NAVIGATING LIFE THROUGH HUMOR

Quick! Hide Your Nuts!

When The Humor is Ready, The Mentor Will Come

I joined Medium in 2019 but I wasn’t particularly prolific. From October 2019 to June 2020, I wrote three stories. They sucked. During that time, I mostly wrote on my bed in partly used notebooks I’d accumulated at the Goodwill. I wasn’t online so much as under the covers scribbling.

I’d still be writing in donated notebooks today, but I quit the Goodwill and I refuse to buy new paper. My motto is if you throw it out, I’ll buy it. Nobody pays for your random thoughts unless you’re famous, a scandalous politician, or Anne Lamott. Paper kills trees and trees house squirrels and writers are nuts. See what I mean?

Like any hero at a fork in the road, I faced two divergent paths. The road to the mental hospital or the road to Medium. I drove up to the mental hospital but they said I didn’t pass the litmus test which was if you think you’re crazy, you’re not crazy.

I think that’s a dumb test. Do they say that to people who think they’re stupid? If you think you’re stupid, you’re not stupid. That can’t be right. Since the cuckoo’s nest wouldn’t have me, I started working on my 4th Medium story in two years.

I wrote it and I waited. Godot had nothing on me. I submitted nowhere. Like many of you, I assumed as soon as my hands touched the magical keyboard, the Medium world would be alerted to my presence and the applause would follow. And that’s exactly what happened. Two years later.

While I waited to be discovered, I found The Bad Influence. When I first attempted to be funny on paper, Reuben Salsa from The Bad Influence read one of my pieces and said it was a little mean. He was 100% on point and very gentle with me.

I could be embarrassed that I ever sent out a piece like that, but everyone does — at first. You gotta be bad before you be good. My old music teacher used to say You gotta sing ugly to sing pretty.

Look at singers when they’re belting out their songs. They’re not pulling a Kardashian, frozen jawed, trying not to move any facial muscles. Their mouth is wide open. They could eat a small dog. Some could eat a bread box. Their mouth is like a cervix opening to let out a baby. Some people pass out when they see a baby being born. You’d probably pass out if you saw a baby falling out of a singer’s mouth too.

When I was first submitting to humor pubs, I was still in the first trimester of learning to be funny on paper— the anger phase of my humor writing. You could still see my comedic umbilical cord and it was sticky and crusty. Nobody wanted to kiss it. Not even me.

A lot of people write because they’re pissed off, feel misunderstood, and because someone told them they were funny. Before we learn to cultivate our humor, we look like we need therapy. The kind where you walk around on a lawn for six months. Don’t judge. That sounds great.

Now that I’ve been doing this for a minute and I’m also editing, I totally get it. I often find myself commenting on pieces, “You’re still mad. Find the funny.”

A lot of the work is trying to figure out what exactly you’re poking fun at. What’s the joke you’re trying to tell? Yes, Marjorie Taylor Greene is infuriating, but why?

Can you sift through your anger and figure out how she’s like other humans? What is universally flawed in humanity that makes a Marjorie Taylor Greene exist? Sugar goes down better than ghost peppers. And why three names?

You know the saying that is both attributed to Buddha Siddhartha Guatama Shakyamuni and the Theosophists, that says, When the student is ready, the teacher will appear? That totally happened to me.

I found MuddyUm. Susan Brearley’s edits made me feel like I should be sending her money. She dove in. She questioned who and what I was poking fun at. Most of everything I have told you so far, she told me first.

She found the places in my writing where I could go bigger, funnier, and twistier. She told me what books to read. I saw a silhouette of Jesus in my toast that resembled her. I’m just saying.

A couple dozen stories later, someone from MuddyUm contacted me and asked me if I wanted to be an editor. They said we like your work. We’d love for you to join us.

When I accepted their decent proposal, they cheered. We, writers, know how often we get cheered for. We’re not football players or rockstars. We’re squirrels in tree holes, hiding our nuts.

Like many of you, in real life, I can make people laugh. I can even occasionally get a repressed chuckle from someone who hates me, but writing humor is a totally different rodeo.

Read any humor book, talk to any joke writer, humor writer, or comedian — talking funny is not the same as writing funny.

People used to tell me I should write humor, but I knew what made them laugh in person looked like crap on the page. Humor talking and humor writing don’t even use the same neuropathways.

It’s even more than that. Humor writing and humor talking aren’t only different parts of the brain. They’re different brains altogether. You didn’t know you had two brains? Well, I’m glad someone told you. People have probably been too embarrassed to catch you up on science for decades.

Had I not had humor mentors, I could have become one of those toxic humor writers who collect other toxic readers, stomping my feet, attacking everything, joke-anemic.

I could have become a liberal Marjorie Taylor Greene cramming my head through door slats, thinking I was hilarious and important. My sister got her head stuck in an elevator door once. I’m not cramming my head in anywhere, but I am metaphorically capable.

I’ve written a lot of good stuff and I've written a lot of crap. Like most of us, I have a discarded novel that was pretty excellent but my self-loathing didn’t have the ovaries to see it through. My book even got me a full scholarship to grad school, but it's dead in the water now — I wasn’t ready for it. It’s amazing how damaging not knowing who you are is.

I love writing. It’s always been a habit for me, but until I found humor, I couldn’t sustain it. Writing was like therapy but the kind where nothing ever got resolved. It was like a place I went to vent but reveled in my trauma. It was like hanging out in hell with myself. I liked the heat, but it was no disco.

Then, I tried my hand at funny. I can still see hell from this view, but if I look closely enough, I can usually find a joke somewhere between the 1st and seventh level.

Like right now I'm thinking, what if the levels of hell had elevators? Is the penthouse the lowest level or the highest? Thinking about that cools my coals. It’s not funny yet, but it’s infinitely less depressing.

Thanks to Toni Crow and Susan Brearley — Would you rather be laughing? Follow MuddyUm and Amy Sea