What Makes Elisa Gabbert Laugh

I don't know exactly how long I've been reading the poet, essayist, and critic Elisa Gabbert, but it's long enough that every so often I have a thought about the world that surprises me with its clarity and precision, its graceful encapsulation of some small or large human experience, and after turning it over in my head for a moment I'll realize: "That's not my thought. That's something Elisa Gabbert wrote in a poem or essay I read who knows how many years ago." Which is one of my favorite experiences of literature, because it reminds me that a piece of writing is alive. Someone carved out a piece of their mind and graciously allowed me to make it part of my own; maybe, later, I'll give it to someone else. I guess this is how other people feel about the riffs and bits in their favorite comedy podcasts.

Gabbert is the author of four poetry collections and three essay collections, most recently Any Person Is the Only Self, and she's currently working on My Void, a book about holes (FSG, 2028). Her work is funny and curious, bloggy and philosophical; the lines most deeply embedded in my psyche are usually from Normal Distance, like this passage in the poem "Stop Thinking & End Your Problems":

I think we expect too much of people, who are mostly suffering and confused.

I think we make the mistake of thinking that “history” is truer than experience is true.

I think “grateful to be alive” is a feeling you can maintain for one or two days, tops.

I think every well-meaning critique-of-war film will eventually turn into “explosions look beautiful.”

I think if you read a poem, then forget you’ve read it, and then much later you read it again, it really does get better.

I think maybe sadness and happiness are alike, but unhappiness is different.

Those of you who are writers and/or who enjoy thinking about writing, as I do, may also enjoy her lecture 30 Ideas About Writing Nonfiction. I especially like this one, which seems a helpful way of thinking about comedy, at least inasmuch as it helps me understand why I didn't care much for that Dan Mintz special I wrote about a while ago:

19. “Good writing” is always surprising in some way. We’re surprised when the writing subverts our expectations, whether they’re conscious or unconscious. You don’t want to sound like an algorithm; you don’t want the next word to always be the first or second or third most likely word in that sequence. Likewise for the next sentence and the next paragraph. But you wouldn’t want every move or transition to be surprising, either. This just creates an expectation of incoherence. Non sequiturs at length are not surprising.

Okay, enough vamping. I'm happy to have Gabbert in today's installment of What Makes Me Laugh, an interview series with funny and interesting people about their favorite funny and interesting things. We discuss some of her favorite writers, the way she approaches humor in her own work, the podcasts that got her through the pandemic, and more. Enjoy:

Your annual reading lists have led me to so many funny (and not funny) writers I’ve come to love, like Javier Marias and Elif Batuman and Sommer Browning. So first let me just say thank you for that, and then second, can you tell me about some of your favorite funny writers? What about their work appeals to you?

Some writers are funny because they’re willing to be more outlandish than I am. Nicholson Baker often writes things I’d be too embarrassed to write. Martin Amis is way more of an asshole than I’m comfortable being, at least in print. I think Martin Amis is one of the funniest writers alive or not alive (I’m aware he’s now in the latter category). I really like to be surprised—no great writing without surprise—and funniness usually falls along that spectrum, from mildly unexpected to shocking. Conquering shame, not needing to be universally liked—these are important funniness skills.

I just searched the giant doc where I keep all my reading notes for “funny” and “hilarious,” and here’s some of what I found from the past couple of years: Endgame by Beckett, The Information by the aforementioned Amis, and Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark are all unbelievably funny. I’m very attracted to UK humor, which is often both intellectual and goofy. Graham Foust’s new poetry book (Close Second Person) is very funny, and last year I loved Hedgie Choi’s Salvage and Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma. The greats, the classics, are generally funny (though not Les Miserables, in my memory). If a book isn’t funny at all I’m probably not going to finish unless it’s brilliant. (Thank you for reading my lists, by the way!) 

I’ve recently articulated for myself that the sort of funny writing I’m drawn to isn’t exactly jokey but feels like someone very funny is talking to me. There’s a sort of left-field thinking or a skepticism/naivete/both that naturally leads to surprising observations, reevaluated wisdoms, just plain weird sentences, etc. I think that’s part of what draws me to your poetry and essays, and it’s also what I love so much about the Selin novels or, say, Mark Leidner’s poems, not that they aren’t also great joke writers. How would you describe your own sense of humor? What are some of the works of art—or the people—who shaped it?

Surprise, absurdity, the faux naiveté (or even stupidity) you sometimes find in James Tate or Kenneth Koch, overstatement, repetition, inappropriately strong emotion, pointless cuteness, recklessness or self-destruction, deathless obsession (Kafka) … there’s a way that funniness is like good acting, it’s unexpectedness that is also believable, natural, not forced. An instinct/impulse. I’ve adored Steve Martin all my life—I don’t think I’m anything like Steve Martin to be clear, but I’m inspired by his combination of, or variation between, seriousness/restraint and over-the-top buffoonery. My older brother surely shaped my sense of humor. When I was a little kid he regularly made me laugh so hard I peed in my pants. I think our sense of humor must form at a very young age; maybe it’s even genetic. So I can’t say that books in particular played a huge role there.

It’s funny—I think my older brother shaped my sense of humor too, but it was more through the books that I got to read when he was done with them, like his Calvin and Hobbes and Far Side collections, or the Jack Handey Deep Thoughts books that I now see as aphoristic poetry. And those were books our parents bought him, which does make me wonder about the genetics question…

Anyway. Since you mentioned Steve Martin, I will take the opportunity to pivot to more capital-C Comedy. What are the funny movies or TV shows that never get old for you, or that had an early influence? Are there any other comedians you love?

