Richard Ayoade reveals his favourite authors
Richard Ayoade is one of Britain’s most beloved comedic personalities. He made a name for himself in the early 2000s when he and his friend Matthew Holness created the characters Garth Marenghi and Dean Learner, which debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2000. Soon after, the pair landed a Channel 4 show, Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, which Ayoade helped to write and direct.
Over the 2000s, Ayoade appeared in even more successful Channel 4 comedies such as Nathan Barley, The Mighty Boosh, and most famously, The IT Crowd, where he played the awkward yet loveable geek Maurice Moss, winning him a BAFTA. During this time, the actor also directed multiple music videos for Arctic Monkeys, Kasabian, Vampire Weekend and The Last Shadow Puppets. By 2010, Ayoade had completed his first feature film, Submarine. The magnificent retro-inspired coming-of-age comedy has since gained a cult fanbase, beloved for its quirky characters and emotional depth.
Since then, Ayoade has been a firm fixture on television screens, presenting shows such as Travel Man, The Crystal Maze, and Gadget Man and regularly appearing on The Big Fat Quiz of the Year. His second film, The Double, was released in 2013 and further established Ayoade as a respected filmmaker. Intrinsic to Ayoade’s movies is literature; The Double is based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella of the same name, and Submarine is adapted from Joe Dunthorne’s 2008 book. Furthermore, Ayoade has published multiple books of his own, mainly cinema-themed, such as Ayoade on Ayoade: A Cinematic Odyssey, The Grip of Film, and most recently, the children’s novel The Book That No One Wanted to Read.
In a recent interview with The Times, Ayoade gave fans insight into his reading tastes, including his favourite authors. He shared: “George Saunders is the best short story writer since JD Salinger. I just read the Bech books by John Updike and am now reading the Rabbit tetralogy — the Everyman edition is satisfyingly huge; you get to feel very smug while carrying it around.” Ayoade expressed that his wife, actor Lydia Fox, constantly recommends him books, and recently, “she has put me on to Rowan Williams — I am reading his book on St Benedict — and I greatly enjoy his writing in general.”
Speaking of Salinger, his disaffected character Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, directly inspired the portrayal of Oliver Tate in Submarine. Ayoade cites himself as a big fan of the author; thus, when asked which books he wishes he’d written, he said: “The Catcher in the Rye or Franny and Zooey, though I would settle for any Salinger story. I don’t know anyone who has made speech come alive as well as he has. It’s natural, but compressed. Funny without ever feeling it’s pushing for laughs.”
Moreover, Ayoade stated: “I always like to have something funny to read — like PG Wodehouse, David Sedaris, Jack Handey or Jules Feiffer. I’m also reading various books on and by François Truffaut and other critics turned filmmakers of that [French New Wave] era, like Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, and Éric Rohmer.”
