Jack Duggan’s Reviews > Penguin Romantic Comedy. > Status Update

Still struggling with it feeing quite tell-not-show, but to its credit it reads very smoothly (also it’s still mostly not funny, but again that sort of fits the context)

“Some stuff that reads in the page as only mildly funny is automatically ten times when it’s acted out”

Yeah, I bet Sittenfeld was telling herself that as she wrote this too. It’s really interesting to see someone giving such reference to SNL and somehow managing to be even less funny, but it’s earnest and the heart is there.

For a little bit I had been thinking “there is so much unnecessary detail about not-SNL, I’m surprised this is written by someone who doesn’t seem to have ever written for SNL” until they went into detail on a sketch and I realised that even compared to SNL this was not funny

Seems funny so far, although the main character being a ‘not like other girls’ writer for not-SNL feels telling