ERIC D. SNIDER

Eric D. Snider is a freelance writer, critic, columnist, humorist, bon vivant, raconteur and man-about-town. He was raised in Southern California, lived in Utah for 10 years, and now resides in beautiful Portland, Ore. He is a prolific film critic, if not a discerning or reliable one, reviewing some 300 movies a year, and he regularly covers the Sundance, Portland, CineVegas and South By Southwest film festivals. His "Snide Remarks" humor column is published weekly at EricDSnider.com. In addition, Eric occasionally performs comedy songs he has written, and has recorded two alleged CDs of that alleged material.

Eric's material appears regularly in these publications:

NEWSPAPERS
City Weekly (Salt Lake City)

MAGAZINES
Glenn Beck's Fusion

ONLINE
Film.com
Cinematical
eFilmCritic
Hollywood B****slap
Online Film Critics Society (Eric is a member)
Rotten Tomatoes

... and has previously appeared in these publications:

NEWSPAPERS
Lake Elsinore (Calif.) Valley Sun-Tribune
The Lake Elsinore News
The Californian (Temecula, Calif.)
The Daily Universe (Brigham Young University)
The Daily Herald (Provo, Utah)
The Salt Lake Tribune
College Times (Utah Valley State College)
The Stranger (Seattle)
Willamette Week (Portland)

MAGAZINES
The New Era
Muscle & Fitness
This People

ONLINE
DVD Talk
DVD Journal

The Official Biography of Eric D. Snider, in Handy Color-Coded Timeline Form

PERSONAL
PERFORMING
COMEDY WRITING
OTHER WRITING

Aug. 26, 1974: Eric David Snider is born in Lake Elsinore, Calif., to Rocky and Laurie Snider. The prolific couple, seeing their error and wanting to get it right, would go on to have five additional children.

1983: Eric is first exposed to MAD Magazine. He loves it.

1984: Eric starts using his middle initial in all his schoolwork. He does not recall why, exactly, but it sure gave the other kids ammunition when they called him a nerd.

1985: Eric is first exposed to radio's Dr. Demento Show. He loves it.

1985-1986: The Sun-Tribune, a weekly paper serving the Lake Elsinore area, has a student from each of the local schools write a weekly column about newsworthy school events. Eric, a fifth-grader, is hired to represent Elsinore Elementary, even though all the other elementary school columnists are sixth-graders. He is paid 25 cents per column inch, or about $4 per article. The column is generally serious, though you could see Eric itching to sneak some humor in occasionally, too.

1986-ish: In an attempt to overcome his nerdiness and gain popularity among his peers (who at this point disliked him for being one of the "smart kids" and a teacher's pet), Eric discovers that he can sometimes write things that make the other kids laugh. He starts writing funny poems, songs and stories and passing them around, in addition to drawing caricatures of teachers and administrators.

May 3, 1987: A recording made by Eric in which he conducts a mock interview with Ronald Reagan about the Iran-Contra scandal is played on the Dr. Demento Show. (That week's theme was young recording artists, and at not quite 13, Eric qualified.) Over the next couple years, Eric would record many lame songs and skits and sell "albums" (actually cheaply reproduced cassettes) to friends and people at church. Dr. Demento would play a couple of them, too, and through letter-writing correspondence become a supporter and mentor to Eric.

1989: During his sophomore year in high school, Eric gets involved with The Tiger Times, his school paper. Since the paper has many writers but only one cartoonist, it is under the latter capacity that he first submits material. (The staff cartoonist was a better artist, but Eric was better at drawing comical versions of the teachers.) He is soon writing editorials that are more interested in being funny than in making a point, and covering legitimate news stories, too.

1990: Near the end of the school year, a candidate for student body president is caught stuffing the ballot box and the election has to be re-done. Eric is one of two reporters assigned to cover this huge scandal, and the excitement of it cements Eric's desire to be a journalist. He had wanted to be a writer since he was 5, but now he knew what KIND of writer.

May 1990: Eric performs in a school play, the first of several for him.

June 1990: The Lake Elsinore News, a new weekly paper seeking to dethrone The Sun-Tribune as the town's chief source of poorly written journalism, hires Eric as a humor columnist, even though Eric is only a snotty high school student. The column is called "On the Light Side," a title Eric instantly hates but is unable to improve upon. Eric writes for the paper until it goes out of business in November 1992.

May 1992: The Elsinore High School drama department produces "The Big Show," a night of comedy sketches written by Eric and several other students. It is the direct precursor to the Garrens Comedy Troupe.

Aug. 27, 1992: Eric arrives at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, in preparation for his freshman year.

