A Floridian, a librarian, and an internet dad, Kristen Arnett also plays the role of court jester in contemporary fiction. The jester was once a person who traveled around the countryside entertaining the masses but, maybe more significantly, had the job of delivering bad news, couched as a joke, to the powerful. In Arnett’s new book, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One (Riverhead Books, 2025), Cherry is a lesbian birthday clown trying to make it big in the world of clowning. And Arnett, through the vehicle of Cherry, is delivering some news on what it is like to be a queer person living in Florida, how gentrification impacts artists, and why telling a joke is actually serious business.
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One extends the run of Arnett novels that are culminations of her obsessions, and perfecting the art of the joke is her current one. Recently, we sat down over a shared Google Doc to talk about how she navigates being an “Online Person,” the evolution of her humor, and how to carve out community spaces for those we love the most.
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The Rumpus: In an interview you did with Autostraddle a few years ago, you said many of your novel ideas begin with an obsession. What obsession sparked Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One?
Kristen Arnett: I’m a librarian, so obsession sparks a lot of my interests. With this new book, I became obsessed with humor itself, or “the bit.” I workshopped a lot of jokes on the internet, as I do, and I kept getting feedback about jokes and humor. I’ve always had people talk to me about what they think humor is doing inside of my novels, so I became obsessed with the concept of humor, especially when paired with grief. I started looking at humor as a literal physical clown, which led to an obsession with the actual physical act of clowning.
Rumpus: In this new novel, there is this beautiful relationship between clowning, drag, and queerness. Did you intend to draw parallels between drag and clowning?
Arnett: I thought a lot about gender and performance, and drag, when I was writing this book—how we put on a show for whatever audience we’re deciding to perform in front of—and that is something I think a lot of queer people can identify with. I also live in Florida, and queerness and drag are [things] I’m thinking about constantly—how they sit inside our very red state. I knew I wanted clowning to address that head-on with this book.
Rumpus: That confrontational attitude, addressing things head-on, reminds me of a line from the book where the protagonist, Cherry, says, “I want to be remembered for making someone laugh. For them to really fucking feel it, right in their guts. Even if they don’t want to.” Does a humorist also need to be an antagonist? Are you intending to reach people even if they don’t want to be reached?
Arnett: Absolutely, all the time! Not everything is going to be funny to everybody, but a joke is going to be funny to at least one person, one time, at a specific point. That’s all I’m looking for: a joke to connect with at least one person, which I think a lot of writers can relate to. But, also, I am my own first reader. I want the joke to land with me too. I want to make myself laugh or write a sentence that I’m deeply interested in.
Rumpus: I did get the sense that you were having as much fun writing this book as we were supposed to have reading it—a deft balancing act between that and creating a burgeoning philosophy on humor itself. The concept of absurdism reoccurs with observations like “Clowning is all about optimism. The absurd depends on the bright shine of possibility.” How does absurdism differ from other types of humor for you?
Arnett: Absurdism to me means possibility. That’s how writing often feels to me when it’s really flowing. I can see a spectrum of possibilities, a magnitude of ideas and thoughts that could power a narrative. It’s allowing the joke to get as weird as possible, which also allows the narrative to truly get strange, something I always want. Maybe that’s the Florida in me jumping out, but the thing that’s the most interesting to me, in terms of storytelling, is exploring the trail off the beaten path, where the weirdest possible shit can happen.
Rumpus: I wonder if that is also the internet in you jumping out. The internet might be the most absurdist place of all, and your humor is tailor-made for that medium. Your jokes on X (formerly known as Twitter) go viral, you write columns for Time magazine that have a wide, online reach. You post on Substack and other literary spaces with great frequency. As someone who occupies a fair amount of space online, how do you navigate the interplay between your public, online self and your private self away from the internet?
Arnett: I have a tough time separating out those personas, on occasion. Many of us are at a juncture where the public and the private have intersected to a point where there is very little private self left, unless you go completely off the grid. I think a way that I’ve managed to maintain privacy is that I simply don’t, in any kind of capacity, discuss or post about subjects in my life that I want to keep private. The persona that I have developed online is this kind of clown, an avenue to make jokes. I treat many social media spaces, including X, as a space to try out a joke that feels interesting to me. I see how people respond to it, I see how I feel about it after posting, and then I move on from there. That’s allowed me to maintain a sense of personal privacy when it comes to aspects of my life. People get to see the jokes, and they get to see photos I hand-select to post, but they’re not always seeing one hundred percent of me all the time.
Rumpus: Do the people who know Online Kristen™ and meet you IRL presume to know parts of you better than they really do? And if so, how do you negotiate that?
Arnett: I think that Online Kristen™ can seem like a very big personality. I know, as a person who religiously watches Bravo, that seeing these people in these kinds of spaces can make it seem as though you have completely unfettered access to their lives, but the reality is that we’re only getting a small fraction of what that person chooses to show us. Also, I’m a true golden retriever of a human being: I like hanging out with people at bars, meeting new people in real life. I think that when people meet IRL Kristen, they see I’m essentially the same person as my online persona because my online persona is total id, and I have a lot of id in me. This hasn’t been hard to negotiate because people are generally kind and mostly want to talk to me about my work. People want to relate to me on a personal level, and I appreciate and understand that. Also, any time someone wants to meet me for a beer, I am down!
