An interview with Julie Vick

Author of Babies Don't Make Small Talk (So Why Should I?) and one of the nation's top fruit humorists

Julie Vick is the author of the book Babies Don’t Make Small Talk (So Why Should I?): The Introvert’s Guide to Surviving Parenthood. She also writes a newsletter about humor writing called Humor Me. Here, Julie and I chat about topics such as where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum, whether our kids think we’re funny, and fruit-and-vegetable-related humor.

Janine: Julie, tell the readers of Mom Jokes about yourself.

Julie: I am a writer and I write a lot of humor. I’m the author of a humorous advice book for introverted parents. I run a Substack called Humor Me that talks about humor and writing. I teach writing at the University of Colorado, Denver, and I have two kids, aged 9 and 12.

Janine: Let’s talk more about your book, Babies Don’t Make Small Talk (So Why Should I?): The Introvert’s Guide to Surviving Parenthood.

Julie: It's a mix of humor and advice. So it has some satirical humor pieces, but hopefully —

[At this point, Janine gets interrupted by her kid].

Janine: Sorry about that.

Julie: That's the life of a mom. You get interrupted! So, my book is a mixture of humorous satirical pieces as well as some advice. It's aimed at pregnancy through preschool. For people with younger kids who are introverted, I think there are some unique challenges. Sometimes you prefer a quiet, calm environment, but that isn’t exactly what you get when you become a parent.

Janine: I feel like the older I get, the more introverted I get. like I feel like I'm kind of an ambivert now.

Julie: You're not the only person I've heard that from. I feel like other people have said that too, that they feel like they have gotten more introverted or prefer more alone time as we get older. After the pandemic, too, some people came out of it feeling more introverted, which is interesting. But yeah, I think a lot of people are in between.

Janine: You and I are both natural storytellers. So I enjoy learning about a person and their story, what makes them tick, and what they're interested in. I like meeting new people and talking to people but then sometimes I'm tired after, especially if it's in a setting where I feel like I can't be as much of my authentic or quirky self and I have to kind of bottle that up. When I get home, I'm like, Oh, I'm exhausted.

Julie: Right, and I think that's the hallmark of an introvert — whether you get drained by social situations or energized by them. In situations where I'm talking with people I know well, I feel like it is less draining.

Janine: When you're a parent, you're thrust into more situations when you have to interact with strangers or people you don’t know well. If you're a person who's carrying a child, it starts then, with people commenting or sometimes even touching or asking invasive questions. When the kids are really little, you're going to parenting meetups or the playground or daycare, and suddenly you have to interact a lot with these other parents. You're suddenly thrust into this whole new peer group.

Julie: For sure. Hopefully, you find new people that you like. A lot of times it's not necessarily people that you have things in common with except for having kids of a similar age. It's gotten a little bit easier as my kids have gotten older.

Janine: When they were little, and they went on playdates, they weren’t drop-off playdates and sometimes you had to sit there and make awkward small talk with the parents, or the nanny, or the sitter.

Julie: Plus your parenting is on display. When they’re older, your kids can go somewhere else and you don’t have to be with them the whole time. It’s easier than the toddler meltdown stage.

Janine: Oh, the toddler meltdown stage is rough. Thank goodness, we don't have to deal with that anymore. I moved when my kid was a year old, we moved from the city to the suburbs of New York and I didn't know anyone here at first. But we were very lucky. We met really nice people and made a lot of friends, and many of my closest friends now are people that I met through my kid, they’re the parents of his friends. I also spend a lot of time watching my son play various sports, because he’s inexplicably sporty, and I'm lucky that all the other parents of kids on his teams are super nice.

Julie: Youth sports is a whole thing! We also moved when my youngest was a baby from Denver to a smaller town in Colorado, and I was also lucky to meet a lot of great people, like our neighbors. Our kids play together, which is amazing.

Janine: I don't know how I would have met anyone over the last 13 years if it wasn't for my kid and my dog.

Julie: I have a cat, and I don’t take my cat on walks. But the kids, especially when they're little and you’re at the park, all of the sudden you’ll be talking with people that, if you were there as an adult, you wouldn't be talking to them. I'm also socially anxious in some situations. So having a kid in these kinds of situations is actually somewhat helpful. Sometimes it gives you something to focus on and something to talk about.

