Humor writing is a tricky endeavor. Not everybody agrees on what is funny and what is patently not, so writing with the primary intention of making your reader laugh is a gamble. In fact, it gets even more complicated than that. Different people have very different senses of humor, and so the term “humor” is abstract, vague. Like “beauty” or “love,” it means different things to different audiences.

So it was with some trepidation that I started reading the current issue, Issue Two, of Kugelmass: A Journal of Literary Humor. What did literary humor even mean, I wondered, and would the stuff I found within the journal’s pages strike me, with my own particular tastes and distastes, as funny? Still, I love to laugh (as the Mary Poppins song goes), and I liked that this journal seemed to have found its own niche that no other journal I had heard of had yet claimed.

The journal started with an incredibly hilarious editor’s note by Editor David Holub, which ended up being the funniest thing in the entire issue. This could be seen as a negative—the best thing in the journal was the letter from the editor at the beginning—but I actually don’t see it that way. The editor’s note was funnier than anything in the journal itself, but that’s partly because the note wasn’t a work of “literary humor,” but a more straightforward, make you laugh sort of piece. It did, however, give me high expectations for the sort of humor I might find within the literary pieces to follow, and for the most part, those expectations weren’t met.

This is not to say, though, that I didn’t enjoy the pieces in the journal. As with most any journal or anthology reading experience, some of the pieces I really enjoyed, some, not so much. I suppose your best hope for any journal is that you’ll like more than you dislike (or are at least indifferent to). What I mean, mostly, is that I didn’t find most of the pieces funny.

Take Aimee Bender’s story “Lady of the Mail,” for example. This story was one of the highlights of the issue. This was my first encounter with Bender’s work, and I was very impressed. I was compelled by the narrator’s obsessive, borderline disturbed fixation on her ex-boyfriend, by her quirky new friends in her new job as a playwright. I liked the story, but I would never have classified it as “humor” on my own.

The same is true for Fred Siegel’s essay “Mysteries of the Bronx” and Ben Greenman’s piece—whose genre is labeled “unclassifiable”—“There Are Only Eight Kinds of Paragraphs.” Witty, I might say, but I would never list these pieces as humor writing. But perhaps that’s what “literary humor” is—good, literary works, with a touch of the absurd or an eye for the comedy in the tragedy of our lives.

And that’s exactly what Steve Almond suggests literary humor should do in his interview in the issue. Almond says, “I’d advise people NOT to try to be funny. Just run toward the shame and rage and all those other horrible memories and feelings and let the humor emerge intuitively.” That’s precisely what the best of the examples in Kugelmass Number Two seem to do.

There were pieces, though, that I thought did seem to be trying very, very hard to make me laugh. They were the ones that I definitely did not like. I didn’t think they were funny, for the most part, and they fell flat as literary works, as well. As a whole, then, I liked the issue, but I liked it for the half of it that was strong because that half was strong enough to justify me forgiving the rest of it.

And I also liked the funny tidbits at the bottom of every page of the journal. These, I assume, came from Holub—they match his sense of humor from the editor’s note at the beginning. Like the literary works in the journal, these bits were hit and miss, but the funniest ones matched my sense of humor exactly, comments like, “I need a pair of bolt cutters because my neighbor put a new lock on his shed, which is frustrating because I know he has a pair of bolt cutters locked in his shed.”