A Profile of the Residents of Apartment 7

Walking into my apartment, I am greeted by both of my roommates sitting in our living room. Jack is on our couch, the color of which has been hotly debated since we got it off the curb in front of our building eight months ago. Becca sits across from them at the small round table, in a chair Jack painted to look like the inside of an egg. In between them is our coffee table, which we all agreed is much too large for the space when we got it, complete with everyone’s favorite coffee table book, Lolita. Next to this arrangement is the bathroom door, on which there is a homemade sign that reads “days since tummy ache: 0” in permanent marker. 

“Would you say the F-slur in a birthday roast of me?” Jack asks. Mind you, I just got home.

“No.”

“Not even for their birthday!?” Becca exclaims, feigning disbelief. 

“What if you said the first half and I said the second half?” Jack offers.

“That’s the half I’m not allowed to say!”

Of the three of us, I am the only one for whom it is not socially acceptable to use this word. So, naturally, my dear roommates have developed a long-standing bit in which they try to get me to say it (and subsequently “cancel” me) as often as possible. Points of note here include the fact that they are, by far, the funniest people I know, and I, of course, never say the word.

Becca and I met over Instagram the January before our freshman year at NYU. She is from Massachusetts; I am from Pennsylvania. We bonded over our shared enjoyment of stand-up comedy; we even had the same favorite comedians, such as Daniel Sloss and James Acaster. While she was becoming friends with me over social media, Becca also happened to be forming a social media friendship with the only other person from my high school class attending NYU that fall, Jack. 

Jack and I weren’t friends in high school; we hardly knew one another and would speak maybe once a year. Although, if you ask Jack now, they’ll tell you I bullied them. Being the only two people with whom Becca had created lasting social-media friendships before moving into our freshman dorms, Jack and I were quickly recruited into a trio once we arrived at NYU. Since Jack and I never really interacted in high school, it felt like making an entirely new friend, with the added bonus of being able to reference people, places, and events from my hometown to someone who understood. Now, a year and a half later, the three of us are dealing with a mouse problem together. A modern-day platonic love story if I’ve ever heard one. 

A way to write about how funny I find my two best friends without being nauseatingly sentimental (by my standards, which includes even an ounce of sentiment—emotions are, of course, gross), unfortunately, does not exist. Thus, I must persevere through my aversion to outward displays of affection, something I would struggle to do for anyone else. I’ll practice now: I love them a lot. Or whatever. 

I value humor in friends more than almost anything (including sensibility regarding slurs, it seems). I am grateful every day to share a dingy fourth-floor walk-up with Jack and Becca, complete with the occasional package thief and a landlord who may or may not exist in physical form. When contemplating the funniest person I know, I couldn’t choose between the two. Becca told me I should write about Jack, and I imagine Jack would have said the same about her if I had mentioned it and/or they were a different, more considerate person. “No, Jack would’ve told you to write about them,” Becca joked while reading this. I am the perfect audience for their humor; if they were touring comedians, I’d be in the audience every night to watch them hold remarkably strong opinions about things that matter impossibly little, like whether or not a TikTok fashion influencer named Tinyjewishgirl is “rage-baiting” with her eccentric outfits. The funniest person I know is not a person, it is the entity that is the group dynamic between Becca, Jack, and myself. It becomes evident during activities such as playing Cards Against Humanity with some of our other friends: there are certain jokes that other people simply do not get in the same way. Things, of which we are intrinsically aware, that are significantly funnier to the three of us. Well, us and the fourth, honorary member of the group: Joe Biden, our nonbinary hamster. Why wouldn’t we have one of those?

One of Jack’s most remarkable skills is observing things. They have a unique ability to look at anyone and, with less than a moment’s notice, describe them in the most specific yet accurate way possible. When asked to describe Becca in this fashion (while forcing me to acknowledge that because they already know Becca, this does not display the full breadth of their abilities), Jack said that she is like “Curb Your Enthusiasm if Larry David listened to Chappell Roan and lowballed Bushwick residents on Depop.” They said this while crocheting a sweater (which they will likely later un-crochet to then re-crochet something else) and sitting on their bed. (“Bed” is generous. It is a mattress on the floor. They have lived in this room for nine months. Their plants are thriving, though). Jack continued, “Becca reads Bourdieu without issue but has to watch TikToks on 2x speed. I think what endears me to her is her complete inability to take herself seriously. She has a unique ability to laugh both at and with herself. She’s a D1 yapper and can talk circles around most people, which can lean a little Groundhog Day at times, but we love her regardless.” 

When prompted about the group dynamic among the three of us, Jack said, “I think what objectively works about our dynamic is the overlap in our senses of humor, which I think can basically be summarized as shared traumas, annoying cultural references, and brain rot.” They identified the fact that, when it comes to shared humor, “it’s usually two against one, creating an ‘in group’ and an ‘out group.’” Jack and I went to the same high school; Becca did not. Jack and Becca are both queer; I am not. Becca and I are both Jewish; Jack is not. We often say that the member of the “out group” is [insert group] “by osmosis.” (Jewish by osmosis, gay by osmosis, etc. “Graduate of Radnor High School’s Class of 2022 by osmosis” doesn’t have the same ring to it, though). 

Within the walls of our apartment, simply being around one another makes us each members of these groups, whether that membership be honorary or actual. The in-group “rubs off” on the out-group. “I don’t know if empathy is the best word for this, but maybe just a really strong sense of mutual understanding, which bleeds over into humor. We each have gained fluency in the humor of the groups we’re not in, and I think that adds to it,” Jack said. (We haven’t gained that much fluency—I still won’t say the slur even in Jack’s birthday roast). The three of us come from similar social, socioeconomic, and educational backgrounds, Jack pointed out, so the “individual minute differences in our lived experiences provides a lot of material.” “That being said,” they concluded, “humor is like sausage or siblings in that thinking about how it’s formed ruins the experience.” 

