HUMOR GUIDELINES

THE TERRIBLE PITCH

You have 5 minutes to sell something—a product, an idea, your soul, etc.—to an interested party. Write the worst pitch you can come up with that is guaranteed not to result in a successful sale. You don’t even really need to tell us the setting unless it makes sense for your pitch.

Word max: probably around 400? (You only have 5 minutes, after all.)

Please don’t send scripts to this category. We won’t publish script forms.

THE FOURTH-GRADE BOOK REPORT

Remember 4th grade, that sweet spot time sandwiched between carefree adolescence and the confusing double-digit years that you thought would get better after you became an adult because you were told you could “do anything you wanted to” when you became an adult, like eat cookies for breakfast and stay up past 10 PM, but then you became an adult and realized it’s all a sham, and if you eat cookies for breakfast you’ll probably develop heart disease, and everything needs to happen before 6 PM, including all meals, rock concerts, and magic, because you haven’t had the energy for 10 PM since 4th grade?

The 4th-grade book report is a nod to a simpler time when critiquing or analyzing wasn’t on our radar. Write a 4th-grade book report about a book you love, love, LOVE.

Your language and sentence structure should match the ability and complexity of a fourth-grader, but the book should be something an adult would read.

The appropriate length is probably a page or two, and the content should include the basics: title/author, plot, main character descriptions/aspirations, and plenty of cheeky opinions.

HAND-DRAWN PIE CHART

Pie charts should be hand-drawn on paper or digitally. As with our other two categories, humor is good here.

Please upload a high-res photo of your pie chart.