A Newsletter of Humorous Writing

For August 12-18, 2020, 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. Big thanks to everyone who sent in an Old Favorite over the past two weeks! It's been a real treat to read the pieces and what you've written about them. If there's a short humor piece you love that you think we should know about, send it our way via the form below (in the Old Favorites section, naturally). We may run it, and your writeup about it, in a future edition of the newsletter. Keep 'em coming!

What We Enjoyed This Week

If You or a Loved One Has Been, You May Be Entitled to Financial Compensation by Joe Wellman (Points in Case) This is a wonderful example of the "playing with a familiar turn of phrase" genre of short humor piece. Here, making just a small tweak to an expression we all know results in an existential crisis and a lot of laughs.

Good Luck Doing This 30-Minute Recipe in 30 Minutes! by Rachel Van Ness (McSweeney's) Here at the newsletter, we've long been advocates for honesty and transparency in recipe times. (Take, for example, the newsletter in which we highlighted an article excoriating recipes for not being honest about how long it takes to caramelize onions.) We're glad to see the cause being advanced by this (very funny) piece.

We Are Committed To Making a Safer Trampoline by David Guzman (McSweeney's) This piece does an exceptional job of balancing two types of jokes: Jokes about unsafe trampoline designs, and jokes about a trampoline company slandering bounce houses. Both joke types are given enough space that neither winds up fully receding into the background as a subgame, which is a tricky thing to pull off. Often when a piece isn't working it's because the author has only half-committed to a central premise or main joke, and in a different piece, you might feel like one of these elements was given short shrift, or that the focus of the piece was overly muddled. But that's not the case here. The formatting, alternating bullet points with parenthetical asides, gives each joke type room to breathe and heighten in a satisfying way, and ensures that one never overwhelms the other. It takes a deft touch to make that work.

An Old Favorite

One striking feature of this piece: It's really NICE. Nice as in kind, good-hearted, and empathetic. Often people assume that humor HAS to come from characters being mean to each other, or has to start from a place of ironic, cynical distance, or has to be abrasive in some way in order to work ("acid wit," "biting satire," etc.). And while those approaches are certainly valid, in this piece the laughs come from just how dang nice the stepdad character is, and from the rich emotional texture, which contrasts with the flatness you expect to encounter in these types of jokes. But it never gets overly saccharine or maudlin to the point that it's no longer funny. It's a refreshing change of pace and a good model to keep in mind.

Do you have an Old Favorite of your own? Let us know by filling out this form and we may run your pick in a future edition of the newsletter. This is the thing we mentioned at the start of the newsletter!

Updates From Your Hosts and Friends of the Show

See you next week!

@lukevburns & @jamesfolta

We started this newsletter with our dear friend Brian Agler, and we want it to always honor his memory and his love of all things humorous. You can find our newsletter tribute to Brian here.

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