Rumpus: People must respond so positively in person to what you are doing online because it is rooted in authenticity—the real-life clown that lives inside of you. There’s this passage from the book where Cherry says, “I’ve described the costume, not the clown. The clown is purely physical. . . . You develop it gradually . . . and by the time you’re done, the clown is inside you for good.” What does the clown inside of you do for you?
Arnett: I think that relationship started from a young age when I used a lot of self-deprecating humor to handle the fact that I did not want to be gay. I grew up in a very conservative, Evangelical household, and understanding the fact that I was queer was a really bitter pill for me to swallow. The easiest way I found to deal with a lot of the things I didn’t like about myself came in the form of self-deprecation. To be fair, people make that easy when you’re young by constantly making fun of each other. I took those slights against myself and decided to turn them into jokes that I could use on my own. I think this is something many queer people do and have done. But I would say that my sense of humor has developed, just like I would say that my writing has developed over the years. Now my sense of humor feels more expansive and includes more of what I love about myself and about being gay. That’s going to obviously filter down into everything that I make as a queer person. It’s really fun to be gay and to write fiction. It’s fun to be gay and make art. We’re so goddamn funny!
Rumpus: Having dexterity with language, being funny, ingratiating oneself to others, and getting a joke off before someone can make a joke about you is all about survival for some of us. But as one ages and finds communities, those skills get to be used for more than survival. They can make art, entertain loved ones, and uplift the community. I know that you are a proud Floridian, and I appreciate how you talk about the complexities of living as a queer person in a place that, as you write in SMIYHTO, “doesn’t always love me back.” What do people get “wrong” about Florida and the people who stay despite having a complex relationship with the state?
Arnett: I deeply care about Florida. I’m a third-generation Central Floridian. I have an understanding that many things can be true at once: Florida can be beautiful and wild and exciting, but it can also be full of a lot of horrible shitty problems. We have a terrible government here, but that doesn’t mean that’s all we are. I constantly have to remind people, as a person who is not only from Orlando but still lives in Orlando, that I don’t live inside of a theme park. There are queer and trans people who live here, just like there are queer and trans people that live in every single state. I would also say that it’s a form of privilege to try and tell people that they should just abandon their home and go somewhere else that would be more welcoming to them. It implies that people have the kind of funds and support that would be necessary to do something like that. Many don’t. I think that people see things on the internet and on television and form a caricature of Florida. They create a cartoon of a space instead of thinking about the real, actual people that live here. Florida is a beautiful, natural space with a ton of wildlife and incredible people. I’m proud to be a brand ambassador for Florida.
Rumpus: One of the central concerns that Cherry has in the book is that there is an increasingly untenable financial relationship between her artistry—clowning—and the state of Florida. As Florida gentrifies, she finds it difficult to make rent and survive as an artist and struggles to resist corporate funding. Does the business of being a writer weigh on you as heavily as the business of clowning weighs on Cherry?
Arnett: I think everything is weighing on everyone pretty heavily right now. Being a queer writer and a librarian inside of the state of Florida at this point in history makes me take all of this shit extra seriously. I think it’s hard to live and care and remain hopeful and to keep empathy in your heart. Gentrification is crazy in Florida right now. Rent is sky-high, like it is in many other places. It can be hard to think about things like humor and joy, to see a need for the clown. But we can’t have despair and grief without the opposite side of that coin, which is joy and lightness. I think the business of being a writer weighs on me, in the same way that library work weighs on me, in the same way that being a caring, empathetic human weighs on me.
Rumpus: I think it takes a special talent to be able to remain in an open, empathetic, and humorous mindset and to keep carving out space for yourself even when it feels like institutions or social factors want to eradicate your resources and capacities. DIY queer spaces come up in your book frequently. Can you talk about the role that queer places, DIY or otherwise, play in your life?
Arnett: Totally! My wife and I went to a new event this past weekend, here in Orlando, called Dyke Nite. They’ve been doing a lot of collective events, and the one they hosted this weekend was coincidentally clown-themed, if you can believe it! I think one of my favorite things about the community in Central Florida is that people help each other. Restaurants, even if they aren’t queer-owned, become queer-friendly because of the people who work there and subsequently the queer people who frequent those establishments. That feels the most gay to me: making these spaces for each other, making room for each other, and celebrating each other. I’m so lucky that I get to attend these kinds of spaces and have a hand in creating them. It’s what makes Orlando so incredible. There are many amazing people who live here and, subsequently, amazing spaces that we get to share.
Rumpus: Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One is also about an artist’s struggle to find her voice and power. You write, “So much of the artistic practice means being in the right place at the right time.” In your own artistic practice, what has it meant for you to be in the right place at the right time?
Arnett: I would say that so much of my life has felt difficult, at times, but now I have an understanding that all the things that happened in my life happened for a reason. I got pregnant when I was a teenager. I had my son, raised him, worked full-time in libraries while I went to school at night. At times, those things felt very unlucky to me. But that’s exactly how my life was supposed to play out. All the things that have happened to me, personally, have led to this moment in my life, right now, where I’m so pleased and happy to live an extraordinary life, one that I am grateful to have. I think that artistic practice and being in the right place at the right time means you’ve arrived at the place where you’re able to make art. And that’s a lucky, lucky thing.
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Author photograph by Maria Rada
