Workshop report: Jokewriting for Medievalists with Mary Flannery

On 12 March 2026, we offered our first online workshop for Guild members: “Jokewriting for Medievalists” with Mary Flannery. In addition to an impressive record of academic publications, Mary is a comedy writer whose satire has appeared in McSweeney's, Points In Case, The Belladonna Comedy, Slackjaw, The Daily Drunk, Jane Austen's Wastebasket, and Defenestration, among other places. As someone who has worked closely with Mary for the past five years, I (Kristen) can personally attest that she is very sharp and very funny.

The workshop opened with a cordial round of introductions and an invitation to share our favorite one-liners or short funny quotes (Mary’s example was the classic from Douglas Adams: “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”) The workshop then moved to a brief discussion of humor theory, including the improvisation of verbal memes based on participant suggestions (“sure, sex is great, but have you ever [insert medievalist-specific nerdery here]” which served as both a condensation of the joke-making process and a warm-up. Participants were then led in a step-by-step “joke map” exercise (a variation on a mind map; see example below) designed to provide them with a body of materials and ideas from which they could craft their “medievalist scholar” one-liners. With this source material generated, participants paired off into breakout rooms to further workshop their jokes before returning to the main Zoom room for a final round of sharing and discussion. Joke topics ran the gamut from bastard secretary to diegetic levels to the desired level of urine in book-crafting recipes and were, at least from the standpoint of a virtual room full of tired medievalists, utterly hilarious.

Thank you so much to Mary for this thoughtful, well-organized, and deeply enjoyable workshop. If you haven’t yet, give her a follow and check out some of her humor writing online: your brain will thank you!