Schumacher won the comedy writing prize for her novel Dear Committee Members, becoming the first woman to win in its 20-year history

Julie Schumacher became the first female winner of the Thurber prize for American humor on Monday night, taking the prize for her epistolary novel Dear Committee Members. It was destined to be a historic night for the nearly 20-year-old award; all three of this year’s finalists were women.

The prize is award by the Thurber House, a literary center in James Thurber’s hometown that boasts the tagline “Where laughter, learning, and literature meet”. It is handed out at an annual ceremony at Carolines on Broadway in New York, one of the city’s best-known standup venues. (Past winners include Jon Stewart, David Sedaris, Christopher Buckley and Alan Zweibel.)

Schumacher’s winning novel depicts a midwestern professor whose life is glimpsed through the seemingly endless number of recommendation letters he is asked to write for colleagues, students and near strangers. While the book is technically fictional, Schumacher is herself a creative writing professor at the University of Minnesota, and, during her reading at the award ceremony, described the main character’s office as “bearing an odd resemblance to the building in which I work”.

This year’s shortlist featured several distinct styles of humor writing. Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is a graphic memoir depicting her interactions with her parents in their twilight years. Annabelle Gurwitch’s I See You Made An Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 is a more traditional collection of essays about ageing.

Susanne Jaffe, creative director of the Thurber House, says one of the main criteria for a winning book is that “it cannot be mean-spirited. It needs to be in the Thurber tradition, and Thurber’s humor was very smart and snarky.” The award receives about 65 submissions each year, including self-published works. The winner receives a plaque and $5,000 award, while the runners-up receive original Thurber prints.

Thurber was a humorist and New Yorker cartoonist from the early-to-mid-20th century, running in literary circles with Dorothy Parker and EB White. He published dozens of books, and his well-known stories include The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and The Night the Ghost Got In. Jaffe describes Thurber as “a great representative of Americana writing”, in the style of Mark Twain. (The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor is also awarded annually, though its remit is more general contributions to humor and it mostly honors performers.)

The night’s host, journalist Henry Alford, referred to the event as the “Oscars of humorous prose”, and though the event, attended by about 100, somewhat lacked that glamor, it was clear that the everyone involved took very seriously the calling to honor this particular niche of comedy.

There’s no shortage of humor writing in modern comedy. The New Yorker’s long-running Shouts and Murmurs column continues to give young writers a chance to shine, while the McSweeney’s website features columns such as Short Imagined Monologues and Hungover Bear and Friends. The staff of the Onion won the Thurber Prize in 1999 for their book Our Dumb Century, and they’ve continued to experiment with comic writing on their viral spinoff Clickhole and their new tabloid parody StarWipe.

And ever since Tina Fey’s book of essays, Bossypants, was published in 2011, female comedians have run the funny celebrity book game. The biggest names – Mindy Kaling, Amy Poehler, Lena Dunham – have garnered huge attention for their works, and comedy it-girl Amy Schumer reportedly just signed an $8–$10m book deal for her own memoir.

In her brief acceptance speech, Schumacher cited Thurber as an early literary influence. “It was some of the first funny writing I ever heard or knew about when I was young,” she said after the ceremony. “And I was somebody who thought books were hard and boring because I didn’t learn to read very easily, so that turned me on to writing in a way. It meant a lot to me.”