A Newsletter of Humorous Writing

For March 17-23, 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 The 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. A reminder: Our special streaming edition of An Evening of Humorous Readings, celebrating the release of Jen Spyra's Big Time, is coming up in just over a week, on April 2nd at 8 PM ET via the Squirrel Theater's Twitch.

It's totally free! All you have to do is head over to the Squirrel Theater's Twitch page at the time of the show. And if you use a Google calendar, you can click this link to add the event to your calendar.

What We Enjoyed This Week

I’m an Insecure Stock Photo of a Vaccine Vial, and This Is My Moment to Shine by Wendi Aarons and Devorah Blachor  (The New Yorker) This is a delightful exploration of a unique character's point of view, and also a setup that allows for some truly excellent runs of different stock photo specifics. ("Plaid Blanket Thrown Over Back of Adirondack Chair Near Still Lake.") Both elements are well-balanced, neither pulling too much focus from the other.

GPT-3 Tries Pickup Lines by Janelle Shane (AI Weirdness) Though not traditional humor pieces, Janelle Shane's AI articles always make us laugh--and as you can imagine, pickup lines are a particularly rich subject for her neural nets to tackle.

Malala Makes Note Before Job Interview To Bring Up Nobel Peace Prize by Khaleel Rahman (Flexx) "Exceptional/famous person dealing with mundane situation" is a very very funny setup. (See also the classic Onion article: "Matt Damon Loses $500 To Guy Who Promised Professional-Looking Headshots".) This piece also does a great job of capturing that nervous "just out of college applying for jobs" feeling in a very relatable way.

An Old Favorite

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

There's just ONE spot left in Luke's workshop "Let's Write a Short Humor Piece." In this workshop you’ll write a short humor piece (like the kind you find on McSweeney’s and/or The New Yorker) over the course of four weeks. As we discuss attendees’ work in class, you’ll also learn broader lessons about humor writing that you can take beyond the workshop. Most importantly, it's gonna be fun! Schedule and signup form here.

James is teaching Short Humour for Beginners as part of Pandemic University's Spring ’21 Semester Series! This will be an intro to the form, as well as a survey of tools and tricks that a writer of any level can use. I'll be walking through process and a writing checklist, as well as some short exercises, plus a little Q&A, in 90 minutes! It's only $16, on April 6th at 1 PM, over Zoom. Be sure to check out the other courses that are part of the spring series -- there are lots of great ones!

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!