Humor
I love writing humor and satire. Writing humor is a release. It’s a balm that helps me navigate a troubled world. It’s an opportunity to shout into a pillow and then share that rant with others who might be shouting into THEIR pillows. Writing humor is my sheet cake but more often, it’s in addition to my sheet cake.
One the first humor pieces I ever wrote is called The Man with the Yellow Hat Goes to Therapy. It’s very silly. My humor writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, The Belladonna, and The Establishment, among others.
I write quite a bit of political humor, and this piece – I Don’t Hate Women Candidates — I Just Hated Hillary and Coincidentally I’m Starting to Hate Elizabeth Warren – was the most read piece on McSweeney’s in 2019. Its popularity reflected a growing awareness and frustration over the way women political candidates are treated and the unfair double standard to which they’re subjected. This piece led to two sequels, which you can read here and here.
A few more political pieces I’m proud of include Gender Bias Riddles, which is one of many pieces written after the heartbreak of the 2016 election. HQWL, which takes on the Qanon lunacy, and The Trump Aristocrats and The Trump Aristocrats 2020, which only make sense if you know about the joke The Aristocrats.
I get a lot of messages and emails from readers who tell me that my humor – particularly the political pieces – helped them laugh at something that was otherwise upsetting and painful. When readers reach out like that, it makes me feel great. And even though one of my McSweeney’s pieces was the most read of 2019, it’s not my most widely read piece. The most widely read piece is this one, Abortion Is Immoral Except When It Comes To My Mistresses. It still goes viral sometimes, which just goes to show that hypocrites are THE WORST.
Since having kids, I also write a lot of parenting humor, like ‘Free Range vs. Helicopter Parenting: Get the Facts’, Five Ways to Help a Mother Whose Child is Having a Meltdown in Aisle 14 and 36 Ways You’re Messing Up Your Child.
I also like to make fun of marriage and relationships because… Well… It’s a sound strategy for getting through the day! I wrote Terms and Conditions for Telling Me About Your Day for The New York Times, which made a few irate men write to me about when they believed women should be allowed to speak. I wrote Household Inequality Causes Flying Fruit Epidemic for The Establishment, a great publication which sadly ceased publishing. What Heterosexual Men Think During Sex, written for McSweeney’s, was really just a hate letter to shaving. Letter to My Husband as He Tries to French Kiss Me appears in New York Magazine’s Vulture, though it originally appeared in Splitsider.
That’s just a sample – I’ve written many more humor pieces. Click on the Articles section link on my website for more.