Deez Interviews: Meet the satirist who reveals her process for “staying funny" and the biggest mistakes she sees first-time humor writers make

Happy Friday, Deezers! This week’s interview is with Caitlin Kunkel, a verrrrry important name to know if you’re in (or interested in) the satire/humor space. You’ve seen her work all over McSweeney’s and The Belladonna, so what we love most about this Q&A is all the amazing details she reveals about pressure-testing your ideas and making an active plan to “input” new inspiration/material into her creative flow.

There’s sooo much good stuff here for anyone in a seasonally-induced rut. Enjoy!

//

The interviewee: Caitlin Kunkel (follow her @KunkelTron!)

The gig(s): Comedy writer & satirist / co-founder of The Belladonna and the Satire And Humor Festival / Writing workshop instructor at Second City & Catapult 

How did you first get into writing humor and satire? Did you start out as a writer and then find your way into that space, or were writing and humor always a package deal?

I took a very circuitous route! I started off writing fiction in college, then taught English in Indonesia for a year, then went to graduate school and got an MFA in Writing for the Screen and Stage, and only AFTER finishing that program did I become very enamored of satire and humor writing at The Second City in Chicago.

I used a production grant from the end of school to take the entire one-year program of sketch writing at Second City, which culminates in producing a show that runs for a month at the theater. That experience got me very into producing, and I produced a bunch more sketch revues in the years that followed. I also started teaching at Second City, drawing on my experience abroad and in graduate school, and I ended up writing a slew of classes for them. The biggest ones were in the Online Satire Writing track – as I got into writing for the internet more and became pretty good at it, I realized it was really an ideal kind of writing to teach online since that is how it would eventually be read anyway.

I developed my writing and teaching skills on parallel tracks and eventually specialized from general comedy to satire, even teaching college courses on it for years. I love studying older historical works, reading modern satirists and humorists like the great Alexandra Petri at The Washington Post (this piece by her is masterful and also extremely sad) and the truly hilarious R. Eric Thomas at Elle (start here if you aren’t familiar with his work), and now I have lots and lots of my former students who are publishing regularly and becoming well-known in their own rights.

So it was probably eight years after I first started studying writing that I specialized in satire, but that made all the difference for my career – I co-founded The Belladonna (comedy and satire by women writers of all definitions) and co-wrote a satirical gift book in 2018, “New Erotica for Feminists: Satirical Fantasies of Love, Lust, and Equal Pay.” In 2019 I co-founded the Satire and Humor Festival to help support and expand the burgeoning interest and writers in the field and give them a playground to meet each other and collaborate (those production skills coming in handy again!).

Tl;dr: I think I benefitted from learning writing across different forms, and then once I was actually a good writer, specializing in one.

Based on your teaching experience, what’s the biggest misconception you've seen newbies/first-time humor writers have?

When people are first starting out, they focus a lot on just getting a piece done when they really need to spend that time more on the formation of the idea itself. No amount of rewriting can save a piece that was flawed from the initial conception!

When I teach, I always have students run through a brainstorming process that involves multiple layers of getting more specific about an overall topic, forming a strong point of view on it that will guide their writing and has a clear critique of a person or institution, and then I have then come up with at least ten titles and formats that the piece could take. This forces them to examine how it will be laid out and if an idea is flawed, they just won’t be able to get to ten directions it could take. But if they can, then they choose the one that feels the best to them. When they start writing, a lot of the heavy lifting has been done.

I think it’s natural when you first start writing, especially in a comedic format, to seize the first idea that you think will work and run with it. After all, ideas are hard! And completing a piece feels great. But spending the time at the top of the process to really interrogate a concept, make sure you can easily write jokes on it — THAT is where a beginning writer should spend most of their energy. Your first few ideas are either 1) too basic and a lot of people will have them, or 2) too diffuse/not crystallized, and it will be hard to make specific, heightened jokes on them.

You co-founded The Belladonna in 2017, around the time that a lot of those sort of old-school internet humor sites like The Toast (2016) and The Awl (2018) folded. What was that like? Do you think there will still be a place for these kinds of sites on the internet in the next decade to come, or do you think that kind of period of "fun early internet" is over? 

Well, not to be a total downer pessimist, but I do actually think that the “fun early internet” is definitively over. So much has been co-opted by algorithms, branded/native content, and all the other considerations that come with making money. 

I really mourn the loss of those sites that brought us such amazing, voicey (used as a compliment!!) writers like Daniel Ortberg and other writers for The Hairpin and The Awl. We started The Belladonna to showcase the wide range of comedic voices and topics that are out there and provide an encouraging home for newer writers (we give feedback on every piece we don’t accept). We…do not make money doing this. But I’ll never forget the day I read this piece on The Toast and felt such deep love for the brain of a person whom I had never met. 

