A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #175

A Newsletter of Humorous Writing

A Newsletter of Humorous Writing

For March 10-16, 2021, a roundup of the week's finest prose humor and prose humor-related news.
Our next show is April 2nd at 8 PM ET, streaming on Squirrel Theater's Twitch.

Hello and welcome to A Newsletter of Humorous Writing, the email propaganda arm of the acclaimed humorous readings show, An Evening of Humorous Readings. We were horrified to wake up to the news of the vicious hate crimes in Atlanta yesterday. If you have the means to donate, The Strategist put together a great list of organizations that are helping Asian communities and could use your help, and the AAPI community fund is distributing what they raise to a number of grassroots organizations across the US. We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and your friends and neighbors.

What We Enjoyed This Week

Local Tough Guy Accidentally Buys 'No Salt' Can Of Whoop-Ass, Now Reluctant To Open It Up by Calder Holbrook (Flexx) Pieces that turn on the transplanting of a phrase into a different context can sometimes feel a bit one-note, but not so here. Plenty of fun details, world-building, and character voices give this piece lots of room to explore and build.

‘MLB The Show 21’ Allows You to Fully Customize Overbearing Father Living Vicariously Through You by Camden Brazile (Hard Drive) A parody of ever-expanding attempts to create realism in games as well as of shitty dad stereotypes, this piece gives Camden lots of opportunity for great, specific jokes.

Quiz: Is He Cheating, or Is He Balls Deep in a New 5,000-Piece Scenic Jigsaw Puzzle? by Hannah Benson (Robot Butt) This is a really fun use of the quiz format, where Hannah uses the questions and answers to set up scenarios with two possible outcomes that can be explored. It makes this piece feel almost like a mini choose-your-own-adventure about two boyfriends who are terrible in different ways.

REPORT: You Can Totally Make Garlic Bread Right Now, If You Want (Reductress) A great example of juxtaposing tones: the detached journalistic voice sets up the breezy colloquialisms as nice laugh lines. Another Reductress piece we wish we knew who to credit for writing -- drop us a line if you know who write this headline and/or the piece! Which reminds us: we had promised to share what we could find out about who wrote this wonderful Reductress piece, and a bunch of readers let us know that the headline was written by Katherine Martin!

An Old Favorite

This week's Old Favorite pick and writeup come from Sean McGowan. Thanks for writing in, Sean!

It’s Literally Impossible for Me to Get Off Anymore by Seth Reiss (McSweeney's)

Sean writes: "'It's Literally Impossible For Me To Get Off Anymore' is a master class in lunacy and a beautiful marriage of high and “low” comedy. The specifics are bulletproof, the voice hilariously flippant. Even the formatting of this piece gets tapped for laughs--the line break preceding “Andy Hiller” lends a sense of timing to the joke that makes its delivery perfect. I obviously can’t speak for Seth Reiss, but it feels like a piece that was discovered as the author was writing it in real-time, like they were just along for the ride. So whenever I catch myself abandoning ideas too early when writing jokes, worried a certain premise doesn’t have enough legs, I remind myself of this piece. Pursue your stupidest ideas, even if it’s literally just an idiot who has a really hard time getting off."

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. 

Updates From Your Hosts and Friends of the Show

James is teaching an intro to humor writing course as part of Pandemic University's Spring ’21 Semester Series! James' seminar is an introduction to short humor as a form, as well as a survey of tools and tricks that a writer of any level can use. It's on April 6th at 1 PM, over Zoom, but be sure to check out the other courses that are part of the spring series, there are lots of great ones!

There are just a few spots left in Luke's "Let's Write a Short Humor Piece" workshop! In it you'll write a short humor piece over the course of four weeks, taking your ideas from brainstorm to full draft. As we discuss attendees' work, you'll also learn broader lessons about humor writing that you can take well beyond the four weeks. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced short humor writer, you'll get something out of this workshop. Schedule and signup form right here.

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.

This newsletter is free, but if you enjoy it and want to support the work we do putting it together, you can send us a tip here. Any amount is greatly appreciated, and 1/3rd of each donation will go to ​Stand Up To Cancer.

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!

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.

This newsletter is free, but if you enjoy it and want to support the work we do putting it together, you can subscribe to our paid tier, or you can send us a tip here. Any amount is greatly appreciated, and 1/3rd of each donation will go to ​Stand Up To Cancer.

If you'd like to place an ad in the Newsletter, please fill out this form.

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!