The highly anticipated debut book from the acclaimed comedy-writing duo releases on November 14 from HarperCollins.
From the brilliant and comedically gifted minds of Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold comes Naked in the Rideshare, an ingenious book of comedic short stories. Complete with a variety of anecdotes set in different phases of life, the book wittily sheds a light on the many contradictions people face while growing up in a manner that is both nuanced and hilarious.
“One real theme that we wanted to tackle in the book is the idea of what it feels like to be in your twenties right now,” Shaw explained to The Knockturnal. “To feel like, somehow I am the singular only person who has not gotten the rulebook about this. I am sitting in the back of a car butt-naked while everyone around me is in business attire, trying to figure out what the rules are while flying by the seat of your pants — or lack of pants, as it may be.”
The resulting Naked in the Rideshare is one laugh after another, with the book exploring different genres, styles, and worlds in an artful and captivating way.
“Ben and I grew up ingesting a lot of comedy,” Shaw shares. “A lot of our early experiences with comedy were short humor essays, so when we were lucky enough to be able to join that world ourselves, it was something that we really wanted to be able to contribute to.”
Their masterclass of a contribution, Naked in the Rideshare, came to life by way of pitching ideas back and forth.
“Some of the ideas were natural and spontaneous, but also, we’re not above forcing our way into an idea, which I think is one of the most fun ways of going about it,” Kronengold explained. “Once we had enough chapters, we got to be like: what is missing here? What gaps can we fill? I remember for one of the chapters, we were like: why don’t we do something in the horror space? How would we tell a story in the horror genre?”
The result, a deliciously crafted spin on the classic horror trope of a chase between two characters, one good and one evil, that ends in the evil character murdering the good character. Except in this story, the good character, a young girl, kills her murderer in the last second, so both her and her murderer end up in Hell.
“It’s a wacky, odd couple friendship story where they’re forced to spend the rest of eternity together,” Shaw says. “And to Ben’s point, we love working with constraints because sometimes giving yourself guardrails ends up being all that more gratifying when you find something within that space that really makes you belly laugh.”
“We love playing in genre,” Kronengold continues. “Once we started looking at the book as a compilation of genres, it became almost like this fun weekly game of deep dives into different canons.”
“And how do we tell stories that feel really small, even if the theme or even the worlds that we’re building in are really big,” Shaw continues. “We have a chapter that’s all about the moments after Julius Caesar gets stabbed. He’s devastated and he’s hurt, but mainly he’s just relieved that his friends weren’t hanging out without him, that there was a reason for it.”
In addition to allowing Shaw and Kronengold the opportunity to flex their comedic muscles in a variety of different genres, writing Naked in the Rideshare also outfitted the duo with an opportunity to sit with their ideas and characters for a long period of time, a stark contrast to the incredibly fast-paced environment of The Tonight Show, where writing was done at a much quicker rate.
“We started thrown into the deep end on a late night show, where your editing process is ‘get this done now,’” Kronengold shares. “So the biggest adjustment with the book was that we had time.”
“Absolutely,” Shaw agrees. “I think it gave us permission to really spend some time thinking about character, which is something that you don’t have to do as much in a sketch. For the first time, we were able to sit down and say: would we want to live with this character for longer? Is there something here? Is there a kernel of an idea that we might even want to keep thinking about in terms of a TV show or a movie? That was really exciting.”
Now that the book is out in the world, the duo is beyond excited for readers to enter the world of Naked in the Rideshare and identify with the stories and characters previously only known to their minds.
“It took about a year and a half to write in total,” Shaw says. “It’s just been so fun. It’s so weird now to see the stories out in the world because we’ve been living with them for so long, and it’s why it means so much when people really engage with it and when people say ‘that reminds me so much of that feeling I’ve had before.’”
“It’s always fun to see who sees themselves in which chapter, because hopefully there’s a little bit of something for everyone,” Kronengold continues. “I think we want people to have at least one chapter where they feel completely called out and loved and made fun of all at once. I think if everyone has one chapter that accomplishes that, we met our goal.”
Naked in the Rideshare is out everywhere on November 14.
