Complaint Review: Royal Nonesuch Humor Writing Award

Male humor writers: Do not enter this competition. You have almost no chance of winning. 95% of staff are female, and 85% + of the winners have been female during the lifetime of the contest.

These women, apparently determined to rectify past wrongs in one fell swoop, have no concept of objectivity or how to properly run a contest. Unfortunately, this is practically the last humor writing contest left in America (the Erma Bombeck contest doen't seem promising for males).

I was in communication with them about this over the last couple of years, and have strong reason to believe that all decisions at every stage in the process during that time were made by a single, inexperienced young woman. It's possible that a few women were involved, but certainly no men.

This year, they have a male executive director and supposedly had both male and female final judges -- "final" being the key word. If all of the readers (screeners) are women, it hardly matters who is doing the final judging.  The judges were probably presented with entries that were almost entirely written by women.

Women and men have different senses of humor. I'm deeply sorry that females were discriminated against in every arena for centuries, but few living male writers are to blame for that. Two wrongs do not make a right.

I sent the organization lots of information about how to properly run a competition, ensuring objectivity. But this was clearly ignored. The crowning irony, of course, is that this corruption and discrimination is all done in the name of America's greatest humorist, who happens to have been male.

The only way to salvage this competition now is to relaunch, with a brand new, transparent process, in which males are included in every step of the judgin process. Until then, as long as I live, if necessary, I will be rigorous in warning male writers away.

I really did try to work with these people and have all the email correspondence.