What makes a winning humor poem? An interview with Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest judge Lauren Singer
ANNIE: Hello, and welcome to my blog. Today we have a very special guest, Lauren Singer, the assistant judge of our Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest. Lauren is also a judge of our North Street Book Prize and she's a past judge of our Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest. She's had work published in many magazines and journals, she's a former Honorable Mention winner of our Wergle Flomp contest in 2011, and her book-length poetry manuscript, Raised Ranch, will be published by Game Over Books in August of 2025. Lauren, thank you so much for being here. Welcome.
LAUREN: Thank you for having me.
First of all, a lot of us are curious about just the experience of being a humor poetry contest judge. I mean, poetry contest is unique enough, but a humor poetry contest? You must see a lot of interesting things.
You know, what makes some something funny has to be about the voice of the writer, because anything can be funny. I mean, you can write about the most serious components of your life and turn them into funny, and I think that the way we do that is by zooming in on the specific and making that relatable.
I think for me, funny is a humanistic quality, because there's so much darkness in our world, and, laughter being medicine, which I believe is a real thing, we have to find ways to relate to each other. For me, that's making something really absurd, really dark, really grievous. Something that we can laugh at, because it is a connector. It's like connective tissue.
There are obviously some entries, several hundred per year, that really are delightful and that you end up choosing. So which really delight you, and how do you know when you're really delighted by a poem?
It's slice-of-life stuff that really gets me. It's like zooming in on something that is mundane, or that we encounter on an everyday basis, and making it ours. You know, like sharing it in this way that is personal, and ridiculous, and touching. The poems that I find the funniest are also the ones that like, pull on my heartstrings a little bit, and that's sort of like a magic-potion-sort-of equation for me.
Two of my favorites this year were actually about the very specific experience of pulling over to the side of the road having to pee, and being caught in the act of that by someone, in one case I think the police. And then in another, having to do it in front of your family because there's no other option. I think it was from the perspective of someone very like poised and curt. And it's those sorts of things, the things that we encounter on an everyday basis, that all of us can relate to, and most of us don't think to write a poem about. Those are the things that I think really stick out to me.
There are a couple of those this year on the winning entries page, like "I'd Like to Donate It to the Library," about a woman who's just donating a lot of random stuff to the library. I definitely recommend that people read that. There's a poem in the Honorable Mentions called "I'm Living Laughing and Loving."
Oh my god, there was one this year, I think it was about having a really harsh internal critic, and this writer made a reference to the Nicholas Cage remake of Wicker Man, and then just wrote in there somewhere, "Not the bees." And I laughed so hard because it's those little Easter eggs that I love. It's like the poet is saying, "You have to dig deep into the thing that I'm referencing here, and you also have to know that it's funny without me telling you." That's another big trope, that people are constantly submitting poems about why they're funny, and telling us, and trying to convince us that they're funny, when someone else is subtly just speaking to their own life experience, or speaking to something observational.
I also really love observational narrative poems. That always gets me, where we don't have to do any work of being convinced, we're just sharing in an observation with someone, and that's all.
A really good humor poet kind of knows what their audience is going to find funny, and also knows whether the audience has the references or not and is able to just go directly into that super specific territory, just like two friends who are saying this goofy line together that they've been saying for the past twenty years that doesn't make sense to anybody else. It's that sense of intimacy and trust. It's automatic.
Absolutely. I think there is. And that's what I love about poems like that, is that there is an implicit sense of trust that is not there with those other poems that are like, "Hey, I need you to know that what you're about to read is going to be really funny! In fact, this whole poem is about why I am!" Versus this very sort of niche trope that is in the internal fabric of this chaotic world that we're all weaving together.
And one thing I want to say about that specifically is that I'm—as much as we try to not be biased, I'm a person in the world and I have my own biases. I think I was twenty-three when I submitted to Wergle Flomp, and I started judging when I was in my mid-twenties. And the poems that were my favorites back then have certainly changed over the course of a decade. I think I would veer towards poems about online dating, which there's always tons of, or being really broke and not being able to afford your rent, which like, I can still relate to, but it's a little different these days.
And then the ones that I'm relating to more now are [different.] I used to just completely glaze over any "my body is changing because I'm aging" kind of poems. I still don't love those, because there's a lot of, I want to say, like, harshness and ugliness in those poems, but the poems that really embrace aging, embrace, like coming to terms with the seasons of your life, those I tend to love.
