Jokes to Offend Men: A Conversation with Danielle Kraese

By Destini Baylis Adams

Studying journalism at a top tier party school isn’t the origin story one would expect for a humor writer. Danielle Kraese has always loved writing, but the analytical writing expected in A.P. English class and journalism were not the best fit for her. Kraese reflected,“I was maybe the world’s worst journalist. I took way too long to admit that. I kept feeling like I had to force this path because I didn’t have any other ideas or tricks to fall back on.” Through this realization, she came to see how her path was always intertwined with humor writing, admitting, “I found a way to turn the prompt into a funny personal essay and it was like a running theme for me through high school and college.” Her humor writing has been published in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and The Belladonna, among other notable publications. Her book, Jokes to Offend Men (co-written with Ali Kelley, Kate Herzlin and Ysabel Yates), was released in October 2022. 

Interview Edited For Clarity

 

What drew you to humor writing? 

I came from a family that valued humor and was always kinda exchanging funny stories and making each other laugh. I grew up around a lot of laughter, but at the same time, my family is also very loud and very outgoing in some ways. I’m kinda like the outlier in the group. I switch into a different mode where I’m just fervently listening and not participating in the conversation.  I think maybe part of it was that I realized the only way to be heard in this family is to write, so I kind of started writing little stories about things that happened to me. Sort of personal essays and then share it with my mom. And then she would be like, “Oh, this is so funny!” And she’d share it with everyone in my family. 

So you’ve been published in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and Slackjaw. What was your very first publication, and how many rejections did you get as a writer before you were eventually published?

They were kind of different phases of my writing. The very first publication I got was actually when I was a kid, it was a little kids section of my newspaper called Kids Day and it’s total nepotism in that my mom like, knew somebody at her job who worked there and so they gave my name and I got to write really silly stuff. I reviewed “Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World” for it. There was a long time between then, and my next publication. That was a long time. Shortly after college I started writing, for Barnes and Noble had a teen humor blog, and I wrote kind of silly stuff for that, and so that was like the beginning of a time where I was getting some stuff published.

What does your writing process look like? Are you one that just sits down and drafts, or and sees what happens, or do you notoriously outline?

A bit of chaos—I use the drafts feature in my Gmail as a place where I throw ideas that come to me really quickly. There’s a mix of also like, a doctor’s name, and a to-do list. It feels like an unintimidating place sometimes to start writing a piece in an email draft, where I’m just like, okay—I have this idea that’s coming to me, or kind of a voice or a headline. And I’m just doing a giant brain dump without judging anything, and it feels like if it’s in an email draft, I don’t have to be too hard on myself about it, like whatever I say is okay. And then when it gets enough meat(maybe it’s like a few hundred words) I’ll be like, okay, I think I’m gonna move it over to Google Docs and make this more respectable.

 

You have this very distinct, witty writing style. Who are your influences, either comedic or not?

I think I’ve always gravitated to sort of like the zany, really wacky humor. Growing up, I loved Shel Silverstein’s poetry. It is just so silly and irreverent. And I remember having a day in fifth grade where we were supposed to each pick a favorite poem and read it. I mentioned to my mom that I was going to read this really silly Shel Silverstine poem and she was like, “Oh, why don’t you do this lovely Robert Frost poem?” and so I caved. I was a big Nickelodeon kid and I loved very goofy, wacky stuff. I loved the show “All That”, and I got really into the movie “Good Burger” to the point where I did (also in fifth grade) a book report on the novelization of the movie “Good Burger.” And then I performed a skit with friends. Yeah, so I think those are some key influences. Although they’re not as refined as I feel like other people’s influences are.

You’ve co-written many pieces. I was wondering what the process of co-writing is like, and what are the differences between collaborating and working on your own? Is it like school, when you’re partnered up to do something, and there’s one person doing a majority of work?

Yeah, that’s definitely a valid fear if you think about collaborative writing like bad experiences in college from group projects. I feel like the difference with collaborative writing is it’s something fun, and everyone is willingly participating. I started when I was in this period where I had taken classes, and I had connected to like people through humor writing Facebook groups and I would see other people collaborating. I was friendly with another writer on Twitter, and we’d always compliment each other’s work. We say things to each other like, “Oh, I love this piece. I loved that piece!” And he reached out to me one time and asked me if I would write something with him.  I think there were some failed attempts at collaborating. Like sometimes, things don’t even get to the point of submission.  The process itself for me is usually one person has an idea, and if it’s something that resonates with me, or vice versa, then we’ll start a shared document that we both could work in, and I know a lot of people who just work together in a document at the same time. Or they’ll be on the phone which is too … I can’t take that performance pressure. Usually when I’ve collaborated, I’ll alternate with somebody. They’ll add something in a document. I’ll come to it and then that’ll give me ideas and I’ll try to build on that (kind of back and forth), and I feel like the jump from writing a draft to starting to edit it into a cohesive piece felt intimidating for me because it’s like, okay, who calls the shots here? I feel like you have to have a lot of trust in the person, you’d have to kinda put your ego aside and not be insulted if something you wrote needs to get cut or not try to steer the piece in your own direction.

