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This is part 3 in a series that explores the origins of Jokes to Offend Men, out October 25! Previously I’ve talked about my high and low comedy influences: My middle school classmates and my family. This week I want to talk about the college years.
I know I was supposed to go to college to get an education but the biggest thing I learned was how to be funny, arguably a skill that has done more for me than my incredibly vague B.S. in Communications. Not to be dramatic, but in college I felt born anew. I went to school in the same small state I grew up in, but I was an hour and half away, and crucially no longer surrounded with the same people I had been in class with for 12 years. It was liberating and exactly what a neurotic weirdo like myself needed to move forward.
I met other people who had the same absurd observations that I did and together, miraculously, we found each other (Hi, Tori!) during our freshman year welcome weekend. Not long after, we made a larger group of friends who hosted weekly movie viewings in their apartment. They called it “Cheesy Movie Monday” and it was, for all intents and purposes, a regional Mystery Science Theater. I found all of this very cool and very adult.
This group of friends happened to be upperclassman dudes (so cool), who lived off-campus (the coolest), and were B-movie scholars (cool? yeah, cool to me!). I grew up watching MST3K with my older brother (who I also thought was the coolest), so for these guys to invite me into their world and then laugh! when I talked back at the screen, that was the ultimate form of validation.
Now you may be thinking: Wait, did she learn nothing from that whole Brendan Holmes middle school incident? Why did she continue to operate in the realm of loud boys? Well, unfortunately, as I’ve found out, they are inescapable. But at 18, it was still very much a novelty I enjoyed—I no longer thought boys were purely gross and I had crushes on many of them, sadly. The only way I could remotely communicate with them was through jokes.
On Cheesy Movie Mondays, jokes were the currency. We all packed into this giant beige sectional that I’m sure was absolutely disgusting now that I think about it, so I won’t…, and we played movies like Gleaming the Cube and No Retreat, No Surrender (plus a slew of other Van Damme movies.) On nights when I made a comment that made the room erupt in laughter, I felt untouchable. And once, after weeks of showing up and proving myself, I was able to select the movie: Teen Witch. An iconic piece of camp cinema that a group of boys would never have chosen on their own, but which they all loved.
I would later go on to stand on an actual stage and make jokes in front of strangers, but nothing will ever top those early days when I was finding out I could make people laugh. In the 15 years since college (gulp), I’ve been working on defining my voice, sharpening my observations and clarifying my point of view, so that I could write a book like Jokes to Offend Men, which is both funny and substantive. And something I am really proud to be able to share with you all soon!
(Of course I won’t be able to sit next to you on a dirty sectional couch while you read it, so you’ll need to find another way of telling me how hard you laughed. If you take anything away from this post it’s that I desperately need external validation or else I will evaporate into a puddle of whatever strange substance is on the floor of this off-campus apartment that none of the dudes thought necessary to clean up.)
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About me: I’m a Brooklyn-based writer, deeply inspired by the 18 years I spent growing up in the Connecticut suburbs during the 90s and early 2000s. My first book, Jokes to Offend Men, is out this October. Pre-order now!