Remember back in January, when I praised the current events-driven musical theater of Ben Greenman (left)? “Why he hasn’t been spirited away from his New Yorker editorial desk to write actual lyrics for actual musicals is beyond me,” I wrote, and though that hasn’t quite happened yet, at least I’m tapped into the media zeitgeist: After taking “Imus!: The Musical” for a test spin last week, Gawker ran “Shetty Woman,” a takeoff on that whole Richard Gere/Shilpa Shetty controversy out in India. It looks like Greenman’s being positioned to trade Wednesdays on the blog with Mike Albo‘s “Underminer” column. Managing editor Choire Sicha confided in email that one of the prime factors in the hire was that Greenman “makes us cackle and clap our hands together like barkingly psychotic seals,” which is pretty much the spirit in which I read his work, too (I was kinda hoping Sicha would say, “We saw your post and were so moved by the sheer rightness of the world it described that we took immediate steps to make it a reality,” but, really, the motivation’s not important, I suppose.)
For his part, Greenman gladly accepted the invitation to become a semi-regular contributor. “I said, sure, why not?” he emailed back when I congratulated him on the new gig, which coincides neatly with the publication of his latest short story collection, A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both. “Eventually, I think these newsicals will be the main way that people obtain information,” he added. “I don’t say that because I want it to be that way, but because it will be that way—people will get busier and busier, and they will only be able to remember things that rhyme.”