February Monthly Links Roundup

Including funny music, upcoming virtual editor sessions, and funny birds

Hello and welcome to my monthly links roundup where I share links of interest.

We are starting to edge into spring where I live and I recently learned that February is National Bird Feeding Month. As luck would have it, I got a camera birdfeeder in the fall. 

I mostly see sparrows, finches, and the occasional chickadee but the award for funniest bird name goes to this one I spotted in the fall which the identifier told me was either a bushtit or a tufted titmouse:

This led me to some important research discovering that funny bird names are a whole thing. So basically, birds are funny.

This month I've got a funny book rec from author Z. Hanna and several other items of interest.

-JV

Apple Music for Laughs: I recently heard a song from The Magnetic Fields album 69 Love Songs and remembered that it makes me laugh. I also recently realized I could listen to some standup comedy albums on Apple Music which I hadn’t thought of before, but is a good way to hear comedy on the go.

Cartoon: This cartoon by Ali Solomon made me laugh.

Movie: Traditionally, since having kids, the animated movie category of the Oscars is the only one I have reliably seen movies from. In keeping with that tradition, I recently watched Flow with my kids and we all enjoyed it.

Recipe: I made this crispy oven pork after

Claire Zulkey

recommended it in this Smitten Kitchen appreciation post and I am now recommending it to you.

• Book promotion: I appreciated this post from

  Catherine Baab
  about a book promotion strategy that I had not heard about before.

• Virtual editor sessions: I always find editor interview sessions helpful and there are two free virtual ones coming up that may be of interest: Estelle Erasmus’s Editor-on-Call session with an editor for Cosmo and Seventeen and TravMedia’s behind the Scenes session for travel writers with AAA and ACE.

• Virtual Erma: There is also an upcoming virtual Erma conference featuring Anne Lamott that may be of interest.

This month’s funny book rec comes from author Z. Hanna whose book comes out next week!

Tell us about your book.

WE’RE GONNA GET THROUGH THIS TOGETHER is my debut book! It is a collection of (mostly) satirical short stories exploring race, gender, sexuality, art, and activism in the contemporary (and twenty minutes ahead) U.S.

The stories feature well-meaning yet messy characters navigating things like: a not-so-well-planned psychedelic retreat for climate activists, a scandal at a facility where wealthy people pay to have the prison experience, and tension within an antiracism coaching practice.

The stories are poignant and political, while also being funny and absurd. I have always been a fan of the tragicomic, specifically of the way that humor can create little cracks in our daily life armor, allowing grief and other stuck things to leak out.

What is a funny book you recommend and why?

I’m recommending Tony Tulathimutte’s 2024 story collection REJECTION (published by William Morrow and Company in 2024). All of the stories in the collection feature some form of rejection at their heart—romantic and sexual rejection, of course, but also self-rejection, rejection of the boxes in which one finds oneself, and even literary rejection (the final “story” in the collection is a hilarious fictional letter from a publisher to Tulathimutte rejecting the book’s manuscript).

This book contains my favorite sort of literary satire—completely over-the-top characters and conceits alongside genuine emotion, genius sentences, and salient social critique. I laughed out loud at many points (not exaggerating!) as Tulathimutte explored the challenges and contradictions that straight white male feminists, futurist tech bros, and un-self-aware progressives all inevitably face. This book can be a bit edgy (Carmen Maria Machado describes Tulathimutte as “a pervert and a madman and a stone-cold genius”), but, in my humble opinion, the edge is sometimes the best place to be.

Thanks, Z.! Learn more about Z. here:

Z. Hanna is a writer from Washington, DC. They have a BA from Middlebury College and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Their short fiction has appeared in Guernica, The Breakwater Review, Every Day Fiction, and more. You can follow them on Instagram here!

New humor: I had a new piece for McSweeney’s about typos go up this week. Last year I wrote a social media post about my new motto being that the typos were how you know it was written by a human and not AI. The post seemed to resonate and in trying to teach writing in the age of AI I started realizing that typos in student work often made me feel like it was more likely they had not used AI to write it. When I realized others might be having similar thoughts, I spun the ideas into a full piece.

(And any typos in this newsletter are, of course, a result of it being written by a human and not AI.)

That’s it for this month!

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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.

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