SUMMER GIFT POST: How the salad gets made

Greetings from my summer 2026 travels, dear PBP readers! This week I’m sharing another one of my top PBP posts of all time, which would normally be behind the archive paywall but is my little gift to you this week! Enjoy!

Goooooooooooood morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you might happen to be!

As many of you probably know by now, I’m a medievalist by day and a comedy writer by night (although sometimes those times swap places). And in my latter role, there’s a certain type of piece I really enjoy reading by fellow comedy writers: explanations of how they came to write a particular piece. Julie Vick wrote a great one for her Substack about how she put together a piece that ended up in The New Yorker’s ‘Daily Shouts’. Carlos Greaves, the undisputed master of topical satire, wrote one for his Substack on how he managed to write a timely bit of short humour in about 2.5 hours(!).

I’m definitely not in the same league as these folks, but I thought I’d walk you through some of the stages one of my McSweeney's Internet Tendency pieces went through before publication: ‘Inside the Mind of an AI-Generated Woman Laughing Alone With Salad’. To date, it’s the only piece I’ve ever written for them that was ‘trending’ at some point (and I have the screencaps to prove it!). Now, if you Google ‘Mary Flannery salad’, it’s the first thing that comes up (what would’ve come up before that, I wonder?). And when I look at it now, it’s amazing to see how far it came from its starting point.

If you’ve ever searched the internet for advice about healthy living, chances are you’ve run across one of the infinite number of stock photos featuring a woman laughing while holding a salad. These women look so carefree, so full of life! Their salads look so eye-wateringly healthy! Oh joy!

People have been laughing at the stock photo motif since time immemorial—which is to say they’ve been laughing at it since 3 January 2011 (according to this website), when one Edith Zimmerman published this compilation of photos featuring feminine salad hilarity on The Hairpin.

I love these photos. They’re just so mind-bogglingly unnatural! The women are so glowy and thin! They’re smiling so widely and showing so many white teeth! The salads they’re eating are clearly life-changing salads (though they almost certainly don’t feature any dressing)!

There’s just something about how there are so many of these unnatural photos that has always fascinated me. They’re sort of an embodiment of how my brain feels like it’s supposed to behave. So often I feel like I’m expected to be throwing my head back and laughing blithely despite whatever else may be going on or whatever I might be feeling inside. There’s something about these stock photos that reminds me of how, on so many occasions, polite laughter is the only socially acceptable response. Screaming just isn’t done, is it? These photos seem to squeeze all the awfulness and authenticity out of the picture until all that’s left is laughter and salad.

And that’s what I wanted to write about: the gap between reality and the bright and sterile images of women laughing alone with salads.

In October 2022 (2 years ago! Omigosh!), I was taking an online humour writing course with Luke Burns (who is awesome and whose classes are equally so). As part of that course, I thought I would write up a piece titled ‘I’m a Woman Who Laughs at Salad and Things Couldn’t Be Better! Really!’

This is how it looked in its original form:

Here I am! Here I am, laughing at salad! Haha! What could be better? Why are you looking at me like that?

Why wouldn’t I be laughing at this delightful bowl of salad? Just look at it! Have you ever seen a more amusing salad in your life? Look! It doesn’t even have dressing on it! Isn’t that playful? Ordinarily you’d expect it to have its sauce-clothes on, but no! The naked leaves are so unexpected! Haha!

You know why laughing at salad is so great? If you’re laughing at salad, you can’t think about anything else! You can’t think about global warming, or the cost of living, or the fact that women are one red wave away from being legally required to be barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen! You can’t think about any of that! Isn’t that marvelous?!

This really is the perfect life! Just look at me: my teeth are perfectly white, and there’s nothing in between them because I’m frozen in perpetual mid-laugh with the fork halfway to my mouth! I never actually eat the salad because I’m too busy laughing at it! How awesome is that?!

And even if I am miserable, nobody can possibly tell! Would a miserable person be laughing it up like this? Would a depressed person laugh at salad?! I don’t think so! No sir! Nobody would look at this face and this salad and think, ‘That woman is checking out of reality and crushing what remains of her sanity into a tiny wad she plans to hurl out of the nearest window!’ Nobody could possibly think that! That’s the best part!!

As long as I’m laughing, nobody will know that I’m screaming inside! There is only the salad! Nothing but the salad!!! NOTHING ELSE MATTERS!!!!

HAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!!

While Luke liked the tone I was able to establish, and the way I managed to take this character on a ‘journey’ of slowly losing it, he immediately pointed out that the original observation that this stock image was a ‘thing’ had been made at least a decade earlier. Because he was fairly sure that this was well trodden territory, he encouraged me to find a way of playing with this image that was my own by pushing beyond that initial observation about how wacky these photos were.

