A Newsletter of Humorous Writing

For April 20-26, 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. With everything in the news about Twitter, we'd like to take this time to reassure our readers that we will NEVER sell this newsletter... for anything less than forty-FIVE billion dollars. We think that our observations about short humor are easily worth at least one billion dollars more than Twitter. If you have 45 billion dollars and are interested please email us at your earliest convenience.

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What We Enjoyed This Week

Our Hybrid Work Policy Requires You in the Office Twice a Week to Battle the Bog Man by Devin Wallace and Emily Claypoole (McSweeney's) Devin and Emily do a great job building out the world of this piece, giving us more and more details about the Bog Man and how the company has tried to deal with him.  Also the phrase "the Bog Man" is just very funny.

A New York Spring Forecast by Claire Friedman (The New Yorker) The very specific specifics in this one are fantastic. They heighten nicely but never stray too far away from the relatable core of the premise.

Getting High as a Teenager vs. Getting High as a Middle-Aged Adult by Leslie Ylinen and Michael Reyes (McSweeney's) The contrast between the "teenager" sections and the "middle-aged" sections drives a lot of the laughs in this piece, but each section is very funny on its own too. No easy feat! The piece is also packed with well-observed details that add wonderful texture to the different scenes.
 

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An Old Favorite

This week's Old Favorite pick and writeup come from Keith James. Thanks for writing in, Keith!

I Am a Stryker-X Assault Backpack, and This Airport Lounge Is an Insult by Tom Ellison (McSweeney's) Keith writes, "This piece does a really good job in picking the POV. If this absolute dressing down of the backpack owner was coming from just another person in the Delta Sky Lounge, it would have been a little bland. We've seen that one before. But instead, we get to see it from this...macho war-hungry backpack bought off of Amazon?? Who has a grandfather that is also a backpack?? This is required reading."

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

James is teaching his Introduction to Parody course again for Pandemic University! We'll discuss how parody works, learn tools to develop and execute it, and workshop you're writing! The course is four sessions on Zoom from May 19th to June 3rd, but there's lots more info and a link to sign up here!

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-- AD --

Looking for a good laugh? Try the book renowned comedy writer Mike Sacks calls “A must-have!” Beet Life by Tyler Holme is an absurd satire of influencer culture written from the perspective of a fictional health & lifestyle blogger known on Instagram as @beets_by_beth.
 
After receiving 100 Instagram followers, Beth has done what every successful influencer does when they amass a huge following. She wrote a self-help book full of life advice you should never follow!
 
Celebrated humorist Ginny Hogan even called Beet Life “Engaging… and laugh-out-loud funny,” which was very nice of her.

(Do you have an ad you'd like to place in the Newsletter? Fill out this form!)

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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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