What Makes Writer & Filmmaker Courtney Bush Laugh

A few weeks ago I read one of my favorite books I’ve read this year: the poet, filmmaker, and childcare worker Courtney Bush’s Learning, a new novella out from Joyland Editions. (Joyland also published one of my favorite books I read last year, Cora Lewis’s Information Age.) Clocking in at a breezy 183 pages, Learning unfolds over a single day in the life of a narrator also named Courtney, who works as a teacher at a progressive Manhattan preschool. It’s a wonderfully rich book, full of wit, curiosity, and characters who speak with an emotional clarity that’s hilarious in one moment and cutting in the next, if not both at the same time. If you are a fan of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot and Either/Or, as I am, then I think you will find much to love in Learning. Here is an excerpt, courtesy of Joyland: 

As always, the red-haired boy smelled inexplicably like pizza. Will you read me a story? he asked. These were the first words out of his mouth every morning, each time asked as if it were a brand new idea, that it had just occurred to him that I might read him a story. But Martin did not want me to read him a story, Martin wanted me to love him. To give him my total attention, to sit with him in the pillows in the corner, to speak quietly in a low voice and reassure him that though this day was beginning, another day full of way too much information, today was only today, and that we were together today. I was Martin’s person and he was my child. When he needed help, he didn’t call for help, he called my name. If another teacher went over to him because I was busy, he’d get upset. I’ll wait for Courtney, he’d say, moping, sliding down onto the floor in agony. Some children imprint very easily on adults. Something about me was what Martin needed. Of course I will read you a story, my love, go choose one, I said.

I considered my work with them holy. I thought of the children as angels, not in the Renaissance painting sense. There was nothing soft or floaty about their existence, their engagement with the world. They were like armored beings covered in eyeballs, covered in sense organs, spinning innumerable gold and silver wheels around their limbs and tendrils, learning at a rate that is impossible to describe in something as structural as language. Eating information with their entire beings.

I chatted with Bush digitally about Learning, the writers who make her laugh, and how working with children has shaped her sense of humor. Find our conversation below, and grab a copy of Learning at Asterism Books or your favorite local bookseller.

Hey! Thanks again for doing this. I was going to start with a whole spiel about why I find so much of your book so intensely funny, but then I realized I ought to approach it this way: do you think of Learning as a funny book? How important is humor to you as a writer?

I love that you think it's funny. I do think of it as a funny book, though I admit I worry about funniness a little in my writing, probably because most of my writing is funny and I think we should all be suspicious of the habitual places we go as artists. Humor is important to me as a person, so it's important to me as a writer. I know it's the mechanism I learned as a child to cope with socializing. In therapy right now I'm talking about my fantasy of, like, being boring and giving nothing. Of showing up in a room and not instantly trying to make everyone laugh. Seeing how it feels to not entertain people. But I don't think I could write something that's not funny. I think it would feel very bad. Plus, I think basically everything is funny.

I think so too. My funniest and best-taste-having friend once said she can’t stand comedy that’s less interesting than the world; why should she bother watching when she could just go outside and look at some trees? I’ve found that to be a surprisingly useful barometer—is X at least as weird and interesting as some trees?—but it also got me thinking about funniness as a heightened state of consciousness toward the world’s absurdity. One thing I think I learned from your book is that children naturally exist in that state: as the narrator reminds us, they’re constantly taking in information, and they haven’t learned the mechanisms you and I use to cope with contradictory or just plain difficult inputs. It’s all normal, it’s all strange, the tiniest things take on outsized significance. I’m thinking of the student who bursts into tears over some pine needles, or the one who wields terrible power over the school by saying “Mert” over and over. Like, that’s textbook defamiliarization, right? 

Here I will pivot to the dreaded “poet’s novel” question. Why did you feel a novel was the right shape for this story? Did it take a different part of your brain to be funny in the book than it takes in your poems? 

I have written many poems about children and poetry lends itself to that really well because you can fragment and digress and return to things very freely but when I was working at this preschool I really wanted to try to write something more orderly, something where as a writer I was more accountable to a kind of intelligibility. I was trying to communicate in a more direct way. I wanted to really make a clear document of that wild preschool experience. It's fiction in many instances, but so much of it is just direct observation. I don't really write narrative poems or poems that follow a chronology, so my poems wouldn't have suited the thing I wanted to make, which was more like a record, or a story, something you want to tell someone specifically so they understand. My poet friend was like, so what's the deal writing fiction, now the unit of language is the sentence instead of the line and you just have to make sure every sentence is good? And I was like oh my God, no. Like imagine if you were speaking to someone and every single sentence was interesting and well-crafted, that would be insufferable to me. It's actually a more relaxed part of my brain that made the book, closer to talking to a friend.

Can you tell me about some of the writers who make you laugh? What have you learned from them?

