April Monthly Links Roundup

Featuring funny tv, a humor editor panel video, and book recs

Hello and welcome to the April monthly links roundup.

April is National Humor Month, and I wish I could say I’ve done a lot of humor writing this month, but my teaching schedule and my family’s schedule have been hectic, so I have been doing more humor consuming than creating. But maybe next month, although May doesn’t look much better. Fingers crossed for June.

Keep reading for some of my humor consumption highlights and a funny book guest rec from humor writer Kristen Mulrooney.

-JV

---

• SNL skit. My kids have been watching some old SNL clips recently, and this closet organizer one made all of us laugh.

• Funny TV: I recently got Max and have now been catching up on *checks notes* about 10 years’ worth of shows I missed. I’ve been enjoying the peek into the comedy writing room in the new season of Hacks, and also appreciating the humor and heart in Somebody Somewhere. The Studio on Apple has also been making me laugh.

• Funny first person: Andrew Knott’s account of winning a giant duck plushie also made me laugh (and also made me thankful that I have never won a giant plushie at a theme park).

• Book: I’ve been listening to Kira Jane Buxton’s book Tartufo on audio, and it has been like a little trip to Italy for my ears. It’s a quirky and charming novel about an Italian village that discovers a giant truffle.

• Humor editor panel: This humor panel video from the New Orleans Book Fest features editors from The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Onion, and Reductress and has some good insider info on those pubs, like how many submissions the New Yorker Shouts and McSweeney’s get per week (spoiler alert, a lot!) and other tips for what they are or aren’t looking for. I’ve found it helpful to watch/read interviews like this when trying to break into or up my acceptance rate at humor pubs.

• Short-form audio submissions: Spotify is accepting audiobook submissions.

• Illustrated humor pieces tips: These tips on writing/collaborating on illustrated pieces from Katy Maiolatesi up at The Belladonna are also worth checking out.

• Transparent book posts: I also appreciated both this report on spending $11,000 on marketing a debut novel and this post about sales and advance numbers behind a book launch.

This month’s funny book rec comes from Kristen Mulrooney, who you may recognize from her humor writing, social media posts, or parenting writing on the Substack

The Pomegranate

.

Tell us about your book.

How Not to Be a Basic Peasant is your typical influencer's guide to living your best life, only the influencer in question is a medieval bard who's just trying to be aesthetic while also surviving the plague.

The book has tips on everything from fashion—chainmail as fashion is in, togas are out—to money-saving meals, like substituting your roasted Christmas swan for a common snipe. The bard offers recs on his favorite books and drops his 50-minute knight training circuit workout. Plus, personality quizzes to help you learn about yourself, like What's Your Sense of Humor? (That is, the four humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm.)

What is a funny book you recommend?

Now that my kids are in elementary school, I've been thinking a lot about the books I loved as a kid and I've spent this school year doing rereads of some of my old favorites, so I'm going to go with an oldie for my funny book rec: Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh.

If you haven't read it since you were a kid, you might not realize how hilarious this book is. Harriet's observations about people are absolutely brutal, and I just found so much comedy in this child creating images of people in the worst possible way and then saying, "I feel sorry for them." She's such a fantastic character. On top of that, the way Fitzhugh writes about the city made me feel so cozy as a kid, and I had the same feeling reading about it as an adult.

Thanks, Kristen! Learn more about her here:

Kristen Mulrooney is a writer and editor. She has written several pop culture themed books including Gilmore Girls: The Official Cookbook and Barbie IRL. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker and McSweeney's, as well as The Belladonna, of which she is also an editor. She lives near Boston with her husband and three kids. Subscribe to her Substack The Pomegranate, a newsletter about modern motherhood featuring writing from Kristen and four other funny moms.

• Interview: I shared some tips on writing short humor pieces in this piece on

  Your First Byline
  . This Substack is also a good resource for all sorts of journalistic writing tips.

• Podcast: I talked with

  Claudine Wolk
  about how I used TikTok for book marketing on her podcast. Claudine’s Substack and book are also good resources for book marketing.

• Class: Interested in publishing parenting pieces but not sure where to start? Next month, Natalie Serianni and I are co-teaching a virtual class offering an introduction to writing for parenting publications. Find out more here.

• Request: I’m planning to do an upcoming post about how parents approach creative work over the summer. If you want to submit an idea for me to potentially share in the post, fill out this form.

---

Thanks for reading Humor Me, a newsletter featuring funny stuff and writing tips. In case you’re new here, I’m a humor writer and freelancer whose work has appeared in New Yorker Shouts, McSweeney’s, Real Simple, and more. Find out more about me at julievick.com.

Any typos in this newsletter are a result of the text being written by a human and not AI.

If you’d like to help support Humor Me, you can:

• Like or share this post to help others find it.

• Buy me a coffee.

• Become a subscriber:

---