Janine: That is absolutely true. If you're in a social situation that’s kid-focused, you can always talk to other parents about things like, how old are your kids, what grade are they in, and what are they interested in? There's a famous person who lives in my town and she once struck up a conversation with me about our kids, and then I told her I liked her outfit. She seems very smart and very nice. Is your husband a jokester? Is he funny?

Julie: He is funny, although I don't know if I would call him a jokester. I always think of him as being more about physical humor. He plays games with the kids.

Janine: Do your kids think you're funny?

Julie: I think they do. I feel like their sense of humor is very tween right now. There's this fine distinction between fun and funny, though. Maybe I’m not the life of the party but I still joke around with them about things. And I do think there is this difference between how my husband does it and the way I do it, which is interesting.

Janine: I like what you said about the distinction between fun and funny. I feel like I'm not always being the life of the party, but I’m often still being funny. When I was a kid, I was very awkward and shy. I was never the class clown. I think people who gravitate toward humor writing often didn’t want to act or do standup, they wanted to stay behind the scenes more and write funny stuff. I think those are the people who tend to be like, Hey, if you sit by me and you listen closely, I’m funny. But you have to give me a chance, you can’t just talk over me.

Julie: I think that's totally right. Of course, a lot of people do both standup comedy and humor writing. I've never done standup.

Janine: Me neither, officially. I'm always talking about how maybe I should. People ask me all the time if I do it. What happens is if I go to a party, and I have two glasses of wine — that’s a lot for me, I can't have more than that, because I have a very low tolerance — so I'll have two glasses of wine and I'll basically start doing a standup comedy routine. And then people are always like, Oh, are you a standup comic and I'm like, What? No.

Julie: I've read a lot of memoirs by standup comedians. I think in their normal life they’re not always so extroverted.

Janine: Musicians, too. They get up in front of a bunch of people on stage and people think they must be extroverted, but they're not necessarily.

Julie: I have a friend who does acting and she said that she's very introverted, but she said she feels like it's different when she's playing a character. She’s not herself.

Janine: I think people who gravitate toward humor writing tend to be funny in a more cerebral or subtle way.

Julie: I feel like I'm not always quick on my feet with thinking of things in the moment like some people are. I think of things later, which works better for writing. Some writers are really fast, they can write topical pieces quickly. I feel like I'm kind of slow.

Janine: I don't write topical pieces so much either. My husband says my strength is not topical pieces, but more evergreen pieces.

Julie: Yeah. Evergreen or seasonal pieces.

Janine: I just got a 20-page booklet from my bank telling me they’re giving me simplified banking. Why did they have to send me this much information to explain how something is simpler? And I still don't understand. It probably just means they’re going to charge me more fees. So it’s likely that I’m going to write a satire about this. I should also say for the record that you are one of my go-to people for giving me feedback on my short humor pieces, for which I cannot thank you enough. The art of giving feedback is something that not everyone gets! Some people are just like, yeah, it's good, it's funny, but I want to know where it isn’t working and how it can be better.

Julie: It’s so important to get good feedback.

Janine: To bring it back around to parenting again, I don't know how anybody can get through raising children without having a sense of humor. I know you and I both channel this into our writing.

Julie: Definitely, it's helped me so much to have a sense of humor about parenting, even with the frustrations. Sometimes I see the humor after the fact, but eventually, I do see it.

Janine: That was one of the things that got me back into humor writing. When I was in my 20s, I had this weird, humorous zine that I wrote. And I wrote a few things here and there. I actually had an advice column at one point for this outlet that didn't pay me at all. So I wrote things, including some funny things. But then I had a pretty long hiatus from doing any kind of writing. My dad died and then I gave birth to my kid, so, you know, I was just dealing with life and death situations. And at one point I had a pretty stressful job with a boss who was not great. Then I wrote a funny piece about my kid and potty training — and people loved it. I had been dealing with all this heavy stuff and I started writing more funny things just for stress relief. Then everybody was like, this is so you, this is really your voice, you’re good at this. So I threw myself into developing a more humor-focused output. I did feel like it was my authentic voice and my niche and what I was good at.

Julie: I have a very similar trajectory. I'd written a little bit of humor before becoming a parent and then similarly took some time off after having both kids. Then I wanted to write again, and I felt like parenting frustrations was a good way to channel humor. I wrote a piece for McSweeney's, one of the first ones after I'd gotten back into writing, and it did really well. It’s so fun when you write something and someone else responds to it that they feel that way, too.

Janine: You don't only write about parenting stuff, and I don't only write about parenting stuff. You wrote that one piece about fruit that I thought was so funny.

