You might know comedy writer Megan Amram’s must-follow Twitter feed (sample: “I can’t afford a therapist so i bought a mood ring”), but the 27-year-old from Portland, Oregon, is also a rising star—she has written for the Oscars and Kroll Show, and has a staff gig at Parks and Recreation. What comes after conquering the Internet and TV? Satirical pseudoscience textbooks, apparently. Amram’s Science … for Her!, out this week, won’t teach you much about science, but it will make you laugh out loud. It also delivers a legitimate critique of sexism—with frequent detours into the absurd.
WIRED: Explain the premise of Science … for Her!
I wrote a science textbook for women that looks like Cosmopolitan, or another magazine like that, because women’s brains are too small to understand real science and their hands are too weak to turn the covers of a textbook. So I wanted to put it into terms that they would understand in a size that was manageable for a petite lady’s hands. That’s the fake version.
Um … so … what’s the real version?
Instead of just writing an angry tirade on Facebook about how annoying the Hobby Lobby ruling is, I think it’s a lot more effective to show your anger through comedic satire. It is way more fun to highlight real beliefs you have but then throw in a bunch of unrelated, goofy things. Because it keeps everyone feeling happy, but hopefully they will read this book and then be like, “Oh yeah, there are definitely sexist things in the books we read or in the things we hear in the news that are easy to take for granted.”
It’s a hard book to describe, because once you get past the first sentence it immediately becomes a conversation about feminism and the media.
There are math textbooks for women and articles online that, completely seriously, ask things like “How big is the volume of your purse?” The thought that this is going to bring more women into science is a little faulty to me.
Most people think that you just got famous on Twitter and then got hired to write for Parks and Recreation. Is there more to the story?
There both is and isn’t, yeah. [Laughs] When I graduated from college I knew that I wanted to be a TV comedy writer, and right when I moved here to LA four years ago, I started to use Twitter. I had no idea it could be used as a performance device. I just did it for a few months and was very lucky and got a following, and then got hired for my first job, which was writing for the Oscars in 2011. Which is a weird first job. I guess my first job was, like, folding clothes at Nordstrom in Oregon. But my real first job was writing for the Oscars.
And how is writing alone different from the Parks and Recreation writers’ room?
It’s totally different, which is interesting. There’s so much to a sitcom beyond just joke writing. That is a prerequisite, that you are funny and know how to be funny within a limited amount of space. But what has been both wonderful to learn and very difficult is all the other things that make a show. Thinking of the stories for the show and being able to adapt to reads; writing a teleplay means a lot of different things. Also, the jokes aren’t always verbally funny—they’re performance jokes and there’s a whole range of very short quips. I’m glad that I was able to practice this one skill a lot on Twitter, writing short little jokes, but it is very cool to learn all of the other parts of a TV show.
I can tell that the jokes in the book wouldn’t work on Parks and Recreation. But how do you decide what’s going to be a book joke and what’s going to be a give-it-to-people-for-free joke on Twitter and Tumblr?
Well, I love giving it to people for free. I think there are a few jokes I thought of for the book that I was like, “Uh, I have to tweet these. These are fun. I don’t want to wait till November.” But that was something I had to get used to—delaying gratification by writing things for my book—because, even though you’re not paid to write blog posts or for the tweets you put online, it is so satisfying to have people like what you write. I definitely had to get used to the idea of writing something that would not be seen for a year or more. Generally for the past year and a half I was trying to make sure that I put all my best writing into either the show or the book and did not just blow it all online. I should have just put it all online, printed it out, and charged 20 bucks.
Some of the articles actually sound real—“Bachelors of Science” and “Hot Reproductive Sex Tips”?
When I first started writing the book, I bought a high school science textbook for reference and then a bunch of women’s magazines. When you read them all at once you see the patterns. A Beautiful Mind music was playing in my head as I was cutting out sidebars on “How to Please Your Man.”
Had you read these magazines before? Was there a point when you realized the science in them was not real, essentially?
I don’t know if I was ever sincerely into them. And I will credit my mom, who’s a doctor, for raising me discussing science and medicine, because I truly found it interesting. But she was also very vocally feminist as I grew up, and would point out to me what may be sociologically wrong about things like “How to Do Your Hair to Get a Husband.” So my mom would take little Megan and explain, “Here’s why that’s not a thing you should be basing your life around.” So I don’t have a husband, but maybe my hair is fucked!
Do you have a personal favorite piece in the book?
I would say I have three favorite pieces, because they’re small: One would be “The Period! Ick! Table.” I really liked “Sad Libs,” which is the Mad Libs–style suicide note. And I also like “This Spring’s Top Cover-Ups,” which alternates between things you can wear at the beach and then things like “9/11 was an inside job.”
Why write a book at all? You get to write for TV.
First of all, books may not exist in two years. What if my book is the last book … ever? It’s so exciting to hold this artifact. There’s also something so cool about doing the aesthetic joke of making it look like this other type of book—you can’t really make that kind of joke on TV.
You tweet fully formed jokes every day and write episodes of Parks and Recreation. And now a book. That’s prolific.
I have, like, 30 more jokes in me and then I’m done. Everyone has a finite number of jokes. If you’re a woman you’re born with all of your jokes inside of you, and then you’re done! It’s joke menopause.
Hair and makeup by Gloria Noto
