Lesson 8 - Shipping Your Work
It’s time to ship. Plus, a bonus interview with a living legend of humor writing.
This is lesson 8 of 8 from Alex Baia’s Forever Workshop “Humor Writers, Get in Here!”
Welcome to the final lesson in Humor Writers, Get In Here!
Let’s close out strong and action-oriented but also with a bit of timeless inspiration. Think of the final lesson as your commencement speech. But it’s also a call-to-arms—to get your work out into the world!
Last time, in Lesson 7, we talked about five habits of well-published humorists. Those habits are the foundation of getting your funny work out there. Today, I want to add just one more habit of well-published humor writers. After that, I have an inspiring bonus treat for you.
Well-published humor writers ship their work!
To ship your humor writing means sending it off to publications, or self-publishing it somewhere like a blog, Medium, Substack, or the like.
The more timid or self-critical writers among us can falter when it comes to actually shipping finished work. To publish, you have to actually hit “publish” (or “send” if you are emailing a publication).
If you are in an early phase where you’re just practicing humor writing for practice’s sake, that’s fine. You don’t need to ship quite yet. Keep practicing.
But if you are ready to get readers, you have to finish pieces, then relentlessly get them into the world. To add a bit more nuance, let’s say that all of your finished drafts fall into three tiers relative to your current ability level:
Tier 1 - “This is a great draft. It is among my best work.”
Tier 2 - “This is a good piece. It is funny and hits the mark.”
Tier 3- “This one didn’t hit the mark. For whatever reason, the piece doesn’t work.”
Be relentless about getting your Tier 1 work published. If it gets rejected, send it somewhere else. If it gets rejected again, keep sending it to new places.
Be persistent even with your Tier 2 work. Send it to a few places, and if it still doesn’t find a home, self-publish it on Medium, Substack, your blog or whatever. There is little to no downside to self-publishing. If you end up self-publishing a mediocre piece, the worst thing that will probably happen is that almost no one reads it and it’s quickly forgotten. Okay, fine. In that case, it was practice! Audiences remember your hits, not your misses.
By the way, if your primary goal is to grow an audience through self-publishing, fantastic. In that case, ignore the advice about sending to publications. Go right to self-publishing, and be relentless about that. It takes a lot of self-publishing oomph to grow your own audience. So be sure to give it your all.
All told, I am not here to tell you how your work should be represented in the outside world. But I damn well think you should ship your work. Put your funny work out into the world where it can be read!
Now, I want to close with an inspiring interview I recently did with the one and only Jack Handey.
An Interview with Jack Handey, Humor Writer And Comedy Legend
Jack Handey is an American humorist and comedy legend. He’s famous for his writing at Saturday Night Live, where he created “Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey” as well as famous sketches such as “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer” and “Toonces the Driving Cat.”
Jack went on to write numerous humor books, including the Deep Thoughts series, What I’d Say to the Martians, and The Stench of Honolulu. He has been a frequent contributor to The New Yorker’s Shouts and Murmurs since the 1990s.
Jack just published My Funny Cowboy Dance, a new collection of hilarious short humor pieces from from The New Yorker, Outside, and elsewhere, plus nine TV sketches from Saturday Night Live, and 22 new Deep Thoughts.
This conversation with Jack Handey explores the humor in My Funny Cowboy Dance, plus some timeless tips for how humorists can sharpen their craft!
ALEX BAIA: My Funny Cowboy Dance opens with “Hydrogen Car,” a piece about exploding hydrogen cars. How did you decide to open with that one? Is this just you following the time-honored advice to “open with a bang?”
JACK HANDEY: A reader mentioned that he thought it was the funniest of my then-recent pieces. And who am I to argue with an anonymous reader? I do think it’s a strong piece though, and not from The New Yorker, which adds to the variety.
Do you have any personal favorite pieces in my My Funny Cowboy Dance?
Good question. I lean toward the darker, mean-spirited things. I think John Cleese said that to a comedy writer, a man slipping on a banana peel isn’t that funny. It has to be an old woman falling into a manhole. So I like “Execution Days” and “The Mysteries of Humor.” Also “Message to my Clone,” because it’s so cruel. I also like stupid, as in “The Symbols on My Flag.”
Do you have any tips on sentence-level joke writing for humor pieces? How can writers make their individual jokes shine in a humor piece?
Try your jokes out on someone whose opinion you trust. Also, don’t make a joke too “sweaty” — that is, too long and convoluted. A good joke has a certain non-logic. It’s often mathematical, as in “2 plus 2 = 5.”
Comedy has few if any “rules,” but one that people sometimes reference is, “the funny thing goes at the end.” You can see this pretty clearly in stand-up comedy. Is this a useful “rule” in humor writing?
Yes, in a joke, usually the key word comes at the end. But sometimes an average line can be hilarious if it comes in the midst of a totally ridiculous situation. Those are usually the best.
What are the most common ways you find humor premise ideas? Or, putting it another way: What are the circumstances in life where humor premise ideas pop into your head?
In my experience, a good idea will occasionally pop into your head, but that’s uncommon. Usually it takes lying on a couch or the floor and free-associating until you come up with an idea. You write it down, then come up with some more. Then you go back through them and see if any are funny. My friend, screenwriter Fred Wolf, used to say that if something was funny after three days, it was funny.
