Issue five is now available for purchase. Head to the store to pick up your copy. Submissions for issue six will open in 2023.

The Great Ape pokes its head through the trees. It’s watching, waiting to see what you’ll do. The Great Ape suffers fools gladly, so be foolish, be wild. Ask yourself the difficult questions: Can you make hay, even when the sun don’t shine? Can you outrun a 500 pound primate in its natural habitat? And is it possible to be deadly serious about being absurdly silly? The answer, to all, is yes. And the method? Simple. Be a Great Ape. 

To submit to Great Ape:

Write something funny. Anything that makes us laugh goes to the top of the accepted pile. Hint: If reading it doesn’t make you at least smeyes, chances are that we are not interested in publishing it.

What do we want?

The best way to understand what we’re looking for is by picking up our previous issues and seeing what has been successful. The print and online copies are inexpensive and all money goes back into making each issue of Great Ape even bigger and better. To get your copy, or a discounted bundle including all published issues, please visit the store.

Get your copy here

We are dedicated to empowering you, the writer. The ethos of Great Ape is simply DO YOU. However, as writers, we know that freedom can be as hostile to the imagination as manacles are to the hands, so here are some things we like and dislike:
We Like…
puns; pithy jokes; dirty jokes; baths; clean jokes; satire; dark humor; levity, brevity, gravity, surprises; wordplay; surrealism; animals that can talk; animals that can’t talk; animals that can talk but choose not to; EVERYTHING that takes the ridiculousness of human existence as its central theme
We Dislike…
bad grammar; “your way” of using punctuation; misuse of the word irony; broken records; worn-out metaphors; ANY and EVERY joke, poem, or story that takes it as a given that one group of people are fundamentally better or worse than any other group of people (i.e. racism, sexism, classism, and all the other terrible -isms out there)

We accept poetry and prose, both fiction and creative nonfiction. We also accept illustrated work, i.e. comics. Prose should be no longer than 4000 words, double spaced, with your name and the name of the piece in the header. Poetry can be in any form, format, or length, but please clearly indicate your name and the name of the poem in the submission email.

Submit your work as a PDF or .docx file to submissions@great-ape.com. Unfortunately, due to the number of submissions we receive, we are unable to provide feedback on all submissions.

We welcome submissions from everybody, but especially encourage authors bringing marginalized or underrepresented voices to the humor genre, including BIPOC writers, queer and non-binary folks, and women, to submit their work to Great Ape.

Great Ape asks for one-time North American and British print and online publishing rights to accepted work. We reserve the right to sell print and e-book copies of the journal in order to recoup printing costs. We did not get into this for the money. Every penny, pound, and peso earned through journal sales goes back into the print budget for the subsequent issue.

Authors retain all print and online rights to their work. If, after publishing with us, you wish to publish your piece somewhere else, that is your business. We only accept unpublished work.

Submit some funny words to Great Ape today!