I almost mentioned Calvin and Hobbes! My brother had all of those too. I also loved Deep Thoughts, but I think I bought those myself.

I still love a lot of stupid ‘80s comedies—the first Vacation. Space Balls. Early Tom Hanks—his physical comedy was genius. The Money Pit! Shelley Long is incredible too. We had tons of VHS tapes when I was a kid, lots of movies I watched over and over again. We had this Weird Al movie which was like a combination of a mockumentary biopic and a bunch of his music videos; nobody I’ve ever met in my life has seen it outside of my family. I don’t exactly recommend it. I love this sort of lesser known Woody Allen movie called Love & Death. I love Monty Python & the Holy Grail. I love the Christmas episode of Black Adder. I love Kids in the Hall. My husband and I both love Clue.

I like standup as an art form but I don’t keep up with it. I’d love to see more live comedy. I think live comedy and theater are interesting even when they’re bad, because you’re part of it. You’re implicated.

Is funniness important to you in your writing? Do you approach “being funny,” whatever that entails, differently in prose vs. poetry?

It is important to me, but I don’t think I’m like, a hilarious writer. It’s more that I always try to write with wit. As if to be a sparkling dinner guest. But I’m never inserting jokes on purpose—it’s more (apropos of your last question) that my writing is some combination of how I think and speak, and in real life I’m making little jokes all the time.

Genre-wise, I think it’s probably easier for me to be funny in poetry. One reason is that I’m usually writing poems with performance in mind—I write them in the voice I read my poetry with, so I feel I have good control over the “delivery,” even when the poem is just lying there on the page. The form of a poem is very instructive in terms of pacing, and I love poets who feel almost like stand-up comics. (See Mark Leidner and Sommer Browning, who you’ve already mentioned. Matthew Klane is another poet whose performance style is hypnotically comical; he also makes music that cracks me up, it sounds like if Leonard Cohen were funny.) Second, in my experience, a poem goes through fewer rounds of editing before being published—so the initial surprise of a funny line is more resistant to damage or erosion. And further, my poems don’t have as many competing goals as my prose. Whatever I’m writing, I’m trying to be interesting and usually at least a little bit funny, but my prose (since I write nonfiction) also has to convey information, include facts and quotes, avoid moral error, etc… I hold myself to a different set of standards there. 

Are there any facts or characters you’ve encountered in your reading that made you laugh, whether in a ha-ha or an oh-shit way? How about the book you’re writing now—is there anything funny about holes?

Every time I tell someone I’m writing a book about holes, they laugh, so they must be. The last time I laughed out loud at history was when John showed me various engravings and depictions of the defenestrations of Prague. Facts that strike me are often somewhere between funny and horrific, the hole zone. Ha-ha/oh-shit in your formulation. Last week we had a really epic plumbing disaster and I learned that our sewer line goes out 100 feet before it gets to the city sewer. The whole length of that pipe is our responsibility. Every wad of toilet paper we flush has to travel to the basement and then down 100 feet of pipe, around other people’s tree roots getting into our line, before it becomes the city’s problem. I guess that’s kind of funny. You don’t want to know how much it cost to get that pipe cleaned out. Owning things is fucking terrifying.

I appreciated how much you wrote about the early pandemic in Any Person Is the Only Self. I sometimes feel starved for thoughtful writing about that period, which seems to me a time of extreme social realignment that many of us experienced in relative isolation. In grad school, I brought a poem about Covid to workshop, and my professor remarked that we all went through it, so nobody wants to read about it—but I do, I do! So I like to ask people when I can: what were the works of art that sustained you during lockdown? You mention an addiction to interview podcasts in Any Person: any favorites?

You’re not the first person I’ve heard say that! The whole idea that we must not write about Covid feels like some kind of mass delusion. (I just read a good book about the pandemic, incidentally—Transcription.)

During 2020 and stretches of 2021, I was listening to a lot of Other Ppl (Brad Listi’s podcast), Between the Covers, and this may be shocking, but I listened to the New York Times Book Review podcast every single week back when Pamela Paul was doing it. I know, I know, Pamela Paul! But she was really good at that podcast! Incredibly, she never read the books—because they were new and she knew her listeners wouldn’t have read them yet either. There were a few others, some of which are now defunct, like I’m a Writer But. I really overdosed on that format though, because I rarely listen to writer interviews these days, though I still like interview podcasts when the people talking are in some other world than mine, like philosophy or physics.

I just consulted my reading lists again to see what I was reading in 2020/2021. The only book I remembered off the top of my head was Rebecca, because it was the first novel I could focus on after the first month or so of lockdown destroyed my concentration, equanimity etc. 2020: I don’t know, I think I just wanted to be miserable. I read a ton of poetry that year. My favorite reads were Sebald and Yiyun Li. Dark! 2021: A little happier? The best times I had with books were Franzen’s Crossroads, rereading two Christopher Pike books from my youth, and Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, which I still think about all the time. I thought I learned of its existence from a Louise Glück poem, but later I realized it’s in Annie Hall, which I’ve seen like twenty times. The brain is so weird.

Can you tell me about a time you completely lost it laughing? 

Good icebreaker question. One time in college, I was driving across a bridge in Louisiana with my roommates Kate and David, and David suddenly said, in an announcer voice, “Now, introducing—Miss River Bridge!” Kate and I looked up at the same time and saw a big sign that said MISS RIVER BRIDGE. We both totally lost it. I’ve certainly totally lost it laughing many times since then, but it was the first thing that came to mind that I can explain and which isn’t offensive.