A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #284
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For April 12-18, 2023
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. Hope you all got your taxes filed on time! Unfortunately, we just found out we're being audited. We claimed our shower at the Humorous Readings Headquarters (HRHQ) as a home office, because it's where we get our best ideas, but the IRS doesn't buy that we exclusively use the shower for work. So if any auditors reach out to you, it would really help us out if you told them that we don't get clean in the shower and that we're always very stinky.
What We Enjoyed This Week
Elliott from “E.T.” ’s College Essay by Rachel Kaplan (The New Yorker) Rachel has a great reversal at the top here that plays on our expectations about Elliott's college essay. It's so fun, and it sets up the rest of the piece to double down and explore that idea. Plus, the great parody of the stilted, flabby style of college admission essays contrasts nicely with the E.T. specifics.
TikTok’s Old Age Filter Shows My Wife and Some Other Guy Standing on My Grave by Patrick Coyne (McSweeney's) Patrick is really great at weaving a piece from a bonkers premise. This is a great example of how you can get a lot of laughs out of exploring and explaining things that might otherwise feel like a problem with the logic in your setup: Sometimes the move is to lean into the weirdness as opposed to trying to explain it away.
What I Think Will Happen if I Go to a Bar and Order a Whiskey Neat by Maeve Dunigan (The New Yorker) Another great exploring piece, this time from one of our favorