NEW YORK- Weekly Humorist imprint Humorist Books to publish Dumb Jokes For Smart Folks (due out November 27th) and Moms Who Kill, by comic and New Yorker contributor Jessica Delfino.

Dumb Jokes For Smart Folks combines wordplay and humorous themes to deliver laughs to anyone who digs a good–or at least a heartfeltfully written–joke. To get the most out of this book, readers should be willing to chuckle or guffaw at some and groan at others. It’s written for adults and any precocious kids left out there who still read their parents’ joke books. 

The second title, Moms Who Kill, is a collection of humorous essays by mothers about raising children and family. It should be noted that these are no ordinary mothers, but such luminary comedians and writers as NPR’s Ophira Eisenberg, The New Yorker’s Emily Flake, and many more.

Dumb Jokes For Smart Folks is inspired by the children’s joke books and even some of the more adult humor that Jessica Delfino grew up reading and listening to in her New England hometown. Maine humorist Tim Sample, the music of the Dr. Demento show and Rodney Dangerfield’s “It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Me” are some of her earliest humor influences (and later, 2 Live Crew). These, along with such a wide and varied literary humor canon as “The Little Golden Book of Jokes and Riddles”, to the poetry of Lewis Carroll that her mother used to read to her, to “Truly Tasteless Jokes,” along with every book that Stephen King ever wrote. Always precocious, she read and took in comedy, movies and music

Jessica writing jokes from a remote location in the woods.

above her age level, and was ahead of the curve with a 2006 YouTube viral comedy music video: an ode to a woman’s body part that Awkwafina and WAP might have even been inspired by.

Jessica worked as a stand-up comedian and comedic musician in New York City from the early 2000s, touring on the success of the aforementioned viral video from 2006 until more recently, when motherhood took center stage. She shifted her focus to writing satire, essays and articles for publications such as The New Yorker Shouts, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The New York Times, Working Mother, Mother Magazine, The Atlantic, SELF Magazine, Huffington Post and Pitchfork. Her short, comedic parenting essay “Driving Under The Influence Of Child” was also featured in Gestalten’s parenting book published in August 2020, and her writing was included in Lenka Clayton’s, “Mothers’ Days” journal.

Humorist Books is an offshoot of Weekly Humorist, with Andy Newton as editor and Marty Dundics as publisher.

For more, go to DumbJokesForSmartFolks.com. Jessica can be found on Twitter @jessicadelfino, and her personal site, www.jessicadelfino.com.