Q: Are you Ellis Weiner’s agent/editor/literary executor/etc.?
A: No. I have no professional affiliation with Ellis Weiner apart from my management of the Ellis Weiner Website.

Q: Do you teach the works of Ellis Weiner in your college classes?
A: No. While Weiner’s works are reasonably amusing and diverting, it is in fact the case that they do not really merit academic consideration.

Q: Then just what is the nature of your relationship with Ellis Weiner?
A: I am a devotee of his work—which fact does not blind me to certain flaws in his various writings, and in his character. I therefore have taken it upon myself to create this website, as a forum in which to discuss both topics.

Q: Is it appropriate to discuss his character here? In public?
A: I would argue that it is. When a person assumes the role of “submissions editor” at, say, a humor magazine, and accepts the responsibility of nurturing young talent, and then conducts himself with an appalling degree of insensitivity and snobbishness; when he, knowingly or not, derails the career plans of an impressionable and earnest young fledgling writer, with the result of consigning said writer to a life—however full of accomplishment and satisfaction—in academia rather than in the more alluring, glamorous world of humor and satire to which the young writer had always aspired…When that person then presumes to publish books and articles, and thus to thrust himself into the public gaze, then I suggest that his character, no less than his works, are fit subjects for open discussion. Besides, this is the World Wide Web. Everything is appropriate.

Q: How do you pronounce “Weiner”?
A: With a long e.

Q: Where does Ellis Weiner get his ideas?
A: I haven’t the faintest idea. I sometimes wonder if he has any “ideas” worthy of the name at all.