A Newsletter of Humorous Writing

For September 1-7, 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. It's our BICENTENNIAL EDITION and we've got a ton of celebrations planned: We're minting commemorative coins, launching fireworks that explode into the shape of the McSweeney's chair logo, and organizing a fleet of tall-masted sailing ships to deliver crates of James Thurber books to New York Harbor.

But in all seriousness, it means the world to us to have had your support over these last 200 emails, and we can't thank you enough for helping build this community dedicated to celebrating funny writers and this weird little genre of writing.

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What We Enjoyed This Week

Some Feedback on My Kidnapper’s Ransom Note by Broti Gupta (The New Yorker) So much of the fun of this piece comes from how it lets the reader infer what the ransom letter is like rather than spelling it out. It also nails the tone and phrases that people so often use when giving writing feedback. ("It’s a great starting point, and there’s a lot of fun stuff here to work with.")

Taco Truck Is Fusion Of Every Cuisine Except Mexican by Nathan Kamal (Flexx) The challenge with a piece like this is that there are already a lot of weird fusion foods out there, so you have to make sure you're heightening beyond reality and that the fusion dishes you invent read as sufficiently weird. This piece delivers, with plenty of hilarious, surprising food mashups like "a cup of polenta with poutine, and the poutine was somehow also curry."

I Have Been Watching This Man’s Laptop for Thirty Years by Eli Burnstein (The New Yorker) This is a fun exploration of a relatable situation that gets taken to the next level by the unique voice of the narrator. The prose manages to be lyrical without skimping on jokes, but also without making the lyricism itself the joke: "The room began to fade until the only thing I could see was the computer’s gray plastic chassis, the only sound I could hear the gentle spinning of its disk drive."

Do Not Feed the Duck—You Will Only Enable Him by McKayley Gourley and Madeline Goetz (McSweeney's) Using variations on a familiar phrase is a nice structure, and this piece does a great job of heightening by painting an increasingly detailed portrait of the titular duck.  
 

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An Old Favorite

This week's Old Favorite is a Brian Agler Selection (TM)--a piece whose accompanying note was written by Brian--from Newsletter #12.

Day of Judgement by Simon Rich (The New Yorker) This is a classic; it's comfort food. But so is mac & cheese, and you don't see anyone complaining about mac & cheese, do ya? Simon Rich is a frustratingly-good humor writer--good because he's good, and frustrating because he's so consistently good. This piece is a perfect example. It's a great premise that just keeps delivering. And even though it was published almost two years ago, it feels timelier than ever before. Bravo, Simon. Your fans at the Newsletter of Humorous Writings wish you all the success in your upstart, burgeoning career.

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.

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Updates From Your Hosts and Friends of the Show

Nothing from us this week! Too busy learning how to smelt so we can make those commemorative coins we mentioned.
 

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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!