It’s the birthday of comedian and bestselling author Andy Borowitz (b. 1958), who has been called one of the funniest people in America and who wrote an article officially acknowledged as one of the funniest pieces ever published in the New Yorker, “Emily Dickinson, Jerk of Amherst” (Nov. 16, 1998).

Borowitz was born and raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and claims he’s led “an extremely tame, unmemorable life” other than one harrowing near-death experience in 2008 when he had surgery for a twisted colon and nearly died from the resulting infection. (Borowitz wrote about this in An Unexpected Twist, published in 2012 as a Kindle Single.) He attended public school in Shaker Heights, then went on to Harvard, where he was president of the Harvard Lampoon.

After graduating in 1980, Borowitz moved to Hollywood and wrote for television. In 1990 he created the hit sit-com The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which propelled Will Smith to fame. At the same time, he began writing political satire in the 90s and by 2001 was posting short daily satirical news items at his famed site, The Borowitz Report. He soon had millions of readers and one of the most popular Twitter accounts in the world, and The Borowitz Report was ultimately acquired by The New Yorker. In the 2000s, Borowitz also began doing stand-up comedy and TV appearances, appearing regularly on CNN’s American Morning, for example. He was invited to host the National Book Awards in 2009 and 2010.

In “Emily Dickinson, Jerk of Amherst,” Borowitz bravely reveals the real Emily Dickinson, the Dickinson he knew, the Dickinson who was a mean drunk and a “gluttonous, vituperative harpy who would cut you for your last Buffalo wing,” the Dickinson who scratched “Waldo sucks” into Ralph Waldo Emerson’s passenger door with her keys. Read the whole thing here.

In 2011, Borowitz edited the anthology The 50 Funniest American Writers, which became a bestseller on the very day it was released. In his intro, Borowitz explains the process he went through to select pieces for the book: “I showed the people at The Library of America my favorite humor pieces; they showed me theirs; and when we found fifty we agreed on, we stopped. To celebrate, we ordered Chinese food, using much the same process.”

Borowitz lives with his second wife, journalist Olivia Gentile, in New York City. He has three children who (I am just guessing here) probably don’t think their dad is funny at all and roll their eyes a lot.

Have a good Friday lightened by big heaping buttery handfuls of humor and stay scrupulously honest to the data.