I think there is a place for sites like that, but obviously not necessarily the funding. Which of course, keeps out the voices of people who can’t write/edit/work for free, as always. I’m extremely interested in how satire/humor can be added to existing sites to drive traffic while not at the same time becoming corporate slop, and that’s something I’m exploring now (contact me if you want to talk about this!). Just because a model doesn’t currently exist doesn’t mean it never will. 

We're less than six months out from the second annual Satire & Humor festival. What are your hopes for the festival in 2020?

The first year was such a blast. It totally went beyond our expectations. We had Emma Allen, the Cartoons and Daily Shouts Editor at The New Yorker there, and tons of writers from Colbert, Seth Meyers, The Daily Show, Full Frontal, Reductress, books, and other formats giving advice and mingling with the attendees. I

I’ve spent a long time teaching people, and it became clear that a lot of them were yearning for a more in-person community where they could meet some of their favorite writers from McSweeney’s and the New Yorker who they’ve been reading for actual years. Taking it offline felt really important, related to your last question, as the internet seems to become less and less weird and strange and fun.

One example of a success from year one – a performer, Evan Waite, read an entirely new piece at a show during the festival and it was such a HUGE success in front of an audience that it was bought by an editor who was in the room and published in the print New Yorker. We hope for a lot more of that type of thing in the future.

For 2020, we'll continue to embody our Festival theme of “accessibility” in all ways – through who we program, the topics we cover, the information we give people, and by keeping the price point as low as possible (we’ll also be offering scholarships). We had our website totally redesigned, and we now feature a Resources page with sites and pieces people can study to get better at this kind of writing, as well as a Classifieds section, where people can post looking for feedback, a writers group, or to shout out their new projects. We’ll be teaching some workshops and producing one-off events leading up to 2020, so subscribe to the newsletter on the homepage for more info. We have no Facebook presence and limited social media – the newsletter is where it’s at!

I firmly believe that not knowing an email address or the proper submission guidelines should never be a barrier to someone’s entry, so in all my teaching and other endeavors I try to provide as much information as possible. Only people who know they suck are afraid to compete with a large field.

Okay, this feels like a dumb question, but between doing your own writing, AND editing The Belladonna, AND putting together the festival, AND teaching.........how do you.....stay funny? Do you feel like you start with a certain amount of "funny" every day to put into your work...or is it something you can exercise and train, like a muscle? 

I wrote a Twitter thread a few months ago about this! It’s not a dumb question at all, and I think a lot of people erroneously quit creative endeavors thinking they have no good ideas when in fact, they may just be running on empty for a period of time. I firmly believe creativity and funniness can be coaxed back (sleep is always the first line of defense for me).

A friend in my graduate program told me very simply that you need to input to output. So when I’m feeling depleted, I have a process I follow. I write down the things I’ve been watching and reading, and any events I’ve been to in the past few months. Pretty much 100% of the time I see that I’ve been staying in, working, rewatching things I’ve already seen, and reading comfort books (to be clear: there’s nothing wrong with any of those things!). 

Then I make an active plan to input. I have a list of “hard” books (nonfiction topics I don’t know much about, older books like “Catch-22” I never read in school, things that are challenging) that I choose a title from, I watch older movies I’ve somehow never seen (“Network” being a recent one, wow, dark as hell, loved it) and I try to go see theater or comedy shows outside my normal sphere. I meet people for coffee to hear about their work. I read reviews of things and compare them to my own thoughts, or think about what I would do differently or which elements I admired and would like to do more in my own work.

After a few weeks of that, I start to have ideas again. I incubate them, start writing, stop taking in as much as I’m outputting, and then keep doing that until the cycle repeats itself. 

My life got a lot better a few years ago when I recognized this is as a cycle rather than feeling like I would never have ideas again and it was absolutely out of my control to ever coax them back. It also helps me take pressure off myself during times of ill physical or mental or emotional health to know that it’s just part of the cycle and I can let up for a bit and just input for a while without feeling guilty.

I do think it’s similar to a muscle, and so reading a lot of other comedic pieces can help as long as you’re analyzing what makes them good. 

I do definitely feel I have limited stores of funny per day, so when I’m working on something myself, I typically don’t give feedback to friends or students that day to keep the energy flowing into my own piece. A creative journal or morning pages can also be very useful to start to see large-scale patterns across months of when you felt great, when you felt depleted, and then you can start to treat yourself more kindly and feed your mind with the stuff it needs to create more.

//

Don’t forget to follow Caitlin @KunkelTron and have a very input-heavy weekend, everyone!!