It's funny. People often compare me to other humor essayists.

The words of Sloane Crosley — “It’s funny. People often compare me to other humor essayists. They’re usually quite nice comparisons; I will accept those gladly. But I am always sort of appalled at the idea of being lumped with other, more chick-y female writers. And the truth is probably that neither comparison is accurate.” — speak with the voice of an artist wrestling with identity, perception, and truth. Her tone, wry yet contemplative, reveals an ancient struggle: the desire to be seen as oneself, unfiltered through the lenses of others. Beneath her humor lies the timeless cry of the individual against the flattening forces of stereotype. Crosley’s humor, like her insight, is not simply laughter for laughter’s sake — it is a form of defiance, a way of carving out space in a world that too easily confines creators within narrow definitions.

When she says she is “appalled at being lumped” together, it is not arrogance but weariness that speaks. The world has long sought to categorize, to make the complex simple, to place each soul into neat compartments. But no true artist, no true thinker, can live within a box. The humor essayist, like the philosopher or the poet, is a creature of contradiction — light and dark, sharp and soft, personal and universal. To reduce such a voice to gender or genre is to misunderstand its essence. Crosley reminds us that comparison, though flattering, can also imprison; it celebrates the surface but misses the depth. Her words, therefore, are a meditation on authenticity — on the courage to reject easy definitions and to live instead in the truth of one’s singularity.

The origin of her thought lies in a lineage that stretches far beyond her own writing desk. For as long as humans have created, they have faced the burden of comparison. Sappho, the ancient poet of Lesbos, was praised as “the tenth Muse,” yet even in reverence, she was defined in relation to others. Aristotle was compared to Plato, Michelangelo to Da Vinci, Woolf to Joyce — yet none of these comparisons ever captured the full measure of a soul. Every creator, from the sculptor to the scribe, bears this invisible weight: the struggle to be understood on one’s own terms. **Sloane