Andrei Codrescu

“For years now I have published my poems in funny magazines / So that nobody would notice / How sad they were,”
Andrei Codrescu wrote in his 1980 “Paper on Humor.” Despite his acutely ironic sense of humor and his archetypal Jewish wit, Codrescu nonetheless seems an odd proposition for the Minnesota Public Radio’s American Humorists Series. More than a humorist, Codrescu is one of our nation’s leading proponents of critical thought. From the time the then 20-year old Codrescu arrived in the United States in the 1960s, the Romanian-born writer and thinker has been exploring and examining American culture in myriad forms—poetry, essays, novels, screenplays, and even a National Public Radio column, all of which display his trademark sardonic wit, thirst for the unusual, and playful defiance of all categorization. 651-290-1221; www.fitzgeraldtheater.publicradio.org