A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #238
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For May 25-31, 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. The changing temperatures have gotten us thinking: is iced coffee the short humor of caffeinated drinks? It's got a clear premise that is a fun play on a popular and well-known drink, it changes its flavor as it goes on and the ice melts, it expands to explore every corner of the cup that it's in, and, if it's done right, you feel better by the end of it than when you started.
What We Enjoyed This Week
AI-generated donuts by Janelle Shane (AI Weirdness) We're big fans of Janelle's digital experiments. What makes them some of the more successful AI-written humor is that the premises that Janelle writes are always so fun and specific, which means the laughs aren't just falling where a bot fails to approximate normal, human writing, the laughs are also coming from seeing an AI try to complete the (often) simple rules of the premise.
Oh, You Think You’re a Real Star Wars Fan? Name Three of Its Stars You’ve Bullied Off Social Media by Callum Wratten (McSweeney's) A very fun piece that explores the sometimes nasty quagmire of fandoms and the hell of online platforms (more on that later in the newsletter). Callum avoids letting this piece drift into generalities by describing the narrator and their past very specifically, which keeps everything moving to new and interesting places.
Once You Brave The 5 Hottest Hot Sauces Of 2022, Diane Will Surely Take You Back by David Henne (Slackjaw) Similarly, David makes the fun choice to jump right into a specific scene and heightened situation, which really grounds this idea and makes the premise of "winning Diane back" more than just a random aside. It's also a nice touch and change of pace to (SPOILER ALERT) have Diane's hot sauce obsession, rather than some unusual behavior on the part of the narrator, be the thing that prompted the breakup.
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 #90.
Healing Crystals and How to Shoplift Them by Sarah Lazarus (The New Yorker) Rock solid premise (GET IT???) that does a great job of finding new and interesting directions while still honoring a central idea.
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
There are still spots left in Luke's upcoming single-session workshop, Narration and Form in Short Humor Writing! In it, we'll do some fun exercises to explore different structures and points of view that you can use in your humor writing. No need to prepare anything ahead of time, and attendees can participate as much as they like.
-- 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!
(Do you have an ad you'd like to place in the Newsletter? Fill out this form!)
Other Humorous Writing News
If you were on Twitter on Monday, you saw that the humor site Hard Drive got into it with Elon Musk, a dumb guy with far too much money, who tweeted an image of a headline written by Max Barth, that was stripped of all credit. Hard Drive recounts the whole saga here, "Hard Drive Apologizes to Elon Musk for Dunking on Him Too Hard", but the highlights are that Musk got made fun of and ratioed so badly that he deleted his initial tweet. Along the way, he tried to hastily construct a logic for why sharing someone's writing without acknowledging them was actually good and part of a larger right-wing battle against "wokism." We're preaching to the choir here, but refusing to credit or link to authors or publications is incorrect and just plain wrong. It's also not some sober-headed, realpolitik assessment of the internet that we all need to get used to. No matter what the marketers and Fuck Jerrys of the world say, crediting and celebrating writers is always good and correct.
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!