Where Does Simon Rich Live? Inside the Quiet Los Angeles Life of Broadway's Funniest Short Story Writer

Where does Simon Rich live?

Simon Rich lives in Los Angeles, not New York. That catches a lot of people out, because almost every sentence he writes sounds like it was muttered on a crowded subway platform at rush hour. He shares a house in the hills with his wife, the writer Kathleen Hale, and their two daughters. Hale has written about their place being far enough up into the canyons that a phone signal is more of a rumour than a service. It is a quiet and slightly inconvenient perch, which seems to be exactly what a man who spends his days inventing talking animals, doomed office workers and overworked angels actually wants.

The geography is a running joke inside his own career. Rich was born and raised in Manhattan, went to school there, and spent his twenties writing for one of the most New York institutions there is. When the work pulled him west, he simply kept setting his stories in the city he had left, in much the same way a comedian keeps circling back to the state that raised him long after the moving van has gone. Readers who look him up after a night at the theatre often expect a brownstone address, and a New York Observer headline once cheerfully crowned him the youngest brownstone owner in the city. These days the commute runs the other way: he writes in California and flies east when a show needs him.

If you are trying to picture it, think less celebrity compound and more one man office. Stories about where well known people actually settle, from a rock drummer letting go of the San Francisco house he held for decades to a songwriter whose Los Angeles dates now feel like a second homecoming, are usually stories about work following opportunity. Rich's is the same story, just with a laptop instead of a drum kit.

Who is Simon Rich, and how old is he?

Simon Rich was born on 5 June 1984 in New York City, which makes him 42. He is a humorist, novelist, screenwriter and, since 2024, a Broadway writer. He grew up in Manhattan, attended the Town School and then the Dalton School, and went on to Harvard, where he became president of the Harvard Lampoon, the comedy magazine that has fed American television writers rooms for generations. At 23 he was hired by Saturday Night Live, one of the youngest writers the show has ever taken on, and he stayed from 2007 to 2011.

He is precisely the sort of name our team at fotobreak watches climb through the daily churn of trending searches: not a face people recognise in an airport, but a person whose jokes millions have laughed at without ever clocking whose name was on them.

What does Simon Rich actually do all day?

He writes very short stories, and then he finds bigger and stranger containers for them. The books came first and they keep coming: Ant Farm in 2007, Free Range Chickens in 2008, the novel Elliot Allagash in 2010, What in God's Name in 2012, The Last Girlfriend on Earth in 2013, Spoiled Brats in 2014, Hits and Misses in 2018, New Teeth in 2021 and Glory Days in 2024. Hits and Misses won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2019, and he made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list twice, in 2013 and 2014.

After Saturday Night Live he wrote at Pixar, then began turning his own books into television. Man Seeking Woman, which ran on FXX from 2015 to 2017, grew out of The Last Girlfriend on Earth. Miracle Workers, which ran from 2019 to 2023, came out of What in God's Name. He also wrote the screenplay for An American Pickle, the 2020 Seth Rogen film, from his own novella. That habit of adapting himself puts him in the same bracket as a showrunner who keeps rebuilding his own obsessions as streaming series or a creator running several seasons in production at once, except that Rich's raw material is usually two thousand words in a magazine. The page to screen pipeline has become its own genre of entertainment news, from a heavily watched trailer for a new adaptation of a famous thriller right down to a short story that becomes 85 minutes of Broadway.

Why is Simon Rich trending now?

Because he invented a format nobody else was using, and it worked twice. All In: Comedy About Love opened at the Hudson Theatre in December 2024. There was no plot and no set to speak of. Famous performers simply stood and read Rich's short stories aloud, and the cast rotated, so the line up changed every few weeks. John Mulaney, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jimmy Fallon, Aidy Bryant, Chloe Fineman, Nick Kroll, Richard Kind and Fred Armisen all took turns.

The follow up, All Out: Comedy About Ambition, ran at the Nederlander Theatre from 12 December 2025 to 8 March 2026, 95 performances of 85 minutes with no interval, directed by Alex Timbers and produced by Seaview with Lorne Michaels, with original music by the band Lawrence. The stories were about ego, envy, greed and, as the show's own billing put it, New Yorkers in general. Jon Stewart, Ray Romano, Cecily Strong, Jim Gaffigan, Nicholas Braun, Jake Shane and Jenny Slate all appeared, and eleven cast members made their Broadway debut in it.

That rotating cast is the engine of the attention. Every few weeks a new famous name joins, every new name brings its own audience, and each of those audiences eventually asks the same question: who wrote this? Searches for Rich spike on a schedule that a conventional play never generates, which is why a writer with no red carpet profile keeps pulling the sort of curiosity usually reserved for an established playwright. Comedy fans who arrive through one performer tend to fan out from there, the same way a search for one comedian's name leads to questions about another comic's life offstage.

Simon Rich's family: a household of writers

The surname is not a coincidence. His father is Frank Rich, the longtime New York Times theatre critic and columnist, which means Rich grew up with Broadway as a dinner table subject rather than a career fantasy. His mother, Gail Winston, worked in publishing. His older brother is the novelist and journalist Nathaniel Rich, and his stepmother is the New York Times writer Alex Witchel. Readers who go looking for the parents behind a young public name usually find an ordinary family story. Here they find four professional writers, which explains a lot and also makes the second generation interest feel inevitable, in the same way people search for the adult children of well known public figures.

His wife, Kathleen Hale, is a writer in her own right and not a footnote to his career. Born in Wisconsin and a Harvard graduate, she has written for magazines and newspapers, published two young adult mysteries and an essay collection, and wrote the Edgar nominated non fiction book Slenderman. Two working writers under one roof with two small daughters is a particular kind of household, and readers are drawn to couples who build a life around a shared trade much as they are to a long married television couple talking about how they make it work.

What does Simon Rich say about AI and writing?

He got there early and he did not flinch. Along with two childhood friends, Rich was given access to an OpenAI text model months before ChatGPT reached the public, and the three of them gathered its poems into a book. He then wrote publicly about how unsettling the experience was, arguing that machines would eventually out write him at pure invention. Coming from someone whose entire living depends on being funnier than the next person, it read less like hype and more like a man checking the weather. The debate has only grown louder since, whether the subject is what the newest video generators can produce from a single line of text, tools that can pull a voice out of a finished song, or the factories turning out the chips all of it runs on. His curiosity about weird machine made art sits comfortably beside the sort of gloriously strange handmade project that needs an explainer of its own.

Where to follow Simon Rich, and what happens next

The most reliable place to read him is The New Yorker, where his humour pieces have appeared for years, and those pieces are the seed stock for everything else: first the magazine, then the book, then the stage or the screen. All nine of his books remain in print and most have audio editions, which suits work built out of short, self contained pieces. On the money side, he is a working writer rather than a celebrity, and the public figures are about the shows, not the man: All In was reported to have recouped its Broadway investment, a rare outcome that explains why a sequel followed so quickly. Anyone hunting for a tidy fortune figure, in the way people look up the estimated net worth of a long careered performer, will not find a credible one, and that is fine.

What comes next is the open question. The obvious move is a third instalment of the live reading series, since the format now has a proven audience and a ready pool of willing performers, and a touring life would not be a stretch for a show that needs four stools and four stands, rather in the way a touring artist builds out a run of Los Angeles dates. Until then, Rich will be where he has been for years: up in the California hills, with poor phone reception, writing about New York.