Every time I am in Becca’s room, I am amazed at her ability to cram the amount of items she owns, particularly clothing items, into such a small space. Becca Solomon is many things, but “minimalist” is not one of them. Her room is where I ventured next to ask her the same questions I asked Jack. As mentioned above, girl can yap. I had to pause recording several times so she could recap an argument she’d had with her partner. (She was right). The following is the result of my sifting through a multitude of asides about her philosophy minor, what she should wear the following day, and the quality of the fried rice at a local Thai restaurant to be left with—eureka!—the answers to the questions I’d asked.

Becca would describe Jack’s humor as being “highly referential.” “To understand the reference is to be a part of the inside joke . . . You have a connection to whatever they’re referencing, and the reference brings to light whatever that original connection was, which was usually a joke to begin with. So it gets layered and then it’s double funny,” she says. Becca highlighted Jack’s ability to balance self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating humor as well as their hyper-specific observations (“Sarah, you have widow energy. Or at least the energy of someone to whom something life-alteringly bad has happened”). She also mentioned their strong commitment to a bit over long periods of time (a personal favorite of mine that both Becca and I have stolen being “canceled once again by the woke mob!” after being told “no”). “You’d be remiss not to include something about their laugh,” she said at the end of the interview. “It’s so validating.” I agree. Sometimes, when I’m scrolling Twitter from my bed and know Jack to be right outside my door in the living room, I will send them a tweet and pause my scrolling until I hear their loud cackle, often followed by a semi-ironic “thank you, Sarah.” 

Becca, like myself, highly values humor in friendships, especially wit. This is one of the components that allow our group dynamic to work well. In analyzing the inner workings of our senses of humor, she said, “Jack and I share a love of ‘camp’ and pretty queer humor . . . And then me and you, I don’t really know how to explain it. There’s a reason we like the same comedians. The fact that we both enjoy dark humor but also have this understanding of societal oppression and the systems that make it so, makes it so [that] we have the same ‘lines.’ We know how to stick to those and make jokes within boundaries that we think are acceptable and that we understand will be interpreted correctly because we share such similar values and outlooks on society.” When attempting to identify the dynamic between myself and Jack, Becca simply said, “You and Jack have the same brain. Everything you two find funny makes sense for you.” 

Due to her outgoing nature, Becca talked over Instagram with lots of people before starting school at NYU, but Jack and myself were the only two online friendships that really “stuck”: “The reason I stayed chatting with both you and Jack is because we found each other funny . . . Humor really brings me together with my friends because half of the time that I reveal something about myself, it’s through a joke.” The very first time Becca and I met, she recounted to me a conversation she had had with her partner at the time, who was coming to terms with their gender identity. The story ends with her saying, flatly, “That’s pretty trans of you, Fletcher.” Becca continued, “Humor is, for all three of us, our best way of coping with anything that’s happened to us. If you’re with someone who shares a sense of humor with you, then you’re going to be able to share that part of yourself and be vulnerable through humor in a way they’ll understand.” 

To exemplify this point, she recalled attending a dance class in high school, the participants of whom had “very different personalities from [her],” and telling her fellow dancers that her sibling had recently attempted suicide. When they asked her if her sibling was okay, Becca replied, “Yeah, they’re not very good at it.” Jokingly, she defended, “They were just all shocked. That’s a funny joke! It was funny at the time; it’s funny now.” All three of us use humor as a way to be vulnerable with one another. We have an innate understanding among us about what jokes are “safe” to make while simultaneously knowing what will make the others laugh the hardest.

Referring to herself, Jack, and myself, Becca said, “I feel like we are able to laugh at it in a way that shares a sense of ‘yes, this is laughter, but it’s used to cope and not to push it aside and pretend it’s not happening.’ I feel like that brings the three of us together as real friends . . . We can share all the necessary aspects of friendship because we share a sense of humor.”

Naturally, interviewing Jack and Becca on the subject prompted me to also think about each of them, as well as our group dynamic. The two of them are incredibly opinionated, particularly about things that objectively do not matter. I still get war flashbacks from the fateful Bagel Discourse of 2023. Watching them speak so passionately about something that could so easily be let go is very entertaining, as long as you’re not the one being spoken to. Both Becca and Jack’s wits deserve spots in the hall of fame. They are each extremely esoteric. (A favorite Jack word, originally used in earnest but that has since become a joke. My personal favorite iteration is “Babe, you’re looking so esoteric tonight.”) I truly believe there is no one like them. 

Though possibly frowned upon by Big Academia, my primary reason for choosing NYU was that I wanted to make friends. I wrote my “Why NYU” application essay on this subject, saying that I hoped to find friends with similar interests to my own. Based on what I knew about the school, I thought I’d be compatible with the other students in a way that did not exist within my high school. This has proven to be unequivocally correct, ironically including someone from my high school. Between the three of us, there are running jokes that I will still be laughing about when I’m seventy. Through being part of this group, I have solidified a version of myself who I really like. I am eternally grateful that I can return home after a long day to two people around whom I feel so much like myself. And who never stop making me laugh.

“When we study abroad, I’m forcing you to order fagottini,” Jack told me the other night.

“Okay.”

“And if it so happens to be captured on video . . . ”

“No!”

They threw their hands up dramatically. “Canceled once again by the woke mob.”