A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #218
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For January 5-11, 2022, 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. Here's a quick tip: toss your favorite piece of short humor into the dryer with your laundry for funnier clothes!
What We Enjoyed This Week
Everything We Currently Know About Birds by Steve Etheridge (McSweeney's) A premise that's "jokes about a broad category" can be a tough one to pull off, because the success of the piece rests wholly on the success of the jokes. Thankfully Steve is a great joke-writer, and this piece is a blast.
I Pass the Bechdel Test Everyday If You Don’t Count Bigfoot as a Man by Kinsey Jasnoch (Reductress) There are so many potential angles that a writer might take to explore the perspective of a Bigfoot obsessive, and a lot of them could take the easy route of just playing the belief in Bigfoots (Bigfeet? Bigsfoot?) as the odd element. Kinsey adds some extra twists to avoid a premise that might feel played out and to keep things feeling free and interesting, but not so many that the reader is overwhelmed.
Freelance Writing Job Posts Clearly Written By My Mother by Joe Wellman (Slackjaw) Not to bake your noodle too much, but one fun thing about this piece is that it's a nesting doll of premise-based writing, with the mom character writing mini, premise-based parodies within the larger premise-based piece.
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 #75.
Sorry For the Delayed Response by Susanna Wolff (The New Yorker) Let's get one thing out of the way right now: I (Brian) have a bunch of emails in my inbox that I haven't responded to yet. In fact, some are from Luke and James! And while this piece is obviously funny on its own merits, that's what makes it really work--we've all been there. We've all had these feelings, even if we haven't necessarily articulated them this way (because we can't, or because we won't). So, now, we aren't just dealing with jokes (and the jokes are A+!), we're dealing with catharsis.
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.
Other Humorous Writing News
George Meyer, the legendary writer for The Simpsons, has a brand new site called Frogs & Turtles! The site is chock full of short bits, and the style and format are very reminiscent of another of Meyer's beloved projects, Army Man: America's Only Magazine. Which is to say, it's great! Hat tip to Ed Park for alerting us to this news.
Updates From Your Hosts and Friends of the Show
We're thinking about running ads here in the Newsletter. They would be short, text-only, and we'd like to keep them focused on humor and writing adjacent things, but we're curious to hear your input! Is this something you'd be interested in? What kind of ad would you like to run? Reply to this email and let us know what you think! And thanks!
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!