Arie Kaplan

Here are some things you might not know about me:

• When I was a very young child, I thought The Count (from Sesame Street) was Jewish because he talked like my maternal grandmother.
• When my daughter Aviya was a baby, I used to hold her horizontally and pretend she was a tommy gun and that I was using her to obliterate mobsters in the 1920s. See, her legs were the butt of the gun, and her arms were the trigger, and um…Please don’t call Child Protective Services.
• One time, I formed a boy band with some of my fellow MAD Magazine writers. (Well, more of a “man band,” because we were all adults…technically.) We assigned roles to everyone, because the people in boy bands always have roles, e.g. the leader, the romantic one, the cute one, etc. My role? The sexy weirdo.
• According to my wife Nadine, the other day I talked in my sleep. I got up (still asleep), stood by the foot of the bed, and yelled, “There should be more comedy concerts!” And I’d just like to say: Sorry, sleepwalking-and-sleeptalking Arie, there’s still a pandemic going on. So there are limits on live indoor entertainment for now!
• Speaking of the pandemic, one of the things I’ve missed about the pandemic is attending comic book conventions in person. One thing I don’t miss? Being asked by random strangers whether I was cosplaying as Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters, which honestly has happened too many times for me to count. For the record: No, not cosplaying as anyone. This is just what I look like.

Now, I didn’t talk about any of those things when Rebecca Kaplan (no relation) interviewed me for Geek Girl Authority. But here are some of the things I DID talk about in that interview:

• The “Beatles” story I wrote for the One Anthology to Rule Them All omnibus, published by The Daily Drunk
• The Red Titan graphic novels I wrote for Simon & Schuster
• “Charlie and Little Bo Peep,” the episode of Charlie’s Colorforms City I wrote for Netflix
• Swamped by Croc, the Batman children’s book I wrote for Penguin Random House

Yup, I discuss all four of those writing projects in that interview, which you can read HERE.

Also, just in time for Presidents’ Day, I wrote a humor piece called “Other Catchphrases John Wilkes Booth Considered Before ‘Sic Semper Tyrannis!’” It was published on Weekly Humorist. Check it out!