Everything Is Fair Game to Be Funny: A Conversation With Elissa Bassist

Elissa Bassist is a self-described essayist, humor writer, retired girlfriend, and editor of the Funny Women column on TheRumpus.net. She spoke with editor and Assistant Regional Funny Woman Katie Burgess by email.

Katie Burgess: You famously wrote to Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugar column about being “a writer who can’t write,” something I think most writers can relate to. She advised you to “Write like a motherfucker,” a saying that is now emblazoned on numerous mugs and T-shirts. Have you found that your confidence has grown since then? Do you have any advice of your own for writers who are struggling with that fear of failure?

Elissa Bassist: I have found that my confidence has grown and shrunk thousands of times since I wrote to Cheryl.

While I feel like I grew out of the person who wrote that letter, every day I do battle with those feelings and fears.

What I’ve gotten good at is accepting the flux and redefining what “success” means to me. Now that I teach humor writing, I tell my students and dates and anyone who will listen, including myself, that any creative career path is more or less about rejection and failure. The job is to write, not to “publish.” Okay, actually the job is to publish, eventually, yes, but I try to adopt this mindset: success is a byproduct. Transcendence is in the effort. Did you show up and try? Then I am impressed. Sometimes I feel like I’ve “made it” when I write one solid sentence in a day and survive the day. I’m not prolific, but I am joyful.

KB: What would you say are your biggest distractions and time-wasters when it comes to trying to make yourself sit down and write?

EB: My go-to activity is not writing. I’ll spend too long on Twitter and Facebook because I like to know what writers are publishing so that I can enter a self-hating spiral that will prevent me from believing in myself and my dreams.

Smartly, I downloaded the Freedom and Freedom 2 apps that block internet, as well Self-Control, an app that blocks social media, feminist news sites, celebrity news sites, any site that has a never-ending stream of updating content.

But the true time-killer is getting mad myself for checking, so I allow myself to check and check like my life depends on it, to get it out of my system, and then I turn on the blockers and find I’m happier and more at peace while writing, mostly about rape culture.

I suffer more from not writing than writing, from the anticipation and my resistance. I read somewhere that one should go quickly into something difficult and not delay. The faster I can bypass distractions, the better my writing day will be.

KB: You created the Funny Women column at The Rumpus back in 2009, in part because you noticed a lack of female humor writers represented in publications like The New Yorker and McSweeney’s. I feel like I see more female bylines in other humor publications now, but I haven’t actually done a count. I’ve definitely spotted more publications making an effort to encourage women and nonbinary writers to submit, though. Have you noticed your column having an impact over the years?

EB: Honoring my gender, I won’t take any measure of credit for the Funny Women column changing the landscape of humor writing; so, the column aside — which would not continue to operate without your help (we’re a two-woman show) — yes, there are tons more female bylines across the board and sites calling exclusively for female and nonbinary writers to amplify their voices, sites like Reductress, The Belladonna, and The Establishment.

Since editor Emma Allen became the humor writing gatekeeper at The New Yorker, it seems half the Daily Shouts bylines are non-men. I know Chris Monks at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency accepts far more non-men now than when I started submitting to him and receiving well-deserved rejections. But I’d chalk it up to more women and nonbinary writers writing and submitting in an arena that has been closed off to non-men for eons. More of us are outraged and finding our voice after having been routinely and systematically silenced — oops, I’m heading into a rant.

KB: There’s this whole “women aren’t funny” cliché, which Christopher Hitchens once based an essay on. What do you think the best response to that idea is? I’m reminded of the episode of 30 Rock where Liz Lemon says, “I refuse to answer this question with a list.” Because if you say, “No, here are all these women who are funny,” you’re sort of falling into a trap. So how can women push back against that idea? Or is trying to change the minds of sexists even worth the energy?

EB: I started Funny Women after I read Hitchens’s essay. “Women aren’t funny”? Challenge accepted. I think a lot of comedy writers were subjected to reading or otherwise heard about his essay, or were accused of his claim, and in response they made comedy.

Many women don’t engage with that blanket statement, like, “We don’t have the time to tell why human beings breathe oxygen.”

Rather than change sexist small minds, I try to appeal to the like-minded, to focus my attention and energy on those who will have me. And we’ve been building our numbers and will one day burn the patriarchy to ash. (Though it’s dangerous to believe the patriarchy is going away any time soon — the patriarchy is like addiction or depression: it’s always waiting for you, doing push-ups when you’re looking the other way.)

