, July 21. We went to the Regal to see Barbie, and it was very cute: well-dressed moms with their daughters, 7-year-olds in all pink. So yes, I’ve spent some time out there. But I’ve never done stand-up there. I’m terrified of what that’s going to look like. I just have to trust that the people who will enjoy it will find it.

Where do you find your next read?

I actually really enjoy reading book reviews as a form, and often I enjoy reading reviews of books I’ll never read more than ones of books I have read. It’s a great way to learn what an interesting nonfiction book has to say without committing to 700 pages on a topic you don’t necessarily care that much about. I’ll read Bookforum, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the Times Book Review. Sometimes a book sounds vaguely interesting but I don’t want to commit, and it’s genuinely a service to have someone summarize the main argument and tell you whether the author pulls it off.

But in terms of actual discovery, it’s mostly friend recommendations. My college friend Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard is probably one of the most well-read people I know, and we have very similar taste. She has a book coming out—a literary essay-memoir-cultural-criticism hybrid called Make Me Feel Something—about how technology is affecting each of our five senses. I also have a Slack with all my former Gawker colleagues that we made when we were all fired, and we have a books channel. I get a lot of recommendations from there.

What’s the best one you’ve gotten from the Slack?

I recently read Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett. It’s a memoir about her friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, who had a tragic backstory: one memoir, then ultimately died of a drug overdose. But the book was so not what I expected from Patchett.

One of my favorites from Jen was The Babysitter at Rest by Jen George, a book of short stories that are legitimately laugh-out-loud funny. It reminds me of Miranda July‘s short stories, if you’ve read No One Belongs Here More Than You, which was a huge touchstone when it came out. Slightly absurdist, weird, Millennial girl fiction. Just really good.

Do you ever have the opposite—someone gives you a recommendation and you wonder why on earth they thought you’d enjoy it?

Yes. Two answers, and both will make people angry. I genuinely could not get into Speedboat by Renata Adler, which so many people have recommended to me. I understand what it’s doing and I can imagine a world where I enjoy it, but I couldn’t. There’s something especially frustrating about a book that’s almost your thing but not quite—more frustrating than something completely outside your world. I’d almost rather read a dragon fantasy novel than something that’s almost what I want it to be.

And someone once recommended The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker. It’s an entire book set inside the head of a man on his work break, going up an escalator, contemplating his life. Exactly the kind of book I normally gravitate toward. I was reading it on a beach vacation and I was like, literally get this away from me.

You do need to be in the right headspace. Do you have favorite funny authors—people who are actually laugh-out-loud funny?

Can I say something on the record? One of my biggest pet peeves in book reviewing is the phrase “laugh-out-loud funny” applied to things that simply are not. It’s almost a flex, as if to say, I am so intelligent that I found this unfunny book hilarious. Don’t lie to me. There are books that are laugh-out-loud funny. Portnoy’s Complaint is laugh-out-loud funny—probably the funniest book I’ve ever read. It’s funny in the way a sitcom is funny, which is what that phrase actually means. Otherwise, say droll. Say humorous. Say cheeky or witty. I’m sorry to be recommending Philip Roth in 2026, but there it is.

I also love Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. Someone once told me it was the Ur-campus novel. It’s about a dissatisfied adjunct navigating various indignities at some university. Very readable, very funny. And it’s interesting to see how much has stayed the same: the ego-driven arguments among faculty and students, the comedies of manners around disagreements that are aesthetic, ethical, or touch on political correctness.

And Love Junkie by Robert Plunket, which had a moment a couple of years ago when it was reissued. It’s from the ’90s, very buzzy at the time—at some point Madonna optioned it. It’s about a suburban housewife who ends up embroiled in New York’s gay art world. Very funny fish-out-of-water story.

If someone wants to know who you are, what’s in the George canon?

Growing up, my mom was always very up-to-date on the new buzzy novels everyone was talking about (everything had a “Barnes & Noble Monthly Pick” sticker on it), and there are two from around middle school that had a big impact on me: White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. I’m still sort of obsessed with both Zadie Smith and Jhumpa Lahiri, both as writers and literary celebrities. I love that Jhumpa Lahiri moved to Rome and only writes in Italian. It’s so fab. And I was recently re-reading Zadie Smith’s essay “Generation Why?” about Mark Zuckerberg, which I first read when I briefly worked in tech. She clocked him day one. She’s always been one of my dream StraightioLab guests—she’s allegedly a big comedy fan.

In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm. It’s nonfiction, which I honestly rarely read at book length, and it’s about a series of mini psychodramas among Freudian psychoanalysts. Her genius is that she takes them completely seriously and lets them hang themselves with their own rope. All these people are simultaneously over-educated and completely delusional. They treat a marginal note Freud once wrote as seriously as a debate about health care. I love books about niche communities and their foibles, almost in the way Christopher Guest movies work.

The Remains of the Day, in terms of uncontroversial modern classics. It got me out of a really bad reading rut.

Gentrification of the Mind by Sarah Schulman. It’s a very slim book about gay politics and media during the ’80s and ’90s. Something I really like about her is that she’s unflinching in her moral commitments, which I often am not. I can be very flexible—reactive one day, righteous the next. It’s genuinely refreshing to read someone who is completely immovable. And it’s a great reminder that the debates happening now within queer politics—assimilation versus a more radical approach—are tales as old as time.

And the Outline trilogy by Rachel Cusk. No elaboration necessary.

Do you read a lot of the classics?

Honestly, no. I didn’t go to an English-speaking high school, and I studied STEM in college, so I missed so much of the canon for both reasons. I never read the high school classics, and I never read what you’d read as a humanities student. I’ve never read Toni Morrison—that’s a big project for me this year. I’ve never read The Great Gatsby. I just have these crazy blind spots that everyone else absorbed effortlessly because they were assigned.

Spending your childhood in Greece, did they at least have you go through the Greek classics?

Very much so. There were three separate classes, all some version of Greek: contemporary Greek, the equivalent of an English class where you’d read contemporary Greek literature; Ancient Greek, where you actually learned the language, reading passages and doing the arduous work of translating word by word; and then Ancient Greek in translation, where you’d read ancient works in modern Greek and study them as literature. Greece is very proud of its heritage, so there was a lot of traditional, quasi-conservative language education. I was doing all of that when everyone else was reading To Kill a Mockingbird.

How many books do you read in a year?

I know because I have a list on my phone. This is embarrassing. It’s May, and I’m seeing nine finished books, which is not what you want a well-read person giving an interview about reading to say. I’m having a very bad reading year. But I’m currently reading Mating by Norman Rush for the first time and I’m really liking it. I know, everyone rediscovers it every month, but still.