Julie: The one about how to pick a good melon. It’s impossible to do from the outside despite what people tell you. Yeah, I like having a range of stuff to write about.

Janine: What are some of your favorite topics to write about or what are things that inspire you to write humorous things?

Julie: I know you and I have both done writing-related humor, stuff about writers in general, and frustrations in the writing process. Then there’s the funny everyday stuff, self-deprecating humor, just the quirky things we all do.

Janine: I've also gotten in on the fruit and vegetable humor because I wrote a piece about being in a CSA. We've got the market cornered on fruit and veg humor. What's the funniest fruit?

Julie: Well, bananas are the cliche. I think 80% of books about humor writing have a banana on the cover.

[Janine holds up a book she has on her desk that is about humor writing and has a banana on the cover.]

Julie: What's funny is I really don't like bananas. I like berries, blackberries are maybe my favorite. You know what’s kind of a funny fruit? Dragon fruit.

Janine: Yeah! What’s dragon-like about that fruit?

Julie: I know. It's a very unusual fruit.

Janine: I know you also have your Substack about humor writing and you're doing a humor writing challenge in January.

Julie: You were kind enough to contribute a prompt for that. I like writing challenges but they're usually like, write 1,000 words a day or write a novel in one month. I find them hard to keep up with, so I thought it'd be fun to do one where you just write one funny line. I think that's a good practice for me. You can write more, but let's say we're just gonna write one funny line a day for two weeks. That's doable.

Janine: Do you have any humor writers you try to emulate?

Julie: I don't know if this is the person I most want to emulate, but one person I remember, even as a kid thinking he was funny, is Jack Handey. I remember watching his “Deep Thoughts” on SNL, and he was super funny, super different. I like that kind of dry humor. He still writes pieces for The New Yorker, and they make me laugh. So that's one influence.

Janine: You and I also both teach writing. I recently taught a humor writing class where it just so happened that everyone in the class was a woman. And I was like, okay, good. We can form a coven and take down the patriarchy in addition to learning about humor writing.

Julie: It's so funny. I feel like a majority of the people in my classes are women. I don't know if that's true across the board, but that's how it works for me.

Janine: The men in my classes are always great because it’s a naturally self-selecting group. They're guys who are not going to think women aren't funny. They’re guys who are willing to take a writing class and learn humor writing from a woman. So the jerks are not going to enter the building.

Julie: You’re right. I think I've had that experience, too. There are two types of people who are not that helpful in learning humor writing. One is obviously people who think women aren't funny, and the other is someone who thinks humor can't be taught. But I think you can actually get better at humor.

Janine: I think so, too. I deliberately studied the craft. I took classes, I attended events, I read books on the topic, I wrote a ton. I got feedback from critique partners. I've done a lot of that stuff and I think the proof is in the pudding — because since I started specifically trying to get better at humor writing, I’ve been published in a lot of top-tier humor outlets and had a humorous book published.

Julie: I was talking to another friend who’s done a bit of standup and she also did The Moth. Some people think they can just get up and wing it. I think that's what people think about comedians, too, that they’re just getting up there and improvising, but they're not. They’re working on it and writing it in advance. It can seem like that with humor writing, too, but it's not like you're just throwing whatever down on the page.

Janine: I think it's a combination of innate ability and honing that skill. It's just like anything else, whatever you put your effort into is going to give you results. I always say to my son that you're rarely going to get worse at something by doing it more.

Julie: Yeah, totally. My kids have started analyzing humor, and I do that too.

Janine: I think there are far worse things that you could do as a parent than to be the parent who jokes. If my kid ever groans at one of my jokes, I’m like, hey, I could be a parent who yells instead of jokes. Sorry, I joke and I sing in public sometimes. My son makes little jokes and puns and sometimes he'll do puns with his vocabulary words and stuff, and I'm always like, good job. Or sometimes he'll make jokes with ‘90s hip-hop or punk rock references. I’m like, man, I'm your target audience for these jokes! I think he's very funny.

Julie: I know, my kids are funny, too. Kids are funny!

Janine: I also think that humor is such a great way to defuse tension. So I think it's a good tool for kids to have in their arsenal. It's a great way to break the ice especially, I think, if you are a bit of an introvert.

Julie: Definitely. With my kids, we've already talked about not punching down, and not making a joke at another kid’s expense. But yeah, for sure, I think jokes can help with social stuff.

Sign up for Julie’s One Funny Line Humor Writing Challenge!

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