We recently connected with Kit Lively and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Kit, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I realized that I wanted to write and draw humor before I even knew that was something that one could do; I just knew that I wanted to be someone who created comedy. So I began making my own humor comics at around the age of eight, after having become obsessed with MAD magazine. These comics I was making were very bad, but c’mon, I was eight years old! I was no prodigy! Hopefully I got better over the years, but who knows? At any rate, I continued making my own humor comics and magazines, up until my late teens, when I began contributing to other people’s magazines.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I got pretty lucky. Or maybe fortunate is a better word. In my late teens / early twenties, I was publishing my own humor magazine called The Chopping Block. I sent copies to humorist Joe Bob Briggs, who not only wrote about my magazine in his own humor magazine, but also began using my cartoons in said magazine. Encouraged, I began submitting to other publications, and managed to do okay.
I’ve since written and / or drawn for lots of humor publications, like MAD, National Lampoon, Funny Or Die, and others. These days I work as the managing editor of Weekly Humorist, writing content for the website and developing programming for our tv / movie side, Humorist Media. I’ve also had a couple of humor books published, and so am usually working on my next book or two. It’s typically a long process.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

When, as a kid and then later a teen / young adult, I was making my own humor magazines, they were always comprised of both cartoons / comics and writing. I enjoyed doing both, but most readers seemed to prefer the cartoons, and wanted to see more of them. That trend continued when I began contributing to professional publications, and so I began to concentrate almost exclusively on creating single panel cartoons. Back in the 90’s and early 2000’s, there was a huge market for single panel cartoons. There is still a market, but it’s not what it was before. I noticed that things were shifting, and began taking cartoon ideas and adapting them to written pieces. I was able to sell the written pieces, and along the way gradually became better at writing in general. I was then able to pretty much exclusively write for the humor magazines listed above. These days I rarely draw, and have collaborators who handle the drawing. It’s helped me to become much more prolific., as my collaborators are much better illustrators than me.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

As a teen, I devoured any book on comedy that I could find, and in particular anything that concerned the particular type of comedy that interested me (MAD, Saturday Night Live, National Lampoon, Monty Python, etc). Not only was I fascinated by the journeys of my humor heroes, but reading about their trials and tribulations on their way to the top gave me a sort of guide to things that I should be looking for as I attempted to figure out my own work. These books were almost like a treasure map of sorts.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.weeklyhumorist.com
• Instagram: @kitlively
• Facebook: Kit Lively
• Linkedin: Kit Lively
• Twitter: @KitLively
• Youtube: Weekly Humorist
• Other: Humorist Media

Image Credits
Magazine cover parodies are from Weekly Humorist. I’m Dying Up Here ad parody from MAD magazine.