Thank you for reading Humor Science, the newsletter I started so I could have an excuse to talk to and learn from some of my favorite humor writers.
This week I interviewed Hallie Cantor about her piece for The New Yorker, “My Calls to the Vet Since Getting My First Pet.” It’s a piece I really relate to after recently getting a dog and asking my vet what that bump on his chest was (reader, it was his nipple).
In addition to humor writing, Hallie is a TV writer who’s written for shows including Lady Dynamite, Inside Amy Schumer, and Dollface, and she was the head writer for Magical Girl Friendship Squad. Hallie has great advice for finding inspiration and honing your skills, and I loved hearing her thoughts on the relationship between humor writing and TV writing, so let’s dive in!
Tell me about the inspiration for this piece. When did you start writing it?
I adopted my dog Robbie in January of 2018 and her care immediately consumed, conservatively, 99.96% of my thoughts. Despite the fact that she was and remains a flawless princess from heaven, the first few months with a puppy felt like a nonstop whack-a-mole of issues to troubleshoot, from separation anxiety to like, randomly getting warts all over her face for no reason?
I was also between writing jobs, so I had ample time and energy to devote to worrying that I was going to screw up dog ownership. I think it was actually the incident in this piece that was my wake-up call – I had a neighbor who would always leave breadcrumbs and other leftovers on a specific spot on the sidewalk, and Robbie would eat them if we didn’t stop her in time, and based on virtually no evidence (maybe she threw up ONCE?), I developed this theory that they were poisoned and she would die. I believe it was during my internet deep dive on “rat poison ingestion symptoms dog” that I noticed that a) I was being ridiculous and b) there was a pattern of me being ridiculous in the same way. These two realizations are generally a good tip-off that it is time to write a humor piece.
According to Google docs’ version history, I started writing the piece on May 8, stepped away for a week, worked on it a little bit on May 15 and 16 and submitted it on May 17.
I did eventually get over myself and knock on my neighbor’s door to ask what the deal was with the breadcrumbs. She was just a nice old lady who liked to feed the birds!!
When you’re writing a piece like this, what’s your process? Do you have a solid plan going in, or do you write freely and then shape it from there?
I usually try to brainstorm as many beats/jokes/specifics as I can before thinking much about the structure. For this piece, it was very easy because I literally just had to remember the dumb things I had called the vet about or worried about recently, and then arrange them in an order that gradually heightened the central joke of the narrator projecting all these issues on her dog that are actually her own neuroses and loneliness.
Is there anything else you want to share about this piece that I didn’t ask about?
It’s interesting to look back at it now and notice how I slipped in a weird, dismissive insult to my mom in a humor piece about my dog. I was definitely expressing some personal anger in a place where I could hide behind the rationalization of, “It’s the character complaining about her mom!”
It can be tricky, when your writing draws on personal feelings, to judge when something actually strengthens the writing vs. when you can probably safely save it for your journal or therapist. While I’m proud of the piece overall, I wouldn’t write that line the same way today.
Where do you find inspiration for your humor pieces? How do you come up with ideas?
Once in a while ideas will pop up spontaneously, but usually I sit down to deliberately brainstorm, which for me looks like reflecting on my life and what I’ve been obsessing about lately. I am often most inspired to write comedy about topics I find sad or embarrassing or difficult to articulate in my real life. With this one, I was very self-conscious at the time about how often I was talking about my dog, and nervous that my friends all thought I was this loser who cared way too much about her pit mix’s pee schedule. I find the feeling of shame can be a giant arrow pointing towards fertile ground for writing.
Are there specific humor writers or any particular pieces out there that you’re inspired by?
Some longtime favorites are Patricia Lockwood, Maria Semple, Caity Weaver, Heather Havrilesky, Samantha Irby, and Lindy West. Right now I am working on a novel so I have been going particularly hard on recent novels-by-humorists for inspiration: Monica Heisey, Andrew Lipstein, Kashana Cauley, Emma Rathbone, Jessie Gaynor, and Julia Langbein have all written very funny novels that I’ve loved reading in the last few years.
How did you first get started with humor writing? What advice do you have for someone who might just be getting started with their humor writing journey?
In college, I did stand-up and wrote for my campus’ satirical paper, and I also interned at a website called CollegeHumor where I later got very lucky by getting a job that was more or less to write and edit humor pieces full-time. My advice is: Find some smart and funny people you can learn from and collaborate with. Don’t be afraid to be weird in your writing. If you suck a little at first, it doesn’t mean you are bad at this. Not everything you write will be something you want to publish, but it will all make you a better writer.
In addition to humor writing, you're also a TV writer and you've written for shows like Lady Dynamite, Inside Amy Schumer, Dollface, and you were the head writer for Magical Girl Friendship Squad. Dollface in particular always struck me as a show that felt like a humor piece come to life. I'm curious if you could talk about the relationship between your humor writing and your TV writing. Do you have any advice for humor writers who hope to one day write for TV? Are there any skills from humor writing that might transfer over to being in a writers' room?
Totally–I got hired on Dollface partly due to a spec pilot I’d written that basically took place in the world of my humor pieces, where the main character’s internal anxieties kept manifesting in real-world ways. Humor writing is great practice for writing on shows with surreal elements like that (or on sketch shows) because you learn to start with one small idea or observation and build on it gradually, finding more funny examples, surprising the reader/viewer with unexpected angles — all while maintaining the internal logic of the piece/scene, which is not always intuitive.
Some TV shows are less clearly analogous, but I think humor writing is always a helpful way to develop your own comedic voice and what you find funny. Even on a show where you’re writing toward a certain host or star’s voice, your unique perspective is what makes you valuable in a room.
Where can people find more of your work, and are there any particular projects or news you want to plug?
You can find my stuff at halliecantor.com and learn about and support the WGA strike at https://www.wgacontract2023.org/strike-hub!
That’s it! Don’t forget to check out all of Hallie’s work, support the strike, and give your pet a hug if that’s something they enjoy. Or if they’re like my dog, put them in their sling so they can nap like a baby kangaroo.
What’s new:
Is anyone feeling the back to school energy? I’m trying to clear out old ideas to make space for new ones, and in doing so, have been confronted with a ton of drafts that I started and never finished. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I’m trying to look at it without judgment and accept it as just being part of the process. Some I might return to, others I might let go. But going through it all got me interested in hearing stories about pieces that took a long time to crack. Do you have a humor piece that took you 6+ months (or longer) to write? Fill out this form to tell me about it, and I may follow-up with you about using it in a future newsletter.
About me
I’m a comedy writer and freelance copywriter living in Brooklyn. My humor writing has been published by The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Reductress, and more. I’m the co-author of Jokes to Offend Men, which was named the #2 Comedy Book of 2022 by Vulture. I’m available for new writing projects, writing coaching, and nerding out about comedy, so please reach out and say hi!