Last summer, I was one of many wide-eyed emerging writers who attended a craft seminar during The New School’s Summer Writers Colony where Elissa Bassist, the editor of the Funny Women column on TheRumpus.net, discussed what it means to write humor in New York. While I myself am not a humor writer, I still found Elissa’s panel to be informative, encouraging, and FUNNY. She was able to answer a bunch of questions that I didn’t know I had, and gave some practical advice about both the writing and submitting process that made my insecurities feel a little more normal.
On top of being a superb editor and giver of craft seminars, Elissa is also an accomplished writer of essays and humor herself. Her work has appeared in several online and print publications, including, but not limited to: The New York Times, Marie Claire, Creative Nonfiction, NewYorker.com, NYMag.com, TheParisReview.org, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Her latest essay can be found in the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, edited by Roxane Gay.
Elissa can teach you to be funny, too! She has humor writing workshops coming up at Catapult in NYC, the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, and here at The New School.
12TH STREET: Why humor?
ELISSA BASSIST: In grad school, I wrote a lot of creative personal tragedy, but as an editor of a humor column at the same time, it dawned on me that people listen to a joke when they may ignore a sob story or a think piece or a rant. Now that I teach humor writing, I tell my students: “If you can’t say something straight (because it seems too dark, too preachy, or too personal), then say it slant.” Humor can get your same point across in a more accessible, entertaining way. Also, many great writers have said it: You get no points for living; bring art to experience and dick jokes to art.
STREET: I’m only acquainted with your written comedy work, have you ever done anything performative? Stand up? Sketch?
BASSIST: During my MFA program in 2010 to 2012, I took improv and sketch classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater and realized its lessons could be applied to writing (I compiled a list for The Rumpus).
(Side ramble: Besides solid writing tips, improv philosophy is a good life and artistic philosophy. It’s about staying open, about seeing others as collaborators and not competitors, about taking suggestions, about accepting utter failure and letting go, about telling someone you’re in love with them. Stuff “about improv” is easily replaced by “about writing” or “about being a fucking human being.”)
Before I moved to New York, I produced and co-hosted the international competitive reading series Literary Death Match in San Francisco, which gave me the opportunity to make out onstage with sex-positive feminist Susie Bright, Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket), and Olympic gold-medalist Brian Boitano. I have photographs if you’re interested.
It should come as no surprise, a writer’s love of performance. Joan Didion famously admitted she didn’t want to be a writer: “I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance. The only difference being that a writer can do it alone.” Often, I feel more at home on a raised platform than any place else. Sometimes it’s in public, in front of strangers, when the “true self” (whatever that is) emerges.
Stand up I will never do. Only the bravest among us attempt it.
STREET: So, how do you know if you’re being funny?
BASSIST: Humor writing is emotional writing. We’re trying to provoke a reaction (laughter or outrage or orgasm—may I make that joke in this interview?). Performance helps writers in this way—reading your work aloud helps you figure out what works, what needs work, what trips you up, what’s wordy, what’s unfunny outside your head, what you should cut, etc. Pretend this final sentence is a joke that proves my point.
STREET: What should aspiring humor writers avoid? Any topics that you think are taboo in general?
BASSIST: I advise my students to weaponize comedy toward oppressors and never target victims of oppression. (There’s always someone who needs to hear this: racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, etc. are not funny; “ism”s are a cruel shortcut to unearned reaction.) Also, if you think it’s offensive, it is; so don’t.
STREET: I’ve been thinking a lot about identity lately, specifically with regards to my writing. The question of whether or not a story is mine to tell comes up relatively often. Do you think that the same question applies to comedy? Are there certain jokes that only certain people should make?
