Gene Weingarten

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Gene Weingarten

Gene Weingarten, born in New York on October 2, 1951, is a humor writer and journalist. His column, Below the Beltway, is published weekly in the Washington Post Magazine and syndicated nationally by The Washington Post Writers Group. Weingarten was a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University in 1987-1988.

"I majored in psychology, but only because it was the easiest major," is Weingarten's description of his undergraduate college career at New York University. "I spent all my time as editor of the daily newspaper, and then dropped out with three credits to go, nearly killing my mother." He dropped out to spend months with a Puerto Rican streetgang in New York; this resulted in a cover story for New York Magazine, which launched his career.

Weingarten served as the editor of the Miami Herald's Sunday magazine, Tropic, from 1985 to 1990. Perhaps his best-known professional accomplishment is hiring Dave Barry, thus giving one of America's best known humor columnists his big break. Tropic won two Pulitzer Prizes, including Barry's, during Weingarten's tenure.

Weingarten is widely believed to have created and edited the cultishly popular Style Invitational humor contest for the Washington Post until late 2003 under the pseudonym of the Czar, but he publicly denies this. He hosts, as of 2006, one of the most popular Washington Post online chats, called "Chatological Humor, aka Tuesdays with Moron". On Tuesday, November 28, Weingarten posted on his Post chat-page that he'd be taking a hiatus, until April 2007, from the weekly discussions to focus on other projects.

Common topics in his online chat include the art of comic strips, analysis of humor, politics, philosophy, medicine, gender differences, and human excretory functions. Many of his columns addressing gender differences have been written in a he-said she-said style in collaboration with humorist Gina Barreca, his co-author for I'm with Stupid. Weingarten writes that humor quality is objective, not subjective, and claims to be the final arbiter on the subject. A hypochondriac until a near-fatal infection with Hepatitis C, he is familiar with a wide range of medical conditions as a result of writing The Hypochondriac's Guide To Life. And Death.

Weingarten is a fan of the Washington Nationals and New York Yankees baseball teams. He is also an amateur expert on mechanical clocks. Since 2001 he has lived in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, DC. He has two children, Molly and Dan, and a wife of 26 years, who is a lawyer at the U.S. Department of Justice.