"Gene Weingarten is outrageously funny. I mean that literally: He is guaranteed to outrage some readers. But the smart ones will absolutely love him."
-- Dave Barry

Gene Weingarten is the humor writer for The Washington Post. His column, Below the Beltway, has appeared weekly in the Post's Sunday magazine since July 2000 and has been distributed nationwide on The Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service. He was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Read his winning story here.

For most of his career, Weingarten has been an editor -- first at The Miami Herald's Tropic Magazine, which won two Pulitzer Prizes during his tenure, and later at The Washington Post. He is frequently cited for having been the man who discovered Dave Barry, a distinction he is pretty sick of hearing about, if you want to know the truth. He is not jealous. He and Dave remain close friends, somehow navigating their way through the fog-shrouded, miasmic stench of unequal achievement.

Weingarten is also host of a highly popular Washington Post online chat; 60 percent of its audience comes from outside the Washington, DC, area. The chat fearlessly plumbs current events, politics, philosophy, medicine, the art of comic strips, the protocols of gender and the indelicacy of bodily functions. It does this with class and sophistication. Except when it doesn’t.

Although he is technically a college dropout, Weingarten prefers to think of himself as Harvard University alumnus, having completed a prestigious Nieman fellowship via the rigorous academic requirement of remaining alive for two semesters in 1987-88. He has written two humor books: “I’m With Stupid” (Simon & Schuster, 2004), in collaboration with feminist scholar Gina Barreca, and “The Hypochondriac’s Guide to Life. And Death” (Simon & Schuster, 1998) which argued that death is a hoot. It was not a best seller. Weingarten's newest book, "Old Dogs: Are the Best Dogs" (Simon & Schuster) will be released in October of 2008.

Below the Beltway examines life in all its absurdity. It good-naturedly traffics in ridicule, character assassination, and intelligent smart-aleckry. It stimulates that part of the brain that wants to laugh but isn’t sure it should.

It should. It’s OK. We’re professionals here.