Like reading? Reductress Book Club is here to make fun of you.

Reductress is one of the best humor sites out there. They have an amazing editorial staff and a talented pool of writers who keep their headlines and articles sharp and surprising. It’s a tough moment to find a good comedic angle on the news, but Reductress’ topical satire continues to land by being direct, unflinching, and unexpected. I also appreciate that their editors have a deep love of silliness and absurdity: some of my favorite Reductress premises come out of left field, like Freddie Shanel’s “Grandma’s ‘Cure’ for Stomach Ache Also Recipe for Baking Soda Volcano” or Damien Kronfeld’s “Do You Not Believe in Ghosts or Are You Just Hurt None of Them Want to Talk to You?”

Recently, the team at Reductress partnered with Phenomenal Media to launch a new project called Reductress Book Club, devoted to making jokes about books and reading culture. A friend and fellow writer had mentioned this project was in the works and I was very excited to see it debut — I had the same reaction as the Instagram commenter who wrote “holy shit reductress books??”

The Book Club is just on Instagram for now, and is off to great start with headlines like “Wow! This Man Can Read Infinite Jest but Not a Fuckin’ Room,” “Woman Only Reads Memoir if Writer’s Life Worse Than Hers,” and “Woman Packs Seven Books to Read on Two-Day Trip,” which really felt directly targeted at my travel habits.

I reached out to McKayley Gourley, who is one of my favorite comedy writers and part of the editorial team behind the Book Club, along with editor Sarah Pappalardo and associate editor Sumayya Bisseret-Martinez. Gourley is an associate editor at Reductress, and has also published widely, animated shorts for Adult Swim, and performs stand-up around NYC.

We talked about the Book Club’s voice, unspoken rules around books, her favorite funny novels, and the funniest thing to read on your commute to work.

The interview has been trimmed from our original conversations for clarity and length.

The jokes I’ve seen on the Book Club Instagram are great, and I love the angle you’re taking on books culture — there are a few headlines that joke about specific authors or books, but most of them are satirizing people’s relationship to books, bookstores, and reading more broadly. What is funny to you all about book culture? What dynamics and patterns in particular are you interested in joking about?

I think a lot of what I find funny about book culture comes from the unspoken, unofficial “etiquette” that a lot of readers recognize and abide by. Things like the universally acknowledged sentiment that being on the first page of a book while reading in public is objectively embarrassing, or that dog-earring your own books is fine but dog-earring a book you borrowed from someone else is extremely evil, or that you can count short stories toward your yearly reading goal, but only if it’s the end of the year and you’re desperate.

I also find a lot of humor in the perception of reading. Like, people will assume you’re smart and bookish if they see you reading in public, but you could just be reading a 200-page Trolls fan fiction on your phone. I love that. Some reading you do to appreciate good prose and expose yourself to different perspectives, and other reading you do simply to disassociate on your commute to work. I find that dichotomy really beautiful. Also, reading a book where a character dies violently by dragon fire, then immediately heading to your 9-to-5 will never not be funny to me.

The types of jokes that interest me the most are the ones that can hone in on a small, seemingly insignificant aspect of book culture and identify something that a lot of people can relate to. I find the more specific a headline is, the better it is at getting to the heart of a larger conversation.

Are these jokes about things that bother you about the literature world?

A little bit. Obviously, shining a light on the negative aspects of the literature world by poking fun at problematic authors like Colleen Hoover, or calling out the inane advice present in so many self-help books is part of Book Club’s goal. But we also want to write jokes that satirize the world of reading in the highly specific way that’s only possible if you’re coming from a place of love. You can only make jokes about an enemies-to-lovers romance novel about two rival realtors who are also randomly immortal werewolves just trying to live a normal life in the mortal world if you’ve actually read said novel.

What’s the voice for the Book Club? Do you see it as distinct from Big Reductress at all?

Book Club’s voice is definitely distinct from Big Reductress. For Reductress headlines, we’re looking for ideas that are culturally or politically relevant, or broad ideas that haven’t been said before that we feel are widely relatable. With Book Club, we’re writing headlines for and about book people, without worrying about if people outside the literature world can relate. Book Club’s voice is also meant to be a bit more lighthearted than the voice of Big Reductress.

Is there a specific kind of reader that you see as the main character behind these headlines? To put it another way, who might the Reductress Book Club equivalent of The Onion’s “Area Man” be?

Yeah, totally. Put simply, our “main character” is someone who actually enjoys reading. It might seem obvious, but a lot of jokes surrounding book culture are catered toward the idea of not wanting to read, or finding it difficult to get yourself to read. With Book Club, we’re looking to write headlines from the perspective of someone who loves reading, reads a lot, and has opinions about the things they’re reading, as well as book culture in general.

Are there any Book Club headlines you’re particularly proud of?

“Woman in Book Shares Lingering Moment With Bathroom Mirror So Readers Can Get the Gist of What She Looks Like” by Madeline Goetz really makes me laugh. Madeline is great at identifying specific and relatable tropes in literature and repackaging them in a satirical way.

I also love “Woman Racing Against Kindle’s Estimation of How Long It’ll Take Her to Read Chapter” by Annie Ertle. That headline really strikes on the goal-oriented and achievement-focused nature of reading that is rampant in current book culture.

To step away from Reductress for a second: you’re not just an editor, you’re a very talented and funny writer too. As a writer, which authors and books inspire you?

What a nice question! Wow, there are so many, this is hard. I’ve always really enjoyed the work of Katherine Ann Porter. She writes so beautifully, and I often return to her work when I’m writing something other than humor. Pale Horse, Pale Rider is one of my favorites of hers. Toni Morrison, obviously. John Cheever. Tessa Hadley. Her short story, “The Bunty Club,” is one I often return to.

Do you have any favorite funny books? And what do you think makes for a funny book?

Funny books are so hard. I find I’m most delighted by humor in a book when I’m not necessarily expecting it, so I might be somewhat of a tough audience. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson comes to mind. The interactions between the grandma and her granddaughter were so well-written and believably funny. I also recently read the short story “Exit Zero” by Marie-Helene Bertino. Her use of absurdity was so fun and made an otherwise bleak subject (the death of a parent) incredibly funny and engaging.

What are you reading right now?

I’m currently reading The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka. I love her writing style –– she does such a good job of capturing the essence of the mundane items that make up our day-to-day lives, but in a way that doesn’t make them seem mundane at all.