A Piffany about Piffany

I'm tired. You're tired. We're all tired. But we cannot, must not fall asleep during this critical moment. How we choose to respond to blatant corruption and self-centered fear, whether we weather this storm by sticking together to preserve a just society, will define us forever.

That’s what I wrote on social media yesterday.

The truth is much more than that. Obviously. It always is that way with truth.

And so it is with me, as well.

Some of you may know me as the publisher, editor and writer of The Comic’s Comic.

I launched that site in November 2007 upon leaving my full-time job as an entertainment reporter for the New York Daily News. Before that, I worked full-time as a reporter on staff at the Boston Herald, The Arizona Republic, The Sun (Bremerton, Wash.), The Federal Way News, and The Times-News (Twin Falls, Idaho). I covered City Hall and county governments, city councils, zoning and planning commissions, and water and sewer district board meetings on weeknights, combed through police blotters, wrote weekly columns on community affairs on Washington’s Kitsap Peninsula and on nightlife in and around Phoenix/Tempe/Scottsdale, reviewed arena concerts on deadline, worked the rewrite desk on breaking news and wildfires, crafted headlines and edited stories to fit specific spaces on newspaper pages, appeared on TV and radio stations to promote my newspapers, and to predict American Idol winners, and eventually took over a comedy column from my predecessor in Boston, expanding it via blogs on the newspaper’s website.

For the past 12 years, most everything you’ve read from me has dealt with comedy. My original reporting on the funny business. My reviews of comedy specials. My interviews with comedians and those who work in the comedy industry. It has been a fun, wild ride, indeed. So fun that I still spend the majority of my public time in and among comedians — whether it’s curating the live comedy show listings for each Friday’s Weekend Arts section of The New York Times, reviewing comedy specials and writing comedy-related essays for Decider.com, recording podcasts with funny people sharing their experiences, strength and hope with others for The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First, and still updating The Comic’s Comic on a regular basis.

But that’s not the whole truth of my existence, my thoughts, my passions, nor my concerns.

I want to begin sharing those with you once more.

So here goes.

It couldn’t be called The Comic’s Comic’s Newsletter’s Newsletter. That’d just be silly.

I thought about reviving my old Blogger brand from the mid-2000s, Popular Thinking. But Substack already informed me on its home page that one of its big newsletters is called Popular Information. And that’s too close for comfort.

Nobody would understand the irony if I called this The New McCarthyism.

Seansplaining would have, could have been a great name if the term hadn’t already been applied mockingly to Sean Spicer.

I thought that if my friend Adam Conover could become successful by revealing that Adam Ruins Everything, then perhaps I could follow suit. But by offering solutions instead of merely putting a spotlight on our societal problem. Sean Solves Stuff? Close. But somehow missing something.

Then I had one of them thar piffanies.

You know, a spiritual breakthrough. Mind explosion. That moment when you suddenly realize something so essential about the way we live, and the way we could live. Perhaps you’ve encountered such a transcendence before. Perhaps you merely long to. I hope that by tapping into my own understanding and desires to better understand the world around us and just why or how things are the way they are, that I can experience more such moments and share them with you.

It’s about time we all experienced an epiphany.

— Sean L. McCarthy