The writers who make me laugh are poets. John Ashbery, James Tate, Anselm Berrigan, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan. Many of my friends: Rob Fitterman, Josef Kaplan, Eric Tyler Benick, Jenkin Benson, Terrence Arjoon. They aren't poets who are writing, like, jokes or punch lines. They are writers who have a funny relationship with language. They are so close to language, they almost seem to be friends with it, so they just help it to reveal its innate funniness, or what they find funny about it. They employ weird syntax or surprising words and create these bends in the language that are so funny, and it would be hard to say why they're funny outside the context of the poem. I have, like, cried laughing reading a James Tate poem. The humor I care about comes from the mystery of language. My favorite comedians are basically poets. My boyfriend (a poet) just showed me some Steven Wright videos. That’s poetry. Jack Handey is a poet. I think jokes and poems have a lot in common. Mainly, like, you can't really say what they are. They are sort of just patterns and rhythms and language games. So from these poets, and so many other poets, I have learned to let language be in charge. You don't have to do too much. Language is much more powerful than us. It's funny on its own. It is doing crazy, funny shit all the time. The funniest book to me is Taxi Night by Cliff Fyman. He's a poet who was a taxi driver who just started recording people in his cab. The poems are made of that language. It just sounds like a million different people talking on the phone, using language in their idiosyncratic insane personal ways.

I love that idea of language being more powerful than us, which I think gets to what I love about the comedians I love most, like Conner O’Malley and Patti Harrison and Joe Pera, and of course the poets I love most, like James Tate and Heather Christle and Meg Freitag. They take such pleasure in language. You can feel them surrendering to it, which I think takes a deep well of love and trust. I get bored of so much conventional standup because I can see the comic trying to manipulate language into some predetermined outcome. There’s no joy, it’s just work. I remember years ago watching this New York Times video about Jerry Seinfeld’s writing process for some tedious joke about Pop-Tarts, and there’s a bit where he’s like, “It’s funny because it has the words chimps and dirt and playing and sticks,” and I just got so angry about that. It was like he was describing a math problem or directions for assembling a chair. Am I supposed to be impressed that it’s all so simple?! Plus I think maybe one of those words is particularly funny. Anyway, he’s a billionaire and that joke was adapted into a Netflix movie two years ago.

Can you tell me about the James Tate poem that made you laugh so hard you cried, or anything else that made you laugh so hard you cried? 

I don't remember the poem. I remember I was reading it out loud with the person I was married to at the time (a poet), and we were taking turns reading this book, and there were just such insanely stupid moments, like very purposefully. I think in the middle of a poem he just pivots out of nowhere and says, my name is (some really immature stupid name), and we couldn't handle it. It was probably a decade ago I wish I remembered. More recently, I cried laughing at Edy Modica's hour, "Is Anything Happening?" I think Edy is a genius storyteller. And I cried laughing at Sardi's a few weeks ago because I was at a birthday party and it was getting late and I was tired and my friend Julien, in a kind of quiet lull after we'd already talked about everything else was like, gesturing to the caricatures on the wall and quietly asked, Is this what people looked like before Covid? I don't know why it just took me out. 

Can you tell me about a work of art, whatever it is, that you feel changed your life? I gather the Duino Elegies are important to you, for instance… 

Yeah, the Duino Elegies changed my life, for sure. I teach Rilke classes sometimes. So I encountered the Duino Elegies when I was in college and I was obsessed with them but didn't understand them at all. I really wanted to, because I sensed there was something very important in there for me, so I kept trying. I read them many times over the years, just for their instances of beauty, and then one day, my friend asked me if I wanted to teach a poetry class with him on Rilke. In discussing it with students for several sessions, I came to realize that Rilke's project in those poems was to answer a question for himself, which is, like, the question that we supposedly can't answer, why do we exist in this form, as human beings? What purpose could we possibly have that distinguishes us from animals, the divine, etc? And then, in nine poems, because the tenth is just him stretching his legs after the revelation, over the course of ten years, because for like ten years he couldn't finish the poems, he arrives at an actual answer. And after reading the poems so many times I understand the answer to be that we are here because the sayable can't say itself. Talking. Language. 

Your book inspired me to revisit the playwright and poet Sarah Ruhl’s short essay on lightness, which is really an essay on humor, and which begins: “Italo Calvino has a wonderful essay, 'Lightness,' in which he honors lightness as an aesthetic choice and a difficulty, rather than as something to be easily dismissed.” Rereading this after reading Learning, I thought: “Something to be easily dismissed—hmm, that’s probably not an uncommon attitude about children too.” Right now I am clearing my throat before asking: how has working in childcare shaped the way you think about humor, whether socially or aesthetically? 

I totally wanted the book to have a lightness. My favorite novels are voice-driven novels that seem to have air moving through them, like almost physically. When I was writing I kept thinking, I want it breezier. And yes, I think lightness is dismissed, and writing something that is easy to read is so often dismissed. And yes, absolutely, children are constantly dismissed. Their intelligence and their autonomy and their understanding of the world are all constantly dismissed. Children are brilliantly funny. They use language joyfully, because they are coming into it. They are truly experimenting with it, so they turn out these shocking constructions of language. They're trying things. They're learning to perform. Their minds are flexible. They are intuitively getting that fundamentally, the way to make someone laugh is to establish a pattern and then break it. Like, babies understand that. Being around children helps you remember that that's all it is. And that it's something we do to make each other feel alive.