common good
Duncan Stevens wearing glasses, a colorful mask, and a blue polo, looking off to the left
laurence kesterson
“I took a lot from being around people whose backgrounds were very different from mine, and not assuming everyone sees the world like I do,” says joke writer Duncan Stevens ’96.
The Write Stuff

Surely, He Jests

Finding the universal in the personal
by Ryan Dougherty
Duncan Stevens ’96
Winning Writer
When colleagues of Duncan Stevens ’96 at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. first saw his jokes in The Washington Post, they couldn’t believe it — and neither could he.

“I would never think of a person I know only in a very dry, official context picking up a paper to read this humor contest in the back,” says Stevens, an appellate-litigation attorney in Vienna, Va. “The worlds are so far apart.”

In the world of the Post’s The Style Invitational, however, Stevens’s humor is money in the bank. Last year, he had 138 jokes published — far more than any of the thousands of other entrants from around the world. Deadpan and middlebrow, Stevens’s style is rooted in word play. A favorite was his response to a Cider House Rules prompt: “Man, this is one awesome cider house!”

Stevens enjoyed crosswords and games as a child, but was mostly straitlaced through college. He joined an a cappella group that tagged playful intros onto songs and wrote an opinion column for The Phoenix that veered satirical. But the first time he wrote something “intentionally funny” was in law school, at Northwestern University, about the life of a J.D. student.

When Stevens started with the FDIC, in 2000, he became a fan of The Style Invitational contest. But he didn’t submit often and wasn’t published until 2012. Then, friends from his Episcopal church started pushing him to ramp up his moonlighting.

“I faced the moral authority of people who expected to see my name in the paper every week,” Stevens says with a laugh.

Before the pandemic, Stevens jotted thoughts on a legal pad during his long train commute, or while his kids played in the park. Now, working from home, he steals moments throughout the day to commit jokes to paper or his phone. Stevens’s writing process has changed, but not his motivation.

“It’s a competitive, spirited community of creative folks with fertile minds, and you want to show you can measure up,” says Stevens, who is also spurred on by classmates from Swarthmore and even his elementary school who follow his exploits online.

Reflecting on Swarthmore, Stevens is most grateful for meeting his wife, Rebekah Bundang ’97, formerly an administrator and now a volunteer with the Literacy Council of Northern Virginia, who has a similar sense of humor. But also hugely impactful was how much more eclectic the College was than his boarding school.

“I took a lot from being around people whose backgrounds were very different from mine, and not assuming everyone sees the world like I do,” says Stevens.

That lesson connects, if indirectly, to his comedic style.

“Knowing your own limitations and your own mind is the only way to write in a way that can be appreciated by people who aren’t exactly like you.”