So one of your pieces like “Jokes, I’ve Told That My Male Colleagues Didn’t Like” is one of your collaboration pieces, and it’s the root for your new book “Jokes to Offend Men”. How did this piece come to fruition?

It started with a presidential debate back in February 2020. This is when Michael Bloomberg was still in the running, and news had been circulating about how his company had … let me be precise when I say this to not be, say libel, but they had multiple discrimination lawsuits. And they were settled, and in many cases, it was women who were behind those lawsuits. They had to sign NDAs as part of the settlement. Elizabeth Warren questioned [Bloomberg] about those settlements, and asking him to release the women from their NDAs so they could speak about it, and let us know what actually happened. And his response was something to the effect of, “None of them accuse me of anything, except maybe they didn’t like a joke I told.” And a writer that I had gotten friendly with from Facebook had this idea for that piece. It came to her in the form of a single joke. It was, “A man walks into a bar. It’s a low one, so he gets a promotion his first six months on the job.”  She sent that to me and a couple of other writers that she was friendly with and she said, “I have this idea, like this joke came to me, is this anything.” It sparked inspiration and all of us were immediately working on it during our lunch breaks. We had a Google Doc going. The premise of the piece hit a nerve for all of us, and we mined our own bad experiences with certain men in the workplace. We took “classic” joke formats, some that often couched sexist beliefs, and did a reversal of them. We submitted it that night. It was considered a topical piece, where it’s out of the newscycle within like 24 hrs. So you have to just move really quick! Get it submitted somewhere fast. Otherwise it’s like old news. So we submitted it to McSweeney’s, and that night at 11 o’clock, we got a very casual acceptance: “This is great. I’ll run it.” This piece was my first McSweeney’s acceptance, and before that I had around 12 rejections over several years!

This book feels very modern. They’re not only jokes regarding workplace frustrations, but they’re also jokes, you know, regarding sexism, female pain, gender roles, and even climate change.  Did you have any individual goals in mind when writing jokes, and if so, what were they? And if there are any group goals, what were they?

I think what was helpful in our writing process was getting on the same page with what we wanted the jokes to achieve. In the beginning they were just kinda “top of mind” and very “men, stink.” There was an evolution of our jokes, and those early jokes we started giving the shorthand of “ladies am I right?” and “men are awful—am I right?” and didn’t have any deeper critique. So we narrowed down what we wanted to achieve with the jokes. And then we took those points, and we put them in the form of questions on the top of the Google Doc we worked in so it was like: “Does this empower the reader? Is this rooted in a societal critique? Would someone who’s been in that situation feel better or worse after reading this joke? If the joke uses gendered terms, are they necessary or could we make the same point without them?” That rubric made it easier to decide what to keep and what cut, and what to punch up. It really helped us all get on the same page.

The chapter titles in this book are just as hilarious as the jokes themselves. Which chapters which you say are your favorite, and why?

I have two kinds of favorites. One where I got the most catharsis from writing, or felt the most fueled by, and I think that was the medical chapter “Jokes to Offend Men Who Have a Medical Degree In Dismissing Your Pain.” I really identified with it, as a woman going to doctors for mysterious pain, and being often dismissed or disbelieved, and like just reading about how common that is and how many women just go for years or even decades in pain that’s dismissed, and how far back in history that goes. But the one that I had more fun writing was “Jokes To Offend Men Who Refuse to Believe You’re Not Interested In Them.” I’ve been with my husband for a while, but when we worked on that chapter, it just unlocked all these deeply repressed memories from being on the dating apps in New York City for years. 

There are many paths someone can take to become a writer:grant writing, commercial fiction, and yes—even journalism, among a multitude of other careers. Failure at one particular path doesn’t necessarily mean that another couldn’t be a better fit. All roads always lead back to humor writing for Danielle Kraese and it is where she has found great success. The zany, wacky humor that she admires is seen in her own work today. Check out her short humor pieces on her website and check out her book Jokes To Offend Men.