A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #191
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For June 30-July 6, 2021, a roundup of the week's finest prose 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. Bad news from your Newsletter writers: we fell asleep reading at the beach and now the only parts of us that aren’t burnt bright red are the outlines of where our books fell open on our chests. And the worst part is that the books were copies of How To Not Get Sunburned At The Beach: A Beginners Guide.
What We Enjoyed This Week
Woman Utterly Blindsided by Dinnertime by Mary Gulino (Reductress) The escalation and heightening in this piece takes a pretty grounded and relatable feeling and turns it into a crisis. A great example of using reaction to heighten and build on an idea.
I’m Burly Burlington And You Have A Golden Ticket To Tour My Coat Factory by Nathan Kamal (Slackjaw) We talk a lot about ways that writers can work their way around pitfalls and craft great pieces out of any sort of premise, but sometimes lightning strikes and a piece has such a clear, funny premise that it seems like it must have just written itself. Nathan's idea here is crisp and clever, and is a great showcase for some really funny and specific choices.
An Invitation To My Wedding Imagined By My 10-Year-Old Self by Halle Hoffman (Slackjaw) Another nicely done mapping piece, this one heaping on very specific childhood details. The parody of a wedding format is also handled nicely -- Halle takes us through the parts of the wedding invitation that we would expect and uses them as the piece's scaffolding, but also uses some description and digression to fill in detail and narrative.
An Old Favorite
A Memo To The New Employee About Parking by Seth Reiss (McSweeney's) Friend of the Show Seth Reiss can make something great out of the simplest premises. Which is just a way of saying that he's a really great writer. There are tons of good jokes and phrases in his piece ("I left out a couple things about parking"), but the last word of this one really cracks me up. (This is James by the way. Luke is out of town at the moment so, as of press time, I can't confirm whether he is also cracking up.)
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' short humor for beginners class is available as a video replay for $8 at Pandemic University! It's an hour and a half lecture plus a handout introducing the basics of short humor, everything from crafting premises from ideas, planning your piece, finding the right format, and more. And be sure to keep an eye on Pandemic University; they've got a lot of other great writing classes and replays available, including this one from Caitlin Kunkel on topical satire!
James also wrote a piece for Sliced about the dangerous history of watermelon. It's not humor, per se, but there are some pretty wild and funny stories in here, including one about a field of watermelons that started exploding like tasty landmines.
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!