A Newsletter of Humorous Writing

For February 13-19, 2020, a roundup of the week's finest prose humor and prose humor-related news.
Our next show is February 25th, tickets here.

Hello and welcome to A Newsletter of Humorous Writing, the email propaganda arm of the acclaimed humorous readings show, An Evening of Humorous Readings. Our next show is coming up THIS TUESDAY, 2/25/20! Tickets are $10 in advance, but $15 at the door, so get a ticket now!  As always, if you can't make it, it really helps us whenever our newsletter readers spread the word about the show and recommend it to their friends--and if you do it on social media, tag the three of us and our venue Caveat while you're at it!

What We Enjoyed This Week

Our New Business Plan: Go Viral by Kate Villa (The New Yorker) If you came to our November 2019 show, you could have heard Kate read this before it was published! It's a great piece, with great pacing, filled with well-chosen details. It's also very relatable because our business plan for the newsletter is to go viral! Wait. Is that a... bad plan?

What We Used to Call Him by David Guzman (Points in Case) This piece has a simple setup: A riff on nicknames slowly reveals more and more details about the person being nicknamed. The challenge with a piece like this, which doesn't have a big conceptual hook, is that the quality of the final product rests to a huge degree on execution and the details. And this piece delivers on both counts. It's superbly calibrated, with jokes that feel surprising, and which get increasingly crazy, but which never feel random.

Robot-Themed Movie Ideas for Our Robot-Dominated Future by Eugenia Viti (The New Yorker)  Very often, illustrated pieces are light on text--which makes sense! That's why they're called illustrated pieces. But this piece is a great example of how adding a little more quality prose to go with the illustrations can push an idea further, add richness, and take it to even more unexpected places.

Musician’s Funeral Turnout Pretty Good For a Tuesday Night by Issa Diao (The Hard Times) This is a great example of how to do a mapping game. (Funeral = show.) Too many pieces wouldn't have pushed beyond the initial gag in the headline, but this one does a great job of exploring and expanding on its premise. It also addresses the very relatable problem of trying to get people to come to shows on Tuesdays AHEM AHEM (tickets here).
 

An Old Favorite

A Stalker Murders Me (A Story Composed from Presidential Campaign Fundraising Emails) by Tom Ellison (Weekly Humorist)

Here at the newsletter, we're big fans of humor made from found material (see also James's Hulk Hogan erasure poems), and as the campaign season continues to get more and more intense, we thought it was high time to revisit this piece. It starts with an interesting observation ("It kinda feels like these presidential campaigns are obsessed with me?"), builds beautifully, and the narrative that it crafts feels completely organic and earned, never forced. A real all-around treat.
 

Updates From Your Hosts and Friends of the Show

Friend of the Show Dan Abramson has a new scripted podcast out called "The Last Degree of Kevin Bacon". Dan wrote in to give us the lowdown on the show: "It's about a guy who wants to kill Kevin Bacon. It’s also about Kevin Bacon, who despite being 6 degrees from everyone, has just realized he has no friends." Kevin Bacon is actually in it (along with TERRY GROSS and many others), and another Friend of the Show, Matt Klinman, wrote for it.

Lana Schwartz's book Build Your Own Romantic Comedy is being released next Tuesday! If you enjoyed Riane Konc's Build Your Own Christmas Movie Romance, we suspect you'll get a kick out of Lana's book as well.

See you at the show (we hope)!

@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.