1998 / Web post / Early-web literary satire
Concise Interviews with Notable People, Vol. I
Famous people answered perfectly ordinary questions, which was the problem.
The original is off-site. HAHrchives preserves the story and a route back to it.
What happened
The piece presents absurdly brief imagined interviews with public figures, letting bland questions and slightly wrong answers do the comic work.
Where it came from
Dave Eggers founded McSweeney’s Internet Tendency in 1998. “Concise Interviews with Notable People, Vol. I” was published there on November 23, 1998, after its first four interviews appeared in Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern.
Why it mattered
It captures an early-web publishing model that treated a webpage as a place for a complete, odd little joke—and helped make internet-native literary satire feel like a durable genre.
How it spread
McSweeney’s gave readers a linkable home for a literary-comedy voice that could travel by email, bookmarks, and recommendation rather than through a traditional magazine rack.
Keep going
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