@SandyHonig on Growing More Confident in Her Dad Jokes

Sandy Honig is a photographer and comedian living in New York City. She photographs and writes for Rookie Mag and performs around the city. On Twitter, Honig’s account is a good one to follow for excellent, well-worded, and often impressively concise jokes. She recently took some time to talk to me about three of those jokes, how her friends describe her sense of humor and some of her favorite works where photography and comedy meet.

Honig: Everyone thinks they know the secret to getting ketchup out of a bottle, but they’re just full of it. The bottle doesn’t want us to have the ketchup and that’s FINAL. I wrote this in a diner alone.

When you look at your tweets, can you remember where you wrote them?

Almost always. It’s sort of like my diary, I can look through my twitter and remember what I was doing and how I was feeling.

Are you usually alone when you write tweets or do you write them around other people? Do you think either of those is easier/more conducive to writing good tweets?

Usually alone, but sometimes I’ll tweet something that came up in a conversation. I like stewing in my brain on something that I think is funny, but at the same time it’s good to have someone to talk to (talk at?). I send a lot my tweets to my friend Mallory for approval to make sure things make sense to people outside my brain.

A friend of mine described my humor as “technically good, well-written jokes, but they make me want to punch you.” That is my resume. 90% puns/dad jokes.

How does your sense of humor as displayed online compare to your in-person sense of humor? Have you noticed the relationship between the two change over time?

They’re pretty much the same, dad jokes all day every day. Except I don’t hear the groans online. I used to keep the puns to myself a lot, but now I think I feel weirdly more confident to say my awful jokes because I have two audiences to try em on.

I’m a photographer in “real life” and I shoot a lot of visual jokes. Usually not photoshopped, but this one was a real stretch for other people to imagine. I laughed every time I looked at my leg.

Have you always found a connection between photography and comedy?

Yes! One of my favorite photographers is Martin Parr, whose images are a riot. They’re documentary-style photos of ridiculous people doing amazing, insane things. There’s endless humor in what isn’t said.

Are there any people you follow who you think do visual tweets especially well?

I think Michael Raphone does them SO well. Especially with this tweet, which I love more than most things. He finds a lot of great signs and screen shots things that are gold.

In your experience, do visual tweets get a very different response than non-visual ones?

I feel like they get more attention. Maybe because it’s a disruption in your feed, it’s something you can rest your eyes on and not breeze past.

Jenny Nelson lives and writes in Brooklyn and works at Funny or Die.

@SandyHonig on Growing More Confident in Her Dad Jokes