As a writer, I am used to whispering into a void, but I don’t go out of my way to convince a misogynist that I am worthy of love. I’m writing, not dating.

KB: Has the current political climate affected your writing? In an article for Dame, you compare the 2016 election’s outcome to a depressed person’s most negative thoughts coming true: “What if the least qualified, most unstable sexual predator-bully-demagogue reigned over the free world and surrounded himself with more and more anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion, racist, misogynist, xenophobic, bloodlessly white nincomshits to run the America show?” Is it harder to be funny right now? Does humor feel inconsequential? Or do we need it now more than ever?

EB: Back to how I’m a beloved humor teacher…after the election, laugher went on hiatus, replaced by extreme crying, bottomless fear, and rage that eclipsed every other priority, meaning fewer people signed up for my class. Months later, once we unfurled from the fetal position, humor found its footing, and students wanted to learn how to write alternative facts.

I cover short conceptual humor: parody and satire. Satire is weaponized comedy. It cuts deep and has a moral purpose. I tell my students: Use this form to change the world. To satirize something is to ridicule it, to reveal or criticize a person, group, or place’s idiocy, ignorance, social sins, insensitivity, and paradoxes. It stirs up shit to improve mankind and societal institutions. Which is to say, humor is consequential and necessary AF.

Also, when it seems as if nothing is funny, then everything is fair game to be funny.

Similarly, because of the news cycle, it seems like never is a good time to post a humor piece. But if never is a good time, then always also is a good time. We must all take a short break from gut-punching news alerts to laugh about something unrelated or to find company in outrage.

KB: You’ve written openly about depression. There are countless romanticized depictions of the tortured artist in pop culture. Why do you think that image is so compelling to so many people? Is there anything you wish more people understood about having a creative life while coping with mental illness?

EB: I think the romanticized version is more compelling than the reality of depression, which is being face-planted in your own drool on the bathroom floor, having barely eaten, ambitious only for the relief of sleep, stewing and spiraling in obsessive waking nightmares known as your thoughts and feelings.

Coping with mental illness, even and especially when you are healthy, is a full-time job, a moment-by-moment real-deal battle royal.

At least once a day I wonder how anyone with a mental illness gets anything done. I wish Normals understood what it takes for depressives to make it through the day.

I’ve reversed my earlier thinking that I’d die for my art or that there’s such a thing as death by art. Art-making is sanity-inducing for me. It’s everything else that’s threatening. And it’s when I succumb to do-nothingness and comparison theories that I’m en route to the bathroom floor again.

KB: You started taking improv classes a few years ago, and you’ve discussed how doing so has informed your creative process. Are you still doing improv? How does that art form, which is all about creating things with your scene partners, help you when you’re working on your own?

EB: Yes, I’d like to still be doing improv, and no, I am not. Only improv people will find that joke stupid, and no one else will understand I’m trying to make a joke.

Improv philosophy is a good life and artistic philosophy. It’s about staying open, about seeing others as collaborators and not competitors, about taking suggestions, about accepting utter failure and letting go, about telling someone you’re in love with them. Improv is a green light. Maybe it’s even Gatsby’s green light. All of this applies to working on one’s own, to pretty much everything you want to do. Stuff “about improv” is easily replaced by “about writing” or “about yoga” or “about being a fucking human being.”

KB: What are you writing right now? Do you hate being asked that question? If so, feel free to make something up.

EB: I am writing a historical science-fiction collection of sonnets about a world without rape.

KB: Who are you reading right now? Are there any books you’ve read recently that you’d like to give a shout-out to?

EB: I love this question. Always ask everyone this question.

Before bed I am reading The Idiot by Elif Batuman.

Before I write I read Her Body and Other Parties by Funny Women contributor Carmen Maria Machado.

I’m never not reading Lorrie Moore. Ditto Michelle Orange’s This Is Running for Your Life.

I just started Mary Gaitskill’s collection of essays Somebody with a Little Hammer.

Poetry-wise I’m reading Dorothea Lasky’s Rome and Anaïs Duplan’s Mount Carmel & The Blood Of Parnassus. Recently I emceed a reading where Anaïs read, and I’ve never fallen in love so fast.

KB: You wrote a piece for the New York Times on how binge-watching has affected TV storytelling, arguing that “a constant state of cliffhanger suspense gets boring.” Do you have a cliffhanger that you’d like to end this interview on?

EB: I just got a text, and you will never believe what it says…

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