A Newsletter of Humorous Writing

For March 16-22, 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. We're currently working on rewriting all the lyrics to West Side Story to make them about fast food. So far all we've got is: "When you're a Jet, / You can eat onion rings. / Burger boy, you're a man; / Burger man, you're a king!"

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What We Enjoyed This Week

Finnegans Wake II: Release Date, Plot, and Everything We Know So Far by Derek de Koff (McSweeney's) A wonderful parody of articles on entertainment blogs that contain no actual information and exist only to get traffic from google searches. This piece captures all the stylistic tics you find in these articles, down to the parenthetical asides; and the juxtaposition of that banal style with details from Finnegan's Wake generates a lot of great laughs.

A Guide to New Emojis Like "Blood Pour" and "Egg Check!" by Claire Carusillo (Gawker) A very funny rundown of different possible use cases for a strange new batch of emojis, and a nice example of how to give yourself room to go to weird places when writing in response to something topical.

Retirement the Margaritaville Way by Nick Paumgarten (The New Yorker) Not a typical short humor piece, but the subject matter and prose are, undeniably, very funny. It would be easy to take the people in this story, residents of a Jimmy Buffett-themed retirement community, and turn them into two-dimensional caricatures, but Paumgarten renders these characters with nuance and empathy. He's able to explore the humorous absurdities of the situation without throwing anyone under the bus for cheap laughs, and without turning a blind eye to the often-troubling politics of places like Latitude Margaritaville.
 

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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 #84.

I'm the Person Ahead of You in Line to Order Food by Joanna Borns (Points in Case) We don't necessarily believe that all humor pieces are part of some shared, Marvel-esque universe, but we also think that this narrator--who evidently has never seen food before, and says things like, "Is your mouth the only location you're supposed to place the food?"--eventually moved to Chicago and became one of these people.

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

Luke's still got spots open in his Let's Write a Short Humor Piece workshop, starting next week! In it you'll write a short humor piece in four weeks, going from brainstorm to full draft, getting feedback every step of the way. Scholarship spots are also still available!

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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.

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