May 25, 2020 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Michael Shulman’s humorous Talk story "Ruins." It’s an account of a Zoom chat between Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, stars of the recently released The Trip to Greece. Here’s a sample:

Coogan winced at the slant rhyme. “If my daughter wasn’t here,” he said, “I would probably buy a very high-end precooked thing, like a fish pie, and then steam my own broccoli and pretend that I’ve made a meal.”

“When you say ‘steam your own broccoli,’ it reminds me of when we were at that beach resort in Greece,” Brydon said. “And that rather lugubrious-looking waiter came over and told us what he had, and at the end he said, ‘And I have two soft lobsters.’ ”

“No, he didn’t,” Coogan countered. “He said, ‘And I have two flat lobsters.’ And Rob said, ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’ ”

Brydon wagged a finger. “What I said was, ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ ”

“That’s right,” Coogan conceded. “It was said with sympathy. Very pure malapropistic comedy. ‘Malapropistic’? That’s got to be a word. It’s timeless comedy, because it ultimately doesn’t mean anything, and therefore it’s sort of liberating.”

For some reason, Brydon picking up on that “steam my own broccoli” cracks me up. Brydon has a way of pouncing on Coogan’s seemingly innocuous comments and wringing humor out of them. It happens in Shulman’s first Coogan-Brydon Talk story “Buddies” (The New Yorker, May 30, 2011), too, when Coogan looks in his soup and asks “Where’s the monkfish?” Here’s the moment:

Entrées had arrived; Brydon had steak frites, and Coogan had a monkfish-and-clam bouillabaisse. “Where’s the monkfish?” he said, sifting through the broth. “Oh, it’s here. It was hiding.”

“That’s another book: ‘Looking for Monkfish,’ ” Brydon said.

“Quit while you’re ahead, Rob.”

“Steam my own broccoli,” “Where’s the monkfish?” – Coogan and Brydon find humour in the most prosaic material. Shulman catches it beautifully in these two superb Talk stories.

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (Illustration by João Fazenda, from Michael Shulman's "Ruins")