A Newsletter of Humorous Writing

For December 21-27, 2022.

Hello and welcome to A Newsletter of Humorous Writing, a roundup of the week's finest short humor pieces and funny articles, and a celebration of the fantastic writers who wrote them. There's so much pressure around New Year's resolutions, so we've decided to set our sights on something simple and manageable: cut down on the number of weekends when we're ensnared in high-pressure games of poker with our foes, where the stakes are not just money, but our very lives. 

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What We Enjoyed This Week

The DEFINITIVE Ranking Of The Things In "My Favorite Things" by DC Pierson (DC's Newsletter) This is a great use of format; couching a series of personal anecdotes, observations, and jokes into the easy-to-parse form of a ranked list. It keeps everything tidy and moving along. And titling this as "DEFINITIVE" is very funny.

The Gifted Child’s Gift Guide by Carrie McCrossen (The New Yorker) A phrase like "gifted child," which has been used and reused on Twitter, is given fresh life here. Carrie's piece has many satirical targets, so the reader doesn't know quite what to expect. We're constantly surprised, and there's plenty of fodder for callbacks.

Pictures with Santa Packages, from Best to Cheapest by David Guzman (Points In Case) Another great use of the ranked list format, here broken into three sections. David fills this piece with so many great details -- each beat is a wonderfully specific little scene.

Quiz: Which Santa’s Reindeer Are You? by Rachel Marsh (Slackjaw) Sometimes, short and sweet is the way to go. The one punchline here is as much a holiday joke as it is a format joke: we bring a set of expectations about both Santa's reindeer and about quizzes, which Rachel subverts quickly and cleanly. 

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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 #96.

Metal Song Not Even Close To Being Over by Krissy Howard (The Hard Times) The Onion tends to own the "news parody" genre, but don't sleep on The Hard Times. Krissy Howard does a great job mimicking the Serious Journalism Voice for a topic that is, for so many reasons, so silly.

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

Get to work on those New Year's writing goals and resolutions right at the beginning of the year! Luke just had TWO spots open up in his (previously sold out) advanced humor writing workshop starting on January 5th. (He's also got just TWO spots left in his intro to short humor workshop starting January 7th.)

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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!