Oct. 3, 1992: Having submitted some of his "On the Light Side" columns as samples to the various publications in the Provo area, he finds a buyer: The Daily Herald hires him as a weekly columnist. Still called "On the Light Side," the column runs each Saturday through the end of the school year (May 15, 1993).

Nov. 24, 1992: Eric holds auditions for the Garrens, a comedy troupe he and his new BYU pal Braden are starting. Only about 10 people show up, of whom seven are cast. That makes nine (with Eric and Braden). A 10th cast member is added a couple weeks later, but another one drops out. The nine-member cast starts rehearsing.

Jan. 22, 1993: The Garrens Comedy Troupe performs its first show of sketches and improvisations. Of the 15 sketches in that first show, five are from "The Big Show"; the rest are BYU-specific. Eric wrote and performs in nearly all of them. The Garrens would continue to perform weekly at BYU for eight years.

June 15, 1993: With the Lake Elsinore News and Daily Herald columns under his belt, Eric is hired to write for The Californian, a daily paper based in Temecula, near Lake Elsinore (where Eric is living for the summer). He writes 14 columns for The Californian, with the last one appearing on Oct. 5.

Oct. 13, 1993: Eric embarks on his two-year stint as a Mormon missionary in the Philadelphia area. It's more or less a 24-hour-a-day thing, but he does write the occasional funny song in his down time.

October 1995: Eric returns to Provo and BYU.

January 1996: Eric begins writing and performing with the Garrens again, his brainchild having been kept alive by other cast members in his absence.

October 1996: Eric begins writing for Provo's Daily Herald again -- not as a humor columnist (he asked; they said no), but writing reviews of local bands' CDs.

Jan. 14, 1997: Eric begins writing for The Daily Universe, BYU's student paper, as part of his journalism major. That's two papers he's writing for at the same time, if you're keeping track.

May 27, 1997: Eric publishes his first movie review, in The Daily Universe, co-written as a "he said/she said" thing with fellow staff writer Kimber Kay. It's of "The Lost World." He does a few more over the course of the summer.

Aug. 15, 1997: Eric starts doing theater reviews for the Daily Herald, and starts to phase out the CD reviews.

Sept. 19, 1997: Feeling burned out and overworked, Eric quits the Garrens Comedy Troupe.

Sept. 29, 1997: After writing a few one-off columns, Eric publishes the first official "Snide Remarks" column in The Daily Universe. Eric is editor of the lifestyle section by now, so he can allot himself the space every week.

January 1998: In order to keep BYU higher-ups off his back about "Snide Remarks" -- which has become ridiculously popular and which often satirizes BYU culture and politics -- Eric's supervisors at The Daily Universe institute a "review process" wherein the column is read by a couple faculty members and student co-editors before it is published, to prevent egregious offenses before they happen. The process is almost as awful as it sounds, though the extra input occasionally makes the column better.

January 1998: Eric appears in a few Garrens Comedy Troupe shows as a guest performer.

Feb. 9, 1998: A "Snide Remarks" column called "Clash of the Titanic," containing an abbreviated version of the script for "Titanic," is published. Within days, it is being e-mailed around the world as one of those "anonymous" funny things you forward to all your friends. (Look at it; it probably looks familiar.) Angry letters from heartsick 19-year-old BYU girls pour in. Eric becomes a poster child for the anti-"Titanic" movement, even though he actually sorta liked the movie.

July 16, 1998: The first "Snide Remarks" compilation is published. It is available only at the BYU Bookstore. The initial run of 500 copies sells in a month. The August run of another 1,000 copies is gone by December, necessitating yet another run. It is the BYU Bookstore's best-selling book for all of 1998, despite not going on sale until the second half of the year.

July 10, 1998: EricDSnider.com is registered. It goes online a few weeks later.

September 1998: Eric is hired by the Garrens to write and perform material in one show, including a song about -- of course -- "Titanic."

January 1999: For the second time, an entire "Snide Remarks" column is eliminated during the review process. Having had enough of that kind of nonsense, Eric stops writing "Snide Remarks" in protest. Three already-written columns and a hastily written farewell edition are published over the next four weeks.

March 25, 1999: "Snide Remarks II: Electric Boogaloo" is published. It sells well, though not as well as its predecessor. (Isn't that always the way with sequels?)

April 29, 1999: Having just graduated from BYU, Eric is immediately hired full-time by the Daily Herald, where he's been writing theater reviews all this time. His job is split: 20 hours a week as a features writer, and 20 hours as a copy editor. After a few months, it becomes 40 hours of features writing; he eventually is made Features Editor and then Senior Entertainment Writer.

May 19, 1999: Eric writes his first film review as a Daily Herald staff member (of "Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace"). Over the course of the summer, he does more and more reviews -- generally on his own time -- until by 2000 he is established as the paper's official film critic, while continuing to do theater reviews, too.