I thought these were great points, and also felt like there was definitely something there to be explored in my piece. But I also didn’t quite feel up to tackling all that at the time, so I did something I only rarely did at this stage in my comedy writing career: I set it aside and forgot about it.

In March 2023, Matthew Nepsa tweeted a series of images he had generated on Midjourney v4 with the prompt ‘Women Laughing Alone at Salad’. Apparently they had gone viral, but nobody had credited him with their creation.

As soon as I saw them, something clicked. Weirdly, by feeding that prompt to A.I., Matt had ended up with A.I.-generated images whose unnaturalness had managed to capture the (much more subtle) unnaturalness of those stock photos! I felt like the monstrously wrong A.I.-generated women laughing with salad got at the heart of the monstrous behavioural expectations women are so often subjected to—to laugh things off, to ‘take a joke’, to act unbothered when everything inside us is telling us to scream. I looked at those terrifying images and thought, A.I. gets it.

It didn’t take me long at all to rewrite the material I already had. Essentially, I was simply using the A.I.-generated images to push my ideas further. And so I sent McSweeney’s editor Chris Monks the following, which I titled ‘Inside the Mind of an AI Woman Laughing at Salad’:

Here I am! Here I am, an AI-generated human female laughing at salad! Haha! What could be better? Why are you looking at me like that?

Is it because I have eight fingers on my left hand? Who doesn’t? After all, this is AI! And thanks to AI, we can have all the fingers and salad and finger salad that we want! Anything is possible!!

Why are you staring? Is it because my mouth is open wider than the Alien’s mouth in Alien? Is it because I appear to have a million teeth on the roof of my mouth? All the better to catch the leaves that appear to be blasting out of my bowl, my dear! Hahahahaaaaaa!!!

Why wouldn’t I be laughing at this bowl of salad? Human females have been laughing at salad since the dawn of time! It’s tradition! It’s inevitable! Just like it was inevitable that AI would know exactly how to capture the totally natural joy of an average human woman confronted with salad! Right? Right?? It’s so accurate and normal!!

Look at this salad! Have you ever seen a more amusing salad in your life? Look! It doesn’t even have dressing on it! It’s naked! Isn’t that playful? Isn’t that unexpected?! Ordinarily you’d expect it to have its sauce-clothes on, but no! Haha! Another accurate AI detail!!

Why do you look so freaked out right now? This leaf-prompted laughter is the most natural thing in the world!! That’s why I look so normal! I’m an AI-generated reminder that no matter what happens, you’ll always have salad! It’s your womanly destiny!!

You know why laughing at salad is so great? If you’re laughing at salad, you can’t think about anything else! You can’t think about global warming, or the cost of living, or the fact that women are one red wave away from being legally required to be barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen! You can’t think about any of that! Isn’t that great?! Who wouldn’t want that?

Why are you screaming? You should want to be like me! This really is the perfect life! Just look at me: my thirteen fingers are perfectly manicured, my million teeth are perfectly white, and there’s nothing in between my teeth because I never eat the salad! I’m too busy laughing at it! That’s why AI made me so skeletal!! How awesome is that?!

And even if I was miserable, nobody could possibly tell! That’s the real magic of AI!! Would a miserable person be laughing it up like this? Would a depressed person laugh at salad?! I don’t think so! No sir! Nobody would look at this face and this exploding salad and think, ‘That woman is crushing what remains of her sanity into a tiny wad she plans to hurl out of the nearest window!’ Nobody could possibly think that! That’s the best part!! Don’t you want to try it??!

C’mon! Try it! I bet you won’t be able to stop!! Remember: as long as you’re laughing, nobody will know if you’re screaming inside! There is only the salad! Nothing but the salad!!! NOTHING ELSE MATTERS!!!! 

HAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!!

I really liked the version I submitted to McSweeney’s. But when Chris emailed to accept the piece (yay!!!), I liked the version he proposed so much better.

Firstly, he suggested we change the title to ‘Inside the Mind of an AI-Generated Woman Laughing Alone With Salad’. It was much more precise, and somehow the ‘with’ got at the weirdness of it all more than ‘at’ did.

But the biggest and best change he had made was to punctuation. He had removed every single exclamation point in the piece, as well as the few instances of all caps. The result was a piece that was much creepier, much more menacing. And I loved it.

I couldn’t believe the response to the piece when it was published. People retweeted it all over the place, quoting their favourite lines. It popped up in the list of trending pieces on the McSweeney’s website (for a hot second). People reached out to tell me how much they loved it. But none of that would have been possible if I hadn’t gotten that initial feedback from an experienced comedy writer like Luke, or if I had tried to publish the original version immediately, or if Chris hadn’t taken all those bloody exclamation points out.

And that’s how this salad piece got made!

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VB,

M