Jennifer Suzukawa-Tseng Goes from Mentorship to Points in Case with a Cerulean Send-Up of The Devil Wears Prada
by Writing Workshops Staff
3 days ago
When Miranda Priestly delivered the cerulean monologue in 2006, she made one thing clear: that sweater was not just blue. Twenty years later, with The Devil Wears Prada 2 arriving in theaters, Jennifer Suzukawa-Tseng decided the color deserved the rest of its origin story, the one Miranda left out.
Her piece, “What Miranda Priestly Didn’t Mention: The Real History Behind Cerulean,” just landed in Points in Case, and it is the kind of high-concept short humor the publication does best. Structured as a tongue-in-cheek timeline, from Stone Age cave paintings depicting assistants weeping over spilled Starbucks, to a young Viking landing her dream job inscribing maritime manuals, to Isaac Newton muttering “I love my job, I love my job, I love my job” while wrestling with the color wheel, the piece layers Devil Wears Prada references into world history with such commitment that you almost forget Stanley Tucci wasn’t actually a 12-year-old art director redesigning the IBM logo. By the time Susan Sontag is publishing “Notes on ‘Cerulean’” and Pac-Man’s blue ghost is being workshopped under the name “Dragon Lady,” the bit has fully earned its premise. It’s a perfectly timed riff at a perfect moment in the cultural calendar.
Jennifer is a writer and marketer based in New York City, with previous bylines in The New York Times and NYLON. The cerulean piece grew out of her work in the Humor Writing Mentorship with Sarah Garfinkel — a three-month, one-on-one program built for writers crafting short humor in the style of The New Yorker’s Shouts and Murmurs, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Points in Case itself. Sarah, a regular humor contributor to The New Yorker, guides her writers through generating premises, drafting like an improviser, and revising until each piece is, as she puts it, “its best, shiniest, funniest self.” Jennifer’s Points in Case debut is a beautiful example of what that process can produce.
We’re honored to have been a brief stop on her humor-writing journey, and we can’t wait to see what she publishes next.
✍️ Work One-on-One with Sarah Garfinkel
Sarah’s Humor Writing Mentorship is accepting applications on a rolling basis. Over three months of personalized coaching, you’ll write up to six submission-ready humor pieces, learn to read like a humor writer and draft like an improviser, and develop a repeatable process for brainstorming, drafting, and revising — the same process that helped land Jennifer in Points in Case.
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