A Newsletter of Humorous Writing

For August 22-28, 2019, a roundup of the week's finest prose humor and prose humor-related news.

Hello and welcome to A Newsletter of Humorous Writing, the email propaganda arm of the acclaimed humorous readings show, An Evening of Humorous Readings. And hey, speaking of the show, did you know our next one is just under a month away, on Tuesday, September 24th and you can already get tickets? We like to joke around in this newsletter, but that's no joke, friend. Click through to check out our sweet sweet lineup (or just scroll down to the end of the newsletter to the part where we always put the info about the show).
 

What We Enjoyed This Week

A Word Of Warning, Everyone Who Swims In The Pool Of This Hampton Inn Drowns by Libby Marshall (Weekly Humorist) This piece does a great job of interweaving the banal details of the hotel check in process with funny and macabre details about the cursed pool. It's also a good example of the affinity between comedy and horror.

An Open Letter to the Man Who Yelled “Go Back to Africa” At Me by JD Dillard (McSweeney's) A textbook example of how you take a simple premise as your starting point and explore it until you can't anymore. This piece makes you laugh, makes a point, has real heart, and makes balancing all those elements look easy. 

My Baby Is Good. Your Baby Is Bad. by Shira Danan (The Belladonna) Lots of wonderful images in this one, including: "Occasionally, he senses his father and I need an evening alone together, and he gives a stage wink before rubbing his eyes at 6:30."

I Invented So Many Things That You Take For Granted by Oliver Prescott (Points in Case) The choice of specifics in this piece is excellent. Though it's somewhat hard to articulate precisely what unifies them all, there's not a detail that feels out of place, or overly out of left field. And it even has room for a weird subgame, which is integrated in a well-balanced way, never drawing too much focus. When you have a premise that's more difficult to define, it can be easy to include overly random or overly general specifics, but this piece gets it right from top to bottom.
 

An Old Favorite

Commercials for Meg Favreau by Meg Favreau (The Big Jewel)

A delightfully strange, very funny bricolage of commercial tropes. It's a great example of how you can be unabashedly weird without sacrificing clarity or coherence. Again, though it's difficult to say what EXACTLY unifies them all, the details all feel of a piece while still being surprising.

On a sadder note, The Big Jewel recently announced that it was going to stop publishing new work. Fortunately it's archives will remain available, so why not take some time this long weekend to take a look through 'em? (Thanks to Luke Roloff for passing along the news.)
 

Updates From Your Hosts and Friends of the Show

Next Thursday, 9/5/19, at 9PM at the UCB Theater in Hell's Kitchen is your second-to-last chance to catch "You Can't Spell Love Without Cleveland, OH", the weirdo romcom sketch show that Luke co-wrote. It's also the last performance of the show that Luke will be at since he's going to be traveling when the actual final performance is happening. So if you want to see the show AND say hi to Luke after, make sure you come out next week!
 

See you next week!

@brianagler, @lukevburns, & @jamesfolta

Did we miss a piece you loved? Did you love a piece we mentioned? Let us know! This is an experiment and we're hoping to continue to make it better and better. If you have any thoughts, notes, wishes, or dreams for this newsletter, please email us or respond to this email and tell us what the score is.