One of my favorites this year, I forget what it was called, but it was something similar to that book, A Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, but it was a mid-to-late-thirties guide to bird watching. It was about this new experience of being in your mid-to-late-thirties and really appreciating birds in a way that you never had before, and you're like, "Ah, like suddenly, I can suddenly hear their call and know who's speaking to me! And I really want a crow to leave me a shiny bauble!" I'm like, I feel that so hard.
It's like those sort of, yeah, those inside jokes that I think I'm going to relate to in a different way a much younger reader is going to relate to, or Jendi might relate to, being a bit older than me. So it's subjective, also, the experience of judging.
Yes, and this is why we have the poetry archives on Winning Writers. Not just the poetry archives, but all the winning entries from all of our past contests are still published and visible on winningwriters.com. And we have bios of the judges, we're very transparent about who the judges are and what they do. Contestants can read all the entries that you guys have selected in the past, but they can also go and read your stuff if they want, to know what you're into, the kind of stuff that really makes you laugh or cry.
I always say this in every interview with everybody, but a message to the potential entrants is, just do your research. [Entering a literary contest doesn't have to be] a shot in the dark. You really have an opportunity to kind of know the judges, and get specific with the judges, and have those inside joke moments, even if you've never met. So think about who you're writing for. And I hope this interview also will help people to just get a better sense of that.
I'm always like, "Butter me up! Appeal to me!" Like send me some X-Files poetry or whatever! If you can find an encounter with everyday life, and make that funny, that's going to strike me every time.
A lot of people who submit poems are probably talking about a lot of the same things. Do you find that to be true?
Yes, yes. The zeitgeist is very much about what's going on in the world, and that thematically enters in every single year. So election cycles tend to give us an overpowering amount of political poems. Covid was a dark landscape of people on all sides of the spectrum, of their thoughts and beliefs about Covid.
It was about Covid, but it was also about people tending to write about the same stuff that we also tend to see everywhere in social media. Like toilet paper, for example, was a huge subject.
Toilet paper, the bodily functions in the lower half of the body.
Well, I mean, we like a good fart, we like diarrhea in Wergle Flomp. We're not against those things, but in the Covid context it got a bit repetitive.
And I tire of the coprophilic poems after a while, where I'm just like, how much more can I read about someone's gastric issues? I lose steam.
Yeah, if there's no original angle, it's a bit difficult. Or with the political stuff, the two candidates that people have been focusing on—the age, the orangeness of one of the candidates, you see that all the time [in the entries].
So I actually included that in my Wergle notes that I wrote this year. I banned any more poems that included "rhymes with orange," and so much of that was in reference to one of these candidates. Also the word "orange" in poems at this point, unless we're talking like, the actual, like peeling of an orange.
To your very good list I would also add social media tropes, just the stuff that's hot on social media, the different hashtags and stuff. That stuff can be current, but if it's too in the public eye, it kind of loses the novelty.
The political horizon is a huge one, like major news events. Oh, and so much AI this year. So much AI, so much ChatGPT came into the poems. I think people write a lot about aging, and marriage, and child-rearing and raising. And thematically I think we get thousands of poems about things people hate about their bodies, things people want to change about their spouses. Those tend to kind of blur together because they're so en masse.
There are a lot of entries about coffee. There are a lot of entries that start out as a love poem, and the person rhapsodizes on a subject, and then at the end it gets revealed that it's coffee, or "my car," or "my dog," or something like that.
At this point I completely just glaze over certain kinds of parodies. There are so many, "It was the night before something," and the same is true for the parodies of Robert Frost, and "with apologies to…" etc., etc. You have to really win me over for me to give that a second glance.
I think a lot of entrants also confuse humor with other good feelings, so there are a lot of poems we get, for example, love poetry, and some of it's ambiguous whether it's a humor poem or not. People are enumerating the things they like about another person and how they make them feel, and it's definitely light-hearted, it's definitely kind and nice and pleasant, but is it humor poetry? What do you think about when you see entries like that?
It's funny, because I think that we get a lot of parodies of that poem "What I'm made of," like the recipe for "what makes me, me," basically, and I never know if those are intentionally supposed to be funny. Sometimes there's a punchline and it's very obvious that they are; other times it's like you said, it's just this sort of description of love and joy, and I want to be like, "That's really great, I love that you love these things. Now tell me how I can relate to that in a way that is going to make me laugh."
In some ways I think people just want to kind of share the abundance of the things that they love, and I think that there is light-heartedness. I never get mad at those poems…but it loses the plot a little bit when there isn't an invitation to poke fun. The ones that work are these really zoomed in niche descriptions of something that you love really deeply that someone else might not.
This is a silly one, but there were like lots of like odes to… what are those robo vacuums called?
Roomba!
