INSIDE JOKES

What if, with the right tools...the right direction... and the right guide book, anyone can be funny, and successfully write comedy from their own experience and empathy?

INSIDE JOKES: A Comedy and Creativity Guide for All Writers by Elissa Bassist & Caitlin Kunkel is a step by step, practical guide to comedy writing, filled with invaluable advice, exercises, toolsand humor!that will show you how you're qualified to write comedy. It's THE ARTIST'S WAY for the comedic soul. As leaders in writing and comedy communities, Bassist and Kunkel share their extensive teaching and professional experience to create a comedy manifesto with invaluable tips, interviews, templates, and resources to empower you. Whether it's writing an email, a dating profile, any type of daily communication in the real world; or if you aspire to write for tv or standup; to write funny personal essays, satire, novels, memoirs or fixing up those shitty old drafts you're stuck on, Bassist and Kunkel will encourage, inspire and show you how it's within your reach to be f*cking funny. And in these pages, they'll make you laugh every step of the way. INSIDE JOKES: A Comedy and Creativity Guide for All Writers is both a practical workbook on how to write comedy and a creativity guide on how comedy writing can change you as a person. Bassist and Kunkel are brilliant teachers and funny women who deconstruct the exclusive art of funnyand show you that it's not so exclusive. They make writing comedy accessible and replicable. As authors, founding editors of humor sites (the "Funny Women" column on the Rumpus; and the Belladonna), experienced comedy teachers, performers, producers of comedy shows and festivals, they've devoted their careers to making people laugh and teaching others how to do the same. INSIDE JOKES: A Comedy and Creativity Guide for All Writers is THE ARTIST'S WAY meets Judd Apatow's SICK IN THE HEAD for people who love DREYER's ENGLISH. The craft and writing guide bookshelf lacks a go-to book for comedy writing. INSIDE JOKES: A Comedy and Creativity Guide for All Writers can become a classic writing instruction bible like BIRD BY BIRD, WRITING DOWN THE BONES, and ZEN IN THE ART OF WRITINGall eminently empowering, readable and practical. INSIDE JOKES: A Comedy and Creativity Guide for All Writers will: --show you how to find your voice and unleash the funny writer and person you are debunk the myth that funny writing is hard or impossible break down how to write short humor, satire, the funny personal essay help writers develop and maintain a writing practice and access their creativity --provide foundational tools of comedy writing, showing you how to write, rewrite and submit your best work Elissa Bassist is the author of the acclaimed memoir Hysterical (Hachette, 2022) and the creator and long-time editor of the "Funny Women" column on The Rumpus. Elissa has worked in media and publishing since 2007: as managing editor of the Best American Nonrequired Reading; associate editor at 826 National; assistant editor at Chronicle Books; founding editor of The Rumpus in 2009; a writer's assistant to screenwriters Joey Soloway and A.M. Homes; producer and co-host of international reading series Literary Death Match; and as a TV writers' assistant for The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, filmed annually at the Kennedy Center and broadcast on PBS with honorees that included Will Ferrell, Carol Burnett, Bill Murray, and Eddie Murphy. Elissa's humor and sad essays have appeared in The New York Times, Marie Claire, Mother Jones, Creative Nonfiction, The New Yorker's Daily Shouts, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, LATimes.com, EW.com, GMA.com, The Cut, Jezebel, Longreads, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Paris Review Daily, Insider, Lilith Magazine, and more, including the bestselling anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, edited by Roxane Gay. Hysterical was a No. 1 bestseller in Alberta, Canada; is being translated into Spanish and published by Roca Editorial in Barcelona; and it's been featured/applauded on The View, Late Night Lit with Seth Meyers, NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, Good Morning America, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Denver where pot was first legalized, Elissa received a B.A. in English Literature from Washington University in St. Louis in 2007, with minors in Creative Writing and Women and Gender Studies. In 2012 she received her M.F.A in Creative Nonfiction from The New School, where she won the Chapbook Competitionthe Super Bowl of grad school. After co-editing Rumpus Women, an anthology featuring Cheryl Strayed, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, and more, she graduated from the Upright Citizens Brigade in improv and sketch writing and has since gone on to be a barista. Currently, Elissa teaches writing at The New School, 92NY, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Writing Workshops, and elsewhere. She is single and probably her therapist's favorite. Elissa's website: https://www.elissabassist.com/ Caitlin Kunkel is a leading teacher and writer of satire, included in the "Fifteen of the Best Humorists Writing Today" list by Paste Magazine. In 2015 she created The Second City's popular three-level online satire writing program which has trained and continues to train thousands, including writers for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Onion, The New Yorker, and many more. In September 2019 she was sent to Amman, Jordan on behalf of The Second City and the US Embassy to teach satire to a group of writers and performers who have since founded the very successful Amman Comedy Club. She's a co-founder of The Belladonna, a comedy and satire site written by women of all definitions with over 80k followers across platforms. In 2019 she co-founded the Satire and Humor Festival, which hosted festivals in New York and Chicago. In 2018 she co-wrote the gift book, New Erotica for Feminists: Satirical Fantasies of Love, Lust, and Equal Pay, #4 on the "The Ten Best Comedy Books of 2018" list by Vulture. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney's and other outlets. She was the head writer for Live Wire Radio, a public radio variety show that airs to over 400,000 listeners per week, from 2017-2020 (the pandemic stole her job!). She's also worked as a script writer and pun-maker for the app Calm. She's a yearly judge for the Thurber Prize for American Humor, the most prestigious literary humor prize in the United States. Originally from the wilds of Rhode Island, Caitlin has a B.A. in Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University, was a Fulbright Teaching Assistant in Indonesia where she taught 450 students a week (she was too young to know that was TOO MANY), and received an M.F.A. in Writing for the Stage and Screen from Northwestern University in 2009. She was a three-year Visiting Professor at Pacific Northwest College of Art, teaching her class "Modern Comedy and Satire." Caitlin currently teaches or has taught for The Second City, Catapult, St. Nell's Humor Writing Residency, Magnet Theater in NY, Washington Improv Theater in DC, and speaks at a whole bunch of colleges each year.