A Newsletter of Humorous Writing

For April 21-27, 2021, 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. Good news! The City of New York has finally given us the approval to open up Humorous Readings Headquarters (HRHQ) as a vaccination site. If you get your shot(s) here, we've got tons of fun bonuses for you: Print copies of the latest newsletter, band-aids with funny lines on them, and medical professionals who do non-stop bits while giving you your dose. (But seriously, if you haven't gotten vaccinated yet, please go do it if you can!)

What We Enjoyed This Week

Trailer for a Prequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” by Ellis Rosen (The New Yorker) This piece does a wonderful job translating the particularities, tropes, and clichés of modern trailers into prose. It's truly a trailer rendered in text, not a script for a trailer--a subtle but important distinction. It succeeds because it makes smart choices about when to use traditional screenplay formatting and when to depart from that structure in order to build out the reality of this trailer (and also to get lots of good laughs).

Why You Should Give Him a Second Chance Even Though His House Doesn’t Have a Drawbridge by Ellena Eshraghi (Reductress) A fun premise with plenty of great medieval castle defense specifics (and one VERY specific door specific) that does a great job of heightening by expanding our understanding of the character's worldview.

Just Following Up On That Creepy Message I Wrote In Blood On Your Bathroom Mirror (Clickhole) The dryness of the customer service tone provides a hilarious contrast to the horrifying content of the survey, and the format allows for lots of fun runs of jokes in the response sections. As we've said in the past, the goal of this newsletter is to highlight specific writers. Instead of saying, "Wow, what a great McSweeney's/Shouts/Etc. piece!" we want you to say, "Wow, what a great [insert writer's name] piece!" So we tend to be more sparing when it comes to featuring pieces from publications that don't do bylines, like Clickhole--but that doesn't mean they're not also doing great work.

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

Luke's got just two spots left in his Let's Write a Short Humor Piece workshop starting May 22nd! In it you'll write a short humor piece over the course of four weeks, working with a small group to get personalized feedback every step of the way. Get more info and sign up here.

The Belladonna is starting a series of free workshops for underrepresented writers! The first workshop is being offered specifically to those "who identify as all of the following: Black, A woman or another marginalized gender (trans, non-binary, etc.) age 18 or above, New to short-form comedy/satire (to date, has written 10 or fewer published short-form comedy/satire articles)." It's taking place on May 10th, and is taught by Daisy Hobbs, who will focus on writing and pitching humor. More details and information on how to sign up can be found 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.

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