I recently read an essay in Issue 3 of Kugelmass by Pank editor  (and excellent writer in her own right) Roxane Gay. The essay is called “The Art of the Rejection of Rejection,” and as the title suggests, it’s about Gay’s experiences as an editor receiving angry, bitter responses from writers whose work she rejects.

One of the most interesting responses she shares in the essay came from a fellow editor, with whom it was clear she had established some sort of working relationship prior to rejecting his work. More than anything, it seemed this fellow editor was upset about receiving a form rejection, but one comment he made in his lengthy missive was one I’ve heard many writers make about work that has been rejected, the gist of which is that many of his stories rejected by Pank have gone on to get accepted elsewhere.

If I were Gay, my reaction would be, “And your point is?” Clearly this editor—and many writers who have made similar complaints—believes that because a story is accepted somewhere, it must deserve to get accepted anywhere, and any journal that rejected it was wrong to do so. This argument is so illogical, it’s almost not even worth picking apart, but just for fun, let’s have a go at it anyway.

First of all, a confession: I’ve felt this way before, too. It never would have crossed my mind to email an editor who had rejected me to complain, but I do understand that initial in-your-face-sucka! feeling you get when something somebody said wasn’t good enough gets accepted. One of the first rejections I ever received came from a journal whose policy it was to give personal feedback on every submission. There’s a lot to be said for form rejections, let me tell you. This rejection essentially said the story was uninteresting, the character idiotic, and the writing weak and awkward. Ouch! When the same draft of the story got accepted elsewhere a few weeks later, I felt, I admit, kind of gloaty toward the journal whose editor had said such nasty things about it.

But I was wrong to feel that way, and here’s why: writing is subjective. Yes, some editors seem to forget that when they say things like, “Most of the work that gets submitted is terrible,” but on some level, I think most editors know that just because they don’t engage with something doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad. A rejection doesn’t mean the editor is rejecting you or your ability as a writer. It doesn’t even, really, mean they think what you submitted is bad. All it means is they, personally, don’t like this particular piece quite enough to make room for it in their particular journal.

Each journal usually has its own specific aesthetic, which is often difficult to pin down even after you’ve read multiple issues. Sometimes, as is the case with journals run by grad students, the aesthetic is constantly in flux because the masthead changes from year to year. Sometimes, though, you might think you have a pretty good idea of what this journal publishes, and you might think your story or essay or poem is a good fit, and you might be right—but you might be wrong, too. You can never really be sure if a specific editor is going to like a specific submission, and the fact that an editor from one journal says “no” and an editor from a different journal says “yes” doesn’t say anything about either editor’s ability to recognize a good thing when it’s in front of them. All it means is that the one editor engaged with that particular submission more than the other did.

Snarkily pointing out that a journal has rejected work that was accepted elsewhere—even when the “elsewhere” is, in your opinion, a “better” place to have been accepted—says more about you as the writer and your attitude, ego, and level of bitterness than it does about the journal. Every editor has a right to like or not like whatever he or she wants. You’d think, as an editor, the guy that wrote the letter to Gay would have understood that.

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.”