A Critic Whose Beat Is, on Occasion, a Laughing Matter

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Jason Zinoman, who has been the comedy columnist for The New York Times since 2011, stumbled into his role by accident.

“It was just dumb luck,” said Zinoman, then a freelance theater critic for The Times who had just published a book on his longtime passion, the modern horror film. “But in retrospect, it makes sense to me: There are a lot of theatrical elements to comedy. And there’s a really fine line between horror and comedy.”

Now, nearly 15 years after being approached with the offer to become a comedy critic for the paper, his beat has broadened: He joined The Times’s Culture desk full time in 2022 as a critic at large, covering movies, books, theater and of course, all things comedy. He has since written about naked stand-up comedy, Jewish artists wrestling with antisemitism and even the political power of former Vice President Kamala Harris’s laugh.

“When I can find a theme that can tie together all these different cultural threads, that’s really satisfying,” said Zinoman, who has also written books about the comedians Dave Chappelle and David Letterman, whom he grew up watching on NBC.

In a recent interview, Zinoman reflected on the evolution of comedy over the last decade. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

You are The Times’s comedy columnist, but you’ve also written about theater, film, politics and even sports. How would you describe your role as a critic at large?