A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #234
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For April 27-May 3, 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. It's been another upsetting week in the US. Abortions need to be safe, legal, and available to all, and if you have money to spare, abortionfunds.org has a very thorough list of groups across the country to donate to. And this Google doc has aggregated a lot of useful links and language to share, all already formatted for Twitter or text message.
What We Enjoyed This Week
Hurry—This Mattress Sale Won’t Last Forever (Nothing Does)! by Mary Gulino (The New Yorker) Pieces structured as short paragraphs, where the situation is reset then heightened and built upon, can be tough to keep the reader from getting ahead of. Mary does a nice job of leaning into the language as a counter-measure -- even if a reader gets the joke after a few beats, the turns of phrase are fun and interesting enough to keep us reading.
We Are Not a Diet Company by Cara Weinberger (McSweeney's) Protest Too Much style pieces like this can have a similar issue as coy pieces, in that the narrator isn't really saying what they mean, which can bog a piece down. Cara stays ahead of the bog by hitting lots of varied topics with the chatty marketing copy and writing some killer jokes along the way.
I Actually Do Have Time for Your Sick Little Games by DC Pierson (Points In Case) This is such a tidily done piece. Lots of fun jokes and wordplay, and the choice of formatting this as an email perfectly matches the narrator's tone, language, and sort-of-but-not-so-big-of-a-hurry sense of urgency.
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 #87.
Casting Call For My Internal Biopic by Joyce Miller (McSweeney's) This piece has some fun specifics and solid jokes, but is really worth returning to for the distinctive format. Styling a piece as a casting call is a fun way to get directly into specifics about characters and lets Miller draw two stories in parallel, one set in real life and the other in the always-more-sparkling imagined life.
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 offered some advice on the keys to good parody and on writing in general over at the Pandemic University's site. If you'd like to learn more about parody, as it just so happens James is also teaching a parody course that starts later in the month! Four sessions in three weeks will give you a primer on conceiving and writing funny, parody short humor! Find out more and sign up here!
-- 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!)
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!