One thing that oddly seems to help generate ideas is heat. A warm bath or shower. Or pulling a blanket over yourself while you’re lying on the couch. Of course, if you’re crawling through a hot desert, looking for water, you’re probably not going to come up with a good joke.
If a humorist has a list of premise or piece ideas, how do you recommend they go about selecting one to draft?
Basically, if it seems funny. Also, if it seems to invite several jokes that fulfill the premise.
Do you have many premise ideas for humor pieces that go unused? Or premise ideas that get turned into first drafts, but you don’t like the draft enough to see it through?
I have folders full of bad ideas and weak drafts. They don’t get better over time. Sometimes you can trick yourself into believing an old idea is pretty good, but usually it’s not. I recently went through my Deep Thoughts, originally typed on 3x5 cards, and weeded out 2,000 weak ones. I burned them in my fireplace.
As a humorist, sometimes I’ll finish a draft and think, “hmmm, not my best work.” Or, maybe the piece will get rejected. How should humor writers proceed? When should we push on and try to publish it somewhere else versus just throwing the piece away and moving on?
If you’re a young writer, send it back out. You want to get published. But sometimes being proud of getting published can bite you. When I was young and had a humor piece come out in Oui magazine, I sent a copy to my parents. But it also had several photos of unabashedly naked young women. Yikes!
Do you have examples of pieces where you’ve had to make a big shift — like a shift in the premise or format — to make it work? I read in another interview that your New Yorker piece, “Guards’ Complaints About Spartacus” was originally about the Man in the Iron Mask. These kinds of shifts are interesting because they show that it’s fine to let an idea evolve.
Good question. Sometimes you’ll have an idea, but it doesn’t quite click. You let it simmer in your head. (Your brain likes to work on unfinished ideas, especially when you’re asleep.)
Many times the answer is to push it farther. When I came up with the idea for the sketch “Unfrozen Cave Man Lawyer” on SNL, at first the idea was that they find a frozen cave man, but they accidentally melt him. Or they find way too many frozen cave men. Finally I decided on one cave man, but it wasn’t enough. What if he’s a sleazy lawyer, playing on his caveman roots?
Do you have any tips for how humorists can steadily improve their craft over time?
The most important thing is to find your own voice. For me, it took writing many, many pieces that anyone could have written, before finding a certain attitude.
END OF INTERVIEW
And there you have it. I loved all of Jack’s advice, and it’s great to see him encourage you to find your comedic voice and get published.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this journey, especially the part where you wrote headlines and drafted humor pieces.
It’s been extremely fun for me to share my love of written humor.
By the way, I have a monthly humor newsletter, and I’d be thrilled if you’d join—if you haven’t already. (Also, I’ll send you my Handy Humor Writing Cheat Sheet when you sign up.)
I’ll see you in the comments section. And I look forward to reading your work out there in the wild.
Humor Reading
The Secret to Great Writing Is Taking Dozens of Showers a Day by Luke Burns
She’s an Old Soul by Sarah Hutto
You’re All Wrong, Die Hard Is A Hanukkah Movie by Keaton Patti
Coffee People Vs. Tea People by Emery Schindler
The Symbols on My Flag (And What They Mean) by Jack Handey
Reading questions: From everything we’ve read so far, what’s a premise or an individual joke you especially liked? Feel free to post it in the Substack comments. (It can also be a premise or joke from any other piece you like. It doesn’t have to be one we’ve linked to in the lessons!)
Writing Exercises
Character piece draft (for paid subscribers): In Lessons 6 and 7, you drafted a character voice-driven piece and sought feedback on it. If you’ve finished your draft and received feedback from a buddy, go ahead and write your second or third draft, based on the feedback. Get this draft across the finish line.
Draft and publishing accountability: You wrote one or two drafts in this class. In the Substack comments, post the headline of one of your drafts, and let us know how it went overall. Are you planning to send this draft to a humor publication, self-publish it somewhere, or just treat it as a practice rep? Commit to one of those options and let us know!
Last chance for questions: Do you have any final questions about humor writing? Now’s your chance. If you don’t have a question, you could also post one big takeaway, or something that surprised you about humor craft. Post away.
Alex Baia is a humor writer for The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and other publications. He is also an editor of the humor site Slackjaw.
Alex voices the character Lex, The Zen Philosopher of Life Hacking, on You But Better, the number one self-improvement parody podcast on the face of the planet.
Thanks for this workshop, Alex! Great mix of practical advice, illustrative example readings and realistic exercises. Loads of food for thought! I particularly appreciated the lesson on voice - so critical for making writing come across as humorous and yet so often left undiscussed!
I'm still working away on my first piece, "From the 6th Graders at Fillmore Middle School: Please cut our music program," which took an unexpected turn that I decided to follow. Feedback from the other participants has been really helpful and eye-opening for honing in on the funniest bits of my premise.
And on that note...
For all you other budding humor writers out there: I'm very interested in starting a small humor feedback group post-workshop. If any of you are interested, let me know below (or via DM)!
I sincerely apologize for being unable to complete the last two lessons. I took a lot away from this, so I greatly appreciate everything Alex has done. I will continue to work on my drafts and try to figure things out. I may be putting more on my plate presently. Thank you, Alex.