A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #235
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For March 4-10, 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. Everyone knows "the witching hour," when horrifying things happen, and "the twilight zone," when strange and unexpected things happen, but few know about "the short humor space": that period from 2-4 pm-ish when things are just a bit zany and off-kilter.
What We Enjoyed This Week
I Know What It Sounds Like But My Liege Lord Just Happens To Be Exemplary In Form and Countenance by Daniel Lavery (The Chatner) Daniel has always been incredibly committed to the premises of pieces: the language, the tone, the sentence structure, every aspect of the writing is always carefully observed and carefully executed. This piece is so wonderfully focused, and the casual defensiveness and use of deep cuts of historical reference ("appanage as the Merovingians sometimes have it") make it compelling and silly. What is particularly effective here too, is that the historical character speaks to us in anachronistically modern language, but Daniel never uses that juxtaposition of modern and ancient as a punchline; This is more of a translation of a funny, ancient monologue into language the modern ear can hear better.
How To Write A Condolence Letter by Ella Gale (Slackjaw) Lists are always better with callbacks and runners, and Ella's piece has them in spades. Ella chases down lots of fun narrative loops and threads, and the tropes of a list of advice always make for an easy way to rest and reset the piece.
Critics Respond To My Performance At Last Night’s Dinner Party by Adam Dietz (Slackjaw) What a fun format! Adam writes from a variety of points of view and voices to give the Rashomon treatment to a very average dinner party guest. The callbacks and reinterpretations of events at this dinner party weave this piece into something with surprising depth. And the choice to make everyone a critic gives the text some gravitas to juxtapose with the mundane party, which makes the whole thing sillier.
An Old Favorite
I Nearly Set My House on Fire Trying to Make the Lightning Mushroom From ‘Ratatouille’ by Jaya Saxena (Eater) Trying any new cooking technique always feels a little risky, but some cooking techniques are legitimately dangerous. The pieces we share here almost never feature the honest threat of bodily harm or house fire, but Jaya's recreation of a cartoon dish is the exception. A solid, super funny premise, great jokes and observations, and the very real stakes of "will this work as a recipe" and "will this start an electrical/mushroom fire," make for a great read.
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' parody class starts next week! Pandemic University is running a flash sale on the class through tomorrow -- sign up now for a discount!
Luke's got two humor writing workshops coming up in June! The first is a one-off focused on form and narration in short humor writing, and the other is a four-week course in which you'll write three short humor pieces, getting feedback, notes, and support along the way.
-- AD --
From writer-director Lizzie Logan (that's me! hi!) comes a romantic comedy starring Natalie Walker as Kat, an agoraphobic YouTube star who falls in love with her delivery guy. ‘People People’ premiered at the Ashland Independent Film Festival in 2018 and won the Best Narrative Feature award at the deadCenter Film Festival. Do you want to rent it? You can do that. In fact, you should. It’s a pretty delightful movie!
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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!
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!