Aug. 20, 1999: Eric starts writing "Snide Remarks" for the Daily Herald. His editors know about the column's history at BYU, but they let him do it anyway. He is now doing what he would continue to do for the next several years: writing "Snide Remarks" and doing movie reviews.

August 1999: Eric is lured back to the Garrens full-time, this time as director and head writer. He remains with the group in that capacity until its demise in 2001.

February-ish 2000: Eric releases "Snide Remarks: The Album," a cheaply made CD containing several of his songs and sketches. The CD has very little to do with the newspaper column called "Snide Remarks," but Eric figures the name recognition would be worth something.

Jan. 3, 2001: Eric begins posting his reviews at HollywoodB****slap and eFilmCritic.com. The reviews continue to be published in the Daily Herald and at EricDSnider.com, too.

Jan. 19, 2001: The Garrens 8th Anniversary Spectacular is performed to huge sell-out crowds at BYU. Behind-the-scenes problems with the show lead directly to the end of the Garrens two months later. (Read the whole story about the Garrens' demise here.)

March 2, 2001: The Garrens perform what would be their final BYU show.

March 7, 2001: "Snide Remarks" starts appearing twice a week instead of just once. It continues at that pace until November 2002, when an editor slightly less thrilled with Eric than the previous one had been cuts it back to once a week.

March 7, 2001: The Garrens Comedy Troupe officially announces that it is disbanding.

March 24, 2001: The Garrens perform their last show of any kind, anywhere, at Provo Theatre Company.

Feb. 8-24, 2002: Eric writes a "Snide Remarks" column EVERY SINGLE DAY (except for the two Mondays) during the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake.

April 18, 2002: Salt Lake City Weekly calls "Snide Remarks" Utah's "Best Unread Humor Column" (because no one in SLC reads it), referring to the Olympics columns specifically as "brilliant."

July 28, 2003: Realizing he's written enough songs over the years to slap together a concert, Eric does just that. He performs at Provo's ComedySportz venue, just him and a piano. No one is injured. (Read the original press release here.)

Aug. 20, 2003: Eric is fired from the Daily Herald after writing a news story about a local theater canceling its production of Neil Simon's "Rumors." Eric's bosses believed he was the one who had gotten the show shut down (which would make his writing about it a serious breach of ethics, like starting a fire and then reporting on the "mysterious arsonist"). In fact, the people who ordered the show be canceled had already heard about the theater's infractions before Eric spoke to them; alas, Eric's bosses didn't believe him when he told them that. (Note that this occurs four years to the day after "Snide Remarks" began appearing in the Daily Herald.)

Oct. 13, 2003: Eric does his second concert, this time selling out the house by promising to tell the story of how he got fired. (Read the original press release here.

Nov. 14, 2003: "Will Make Jokes for Food," Eric's first real CD, recorded largely at the Oct. 13 show, is released.

March 8, 2004: "Snide Remarks" begins anew, now as a by-subscription-only feature on EricDSnider.com.

March 26, 2004: Eric performs a sold-out show in Portland. He considers moving there.

March 26, 2004: Simultaneous with his Portland show, a book of sheet music for some of Eric's songs, entitled simply "Songs," goes on sale.

June 4, 2004: Eric performs his show in his hometown of Lake Elsinore, Calif., in the cafetorium of his elementary school. It seems much smaller than it did when he went there.

June 26, 2004: Eric moves from Orem to Salt Lake City.

Aug. 12, 2004: Eric begins writing columns and theater reviews for City Weekly, for whom he had freelanced a couple pieces previously.

Sept. 22, 2004: "The Snide Remarks Collection: Vol. 1," a CD of Eric reading 15 of his columns, is released.

Oct. 22, 2004: Eric performs in Portland again, too soon after the last show and hence to a non-sold-out crowd. Still, good times.

June 1, 2005: Eric begins writing for radio personality Glenn Beck's Fusion magazine, a blend of humor and politics. Eric is probably the most liberal person on the staff even though he's not all that liberal.

June 18, 2005: Eric moves to Portland.

Nov. 23, 2005: Willamette Week, a weekly paper in Portland, starts running some of Eric's film reviews.

Feb. 1, 2006: Eric's second real CD, "Monkeys and Pirates Are Funny," is released. It contains material recorded at shows in Provo on Sept. 27, 2004, and Nov. 14, 2005.

Feb. 9, 2006: City Weekly, back in SLC, starts running some of Eric's film reviews, too.

Aug. 23, 2006: Eric announces that effectively immediately, "Snide Remarks" will be free, with no subscription necessary. To celebrate, he plans to take a week off, something he had not done since starting the subscription service 129 weeks earlier.

June 11, 2014: The world ends (tentative).