Right. Every so often I would encounter one that really made me laugh, because [the robot] was personified by these characteristics that someone might want in a partner or pet. It's this description of something that's like super helpful and everyday basic and still inviting us in, to be like, "Have you ever fallen in love with a vacuum? Even just a little bit?" And it's like, yeah, I have. That's the part where I want to relate to that, and be like, yes, that's awkward.
Like you say, it's all about the context. Maybe a person is describing themselves in this poem like "What am I made of," and maybe to them it's hysterical because it's the opposite of who they actually are, so they're writing it laughing, like, "Haha, you know, this is really ironic" or something. But there's no way for you as a judge to know that, because it's not written down on the page.
So I would add for people, along with "Do the research on the judges" also remember, all they can see of you is the words that you put on the page. So if you're writing a poem about spiritual enlightenment or you're writing a poem just describing something you really like, and you are thinking to yourself, oh this is great, this is so funny, remember: If it depends on context that's still inside your head or heart to be funny, Lauren and Jendi can't see it, and they don't know. So remember to leave that context on the page.
I would say the same is true when you're inciting all of this joy into your poem, the same is also true for like really disturbing commentary. You know, every so often we get a poem that's clearly supposed to be funny, but it's describing like a murder or something really, really gruesome. And there have been some amazing poems about end of life and chronic illness and cancer, and things like that, and that is not what I mean here. I mean very specifically like a violent scenario that is supposed to be hilarious. That's never going to get me. Like, that's never—I'm never going to find that funny. There's just no world in which you describing murdering your ex is going to make me laugh, just across the board.
I was going to bring up that exact topic, because we do get a certain number of poems each year that are violent. Revenge fantasies, abuse fantasies, like doing like any kind of abuse, physical abuse, on other people. You were kind of getting in this direction earlier, when you were talking about the body image poems, because there can be these very ugly things creeping into these poems, like this self-hatred. And desire for revenge—you know, not a desire for revenge as in, "Oh, the person who wants revenge is so ridiculous" kind of idea, it's really this hate-driven desire for revenge that this person wants to enact on the page.
My assistants and I, we go through a lot of these, and we write an email to every single person who submits a humor poem to the contest when we think this is a serious poem and not a humor poem. And you would be shocked at the number of times that we get emails back when we've contacted someone who's written a very, very serious or disturbing poem, and they say, "This is funny! How could you not think this is funny?" and I never know how to take that. How does it make you feel that people across the world are entering a humor poetry contest with some very, very dark and serious stuff?
I'm of two minds about this. My one thought that I used to think was true across the board, was that because we are an international contest and because we are a free contest, that sometimes people just miss the mark and they don't read the instructions, and they're like, "Oh, free contest! It's so rare that we have a free contest! I'm just going to submit." And you know, either "I don't know that this is supposed to be a humor contest," or "I don't care and I'm banking on the fact that this is good and should be shared, and I want to just put it somewhere."
I think that there are certainly hundreds of people who do that, right, they just don't read the instructions. And I also think that there are probably lots and lots of people who know that their poem is going to be read regardless, and just need to share with someone.
Jendi and I have talked about this [and wondered whether there might be a way] to reach out and say, like, "Hey," especially for the ones that were really poignant and good, and say, "There's a reader for this somewhere. It's not this contest, but we want you to keep doing this." There were so many times that I wanted to reach out with support, and be like, "This isn't the place to put this, but there is a place to put this." And also, there are certainly the ones that are super dark and painful, but also have overt humor, and those tend to be some of my favorites.
Yes, It's such a fine line, because it is all about the specificity. And one of the reasons that humans invented humor in the first place, everyone knows, is because we need to escape from these really crazy and dark situations that we find ourselves in our lives. Humor is in reaction to pain and grief and loss and horror. Humor bubbles up in the human spirit. But when only the dark parts of the situation are getting in [to the poem], it's maybe not quite to that point where humor can be found in that situation, in the poem.
You're a poet and a lot of your poetry is also informed by grief and loss and some very, very dark and very, very human things. But whenever I read your poetry, like on your Instagram account, I have noticed that they also have a lot of humor in them. I always find myself with these really complex and rewarding emotions when I read your work, because as a poet you do the leg work to find all these different angles of the situation and bring them together in very specific and immersive language. So how do you do that, and, in your opinion as a poet and a judge, how can sadness and humor coexist in poetry?
It's such a good question, and it's a two-part question, so I'll start with the personal and then I'll relate it to judging in the second half. I feel grateful that as a trauma survivor of a diverse spectrum, I have always had writing as an outlet. There has never been a time in my life that I didn't have a notebook and access to this sort of imagined world that I could just jump right into and make mine. So I feel like that has been such a precious gift and necessity of my life for survival.