BASSIST: With humor, I advise staying away from satirizing traumatic life experiences that you yourself have not experienced, which I think applies to all writing. Though maybe I accidentally just tried to cancel novels…
The most common question I get from students is some variation of, “But am I allowed to [fill in the blank]?” Writers are constantly looking for reasons to not write, and I think it boils down to permission. Usually I can sense this type of question coming a mile away, and I cut it off with, “YES. I GIVE YOU PERMISSION.” Don’t get caught up in the postmortem before you’ve written. Then revise it, sleep on it, rethink it, over and over. Ask friends to read it before you submit it. Rely on editors. But good god, tell the story first, then decide if it’s yours, and if it isn’t, rework it until it is, until you’ve found or carved the part you wrote that belongs to you and no one else. Barring plagiarism, intellectual copyright, white heterosexual supremacy, and likely three other things I can’t think of at the moment, WRITE IT.
STREET: What should aspiring comedy writers be reading?
BASSIST: Veronica Geng (Love Trouble), Lorrie Moore (Self-Help, Anagrams, Like Life, Birds of America), Sylvia Plath (I’m not kidding). Subscribe to Poetry magazine (the best writers are poets, DO NOT @ME) and read Carol Ann Duffy and Melissa Broder (another two poets). Also, men are funny, too, so Simon Rich (everything, just everything) and Tim Kreider (We Learn Nothing).
Read whatever you want to write; if you want to write for Shouts & Murmurs, read the online column every day, twice a day. As for more humor sites, read The Belladonna, Weekly Humorist, Points in Case, Little Old Lady Comedy, Emrys Journal, Flexx Mag, Electric Literature, The Nib, and my column “Funny Women” on The Rumpus.
STREET: What advice would you give emerging writers?
BASSIST: BE YOU. Mind the gap between aspiration and ability (check out Ira Glass’s speech to beginners on this), and give up the goal of being “the next Tina Fey.” Tina Fey is taken. “Tina Fey” is a 48-year process. As artists with inferiority complexes about our superiority complexes, we want to be Good, so we want to be someone else, someone who is already Good. And so we suffer by comparing ourselves, by imitating others but not matching them, and in the process we lose ourselves and lose what sets us apart. Even if you don’t think you’re a Good writer—YOU’RE WRONG—or if you don’t like the way you write—YOU’RE A FOOL—you’re the best (and happiest) when you are you. Your “you-ness” is your superpower. Learn to love it and grow it rather than doubt it. This took me seven years to figure out.
STREET: What about for emerging female writers in particular?
BASSIST: Don’t network; make friends instead. Go to shows, be in the scene, join a writing group, take a class. Be a fan. Be generous. Go out of your way in small ways, like write to people whose work you love and tell them you love it (not in a creepy way). They’ll love you for it. (I’ve turned many writers into friends this way.) And work hard because game respect game.
I believe in the symbiotic relationship between writer and reader (or performer/audience), the undocumented exchange of energy: the more you give, the more you get. So applaud how you’d want to be applauded: get in the habit of applauding someone else’s success, and get in the habit of celebrating yourself, especially yourself.
Pro tip: the pathway to low self-esteem is believing that believing in yourself is someone else’s job.
Back to the permission issue: the writer Kathryn Chetkovich wrote the essay “Envy” about being Jonathan Franzen’s girlfriend; what she envies is not his fame or his “genius,” but the permission he gives himself to write. As she puts it, “What I envied were what his talent and success had bestowed on him, a sense of the rightness of what he was doing. I wanted what women always want: permission. But he’d had that before this book was even written; it was, after all, the first thing I’d envied about him. It was arguably what enabled him to write the book in the first place.” I want to make “give yo’self permission” a thing.
And another thing: A lot of writing is getting over the fact you’re writing. Every day I think I should be doing something “real,” like “law,” something that’s “not for me or about me,” and it takes me at least two hours every day to cut the shit and show up and sit down at my desk (I work from home). My self-heckling doesn’t always quiet down, but I’m getting better at sitting in a chair and doing the work, however bad I assure myself it is. This is a years’ long process and a daily mental battle to put your interests up there with your obligations and to reverse the positions of self-doubt and permission.
And while I’m still giving advice to women, stop criticizing women (and non-binary people and people of color). Stop right now. If you need to get it out of your system first, fine, but only with Betsy DeVos, et al.