And then as I got a little bit older, encountering things like having a chronically sick parent, and then divorce, and a sister who passed away, there was so much meat. And I was like, "I can't keep writing about all of this darkness and not accessing the humor in it."
As a little kid, I realized that if I'm going to be more palatable, I need to be pleasing. And the easiest access to that when you're like a traumatized little kid is to be funny. And so that sort of came naturally. I was like, "If I just talk about how bummed out I am all the time, and how, you know, sad my life is, no one's gonna want to hang out with me." But if I'm like, "You know, hey, I'm really bummed out, and also aren't we all kind of bummed out, and don't we all need to relate to that in some capacity?" That is how I have sort of fused my connection to people, and also how I have become a writer.
I had a mentor in my late teens/early twenties, a sociologist named Philip Mabry, who was one of my professors and my adviser in school. He really kind of recognized that in me, and he introduced me to the comedy of Margaret Cho in my late teens. He said, "This is someone who has learned how to make the abject upright." The really wonderful comedians in our world are the ones who are not necessarily poking fun at everyone else, they're reaching into their own trauma and their own sadness and their own gifts, and then they're just pulling them out, and being like, "Here they are, do you see them? All right, now I want you to laugh at them."
It's inviting, it's like an invitation to be like, "Here is all of the muck and the mess of who I am, and this is why it's okay to laugh at it," as opposed to someone, you know, singling you out and directing all of their anger at you without the invitation, which we all know, you know, is something that can be true.
In my own writing of my recent past, it's a lot of reflections after the loss of my son in 2021. That was such a tremendous loss for me that I was like, "Oh, this is it, this is the end of being funny. There's no more humor left in my world, it's over." And of course, I think anyone would think about that being true for them after they went through something really significant.
But I had this sort of an aha moment one day, I think maybe six months after my loss. I was going to a drive-up, a Taco Bell, and I was ordering like five soft tacos for myself. I realized that like five soft tacos is like too many tacos for one person on a normal basis, and I panicked. This was not a funny moment. I want to just say, this was a sad time where I was like, "I'm just gonna like eat tacos and cry and not think about my life." But in that moment I like, picked up the phone and pretended that I was on the phone with someone that I wasn't. There was no one on the phone. And meanwhile, like, my child just died, I'm newly divorced, all of these things are happening, and I'm just like, "Hi honey, oh yeah, I got—I ordered you your—you want the chicken to go, right? Yeah, okay, I'll see you later."
Then I'm leaving the parking lot and I'm just like, "That's hilarious." That encounter with the deepest darkest well of my grief and the fact that I just pretended to be ordering tacos for a partner that does not exist in this moment because I was too embarrassed to let the person on the other side of the drive-through speaker know that I'm going to go home and binge eat tacos and cry in my beans—I was like, okay, I can write funny poems again, I can infuse those two things. And that became a poem in the upcoming book called "Taco Tuesday."
If I don't find a way to remedy some of those dark edges with some humor then there's like nothing left. So it took some time to be funny again, but I think that there is humor in the darkest, darkest things, and that is survival, I think, for me, and, I think, for a lot of people who write or make art of any kind.
So it sounds like for you there's an intrinsic relationship between sadness and humor. But I also am hearing something that is very important, I think, for a lot of our entrants to know, which is that part when you were talking about from an early age you realized that you had to be palatable. Of course, as a trauma survivor or anybody in any kind of minority or minoritized situation, being palatable can be a very loaded and also traumatized thing, but in the comment that you made I just feel this very poet-esque regard for the reader. And for you even at that young age the reader was already there. You realized it's not just about you and your experiences in your art.
In life we all are living through our experiences and our experience is just for us, more than anybody else. But when you take the step to write poetry or any kind of art and show it to other people, it's always including that other person. When we see a lot of these entries that are about those other positive experiences, like you know, love, or spiritual enlightenment, or seeking, or when we see those really, really serious poems, I get a sense that a lot of these poems are written to help people process their own experiences, but they're not necessarily written with that other person in mind, that other person on the end, whether it be the judge or another intended reader.
Absolutely, and I think there's a difference between your journal and the poem that you want read. My journal is very, very different than the poetry that I share on social media or I try to submit for publication. I think there's a question that you have to ask yourself between, and that's like, "Do I want this to be read or not? Do I want people to share in this experience?" And I think that's where the sort of palatability comes from, because I think even as a little kid I was like, "I want, you know, people at school to like me," right, so like my persona at school is going to be different than the introspective little kid at home who's writing in their diary right trying to be Harriet the Spy.
I don't think that we owe it to anyone to be palatable in our subjective experiences, that is entirely ours. But when we're making art to be shared, I think we have to ask ourselves, like, "How do we want to hit our reader or our observer?" And you know, contextually, that could be in a multitude of ways, and being palatable can mean many different things, but I think in a humor poetry contest it's that fusion of human subjective experience and poignancy with that objective experience of like, "Other people can observe this and relate to it and laugh at it with me."
Again, it's an invitation into this inner world that I want to share with you, not that you're walking in on and I have to explain myself. That doesn't strike chords, generally. That tends to feel like, "Oh, sorry, sorry that I walked in on that," versus "Oh my God, me too! I've also been caught in that place!"
Going back to the theme of your poetry for a second, you're a Wergle veteran, because you had this hilarious poem called "Regarding Eggplant" in 2011. I urge all the viewers to read that poem, and I'm going to link to it in the description of this video so you'll be able to read it. But I also just want to ask, like, as kind of a case study of a successful Wergle Flomp poem: Where did you get your inspiration? What was your process writing that?
Again, it came from a dark place. I had just been broken up with. I was twenty-three when I wrote that poem, so I was really young, and I was also freshly out of a job. There was just so much happening in my life that was very synonymous with being, like, a twenty-three-year-old person in the world and fending for themselves for the first time, really.
That poem didn't just sort of appear out of nowhere, it came from a lot of different things. It came from, you know, going to the grocery store and feeling like, "Okay, well, I'm, you know, I'm single, and I have no job, and I have nothing to do with myself, like, I should treat myself to something really nice," and then like looking at the produce, and like feeling more sad, being like, "I don't know how to cook, I don't know how to, like, I don't know to take care of myself, like, what am I supposed to do here?"
That sort of evolved because a friend came to visit me and he brought me eggplants from his garden, and one of the eggplants had a nose. Like, it had like, you know, the top of the eggplant, which like looked like a little hat, and it had this growth defect which looked like a nose. And I was like, "I'm never gonna to be able to cut this eggplant, I'm never gonna be able to cook it, it's just gonna like, have to rot on my counter, because I like, I've named him, and I love him, and there's no world in which I can imagine, you know burning him alive."
So it evolved from that place, dumped, jobless, eggplant, like being completely out of my mind with what it means to be a grown-up and take care of myself. It's like my coming of age. I think it happened all in that poem.
I just love the story, I love the poem, and I hope that everybody will go read it.
If you read that poem, read the book Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, because that's where I was in my life, and I never knew that book existed until I wrote that poem and people started giving it to me. It was such a perfect compliment.
We have to be wrapping up, but before we do, do you have any advice for the entrants who are now preparing poetry for the contest this year?
I think that there is something to be said about appealing to the zeitgeist and what's going on in the world. We all experience the objectivity of being a person in the world that's consumed by social media and things being pummeled at us from all angles, and so many of the poems that we get are about that. But they're not about the version of us in those moments. There are a lot of generalizations. If you just take that one step further and write about how that impacted you, or how something in your life changed, I think there's a lot of richness.
Just as an example, algorithms. A lot of people wrote very generally about algorithms, and it inspired me, reading all of these poems, to write about algorithms, but the very specific things that the internet was trying to appeal to me. So I got tons of advertisements for Bog Witch t-shirts and like, a bog witch, being like, this like lowly spinster in her garden making potions. And I'm just like, "Oh the internet knows my name!" I got all of these Fleetwood Mac advertisements. Clearly, the internet thinks that I am a spinster witch alone in my house. Like, it's not wrong, right?
I didn't see a lot of those deeply personalized poems about, like, "What like is the internet advertising to you personally," as opposed to, "I'm so tired of going online and all the algorithms." We all go through that, so what is it about your life that resonates with that experience? And why are you frustrated? Because if you go one step deeper into that swamp, we're all gonna laugh at it with you. Take one step further into the muck of your own life and find something that resonates, that is very specific to you, but something that all of us can relate to. And that is true of formal poetry, of rhyming poetry, of limericks, you know, like, we get them all, and there's room for all of it.
Viewers take note: Take one step further into the muck of your life! Well, thank you so much, Lauren. It's been an absolute pleasure to be talking with you. I'm so happy that we have all these amazing concrete pieces of advice from the reader who really, really matters—that is, the judge of the Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest.
Thank you so much for having me! It's a pleasure to see you and to talk to our Werglers, because we don't get an opportunity to do that enough.
Categories: Advice for Writers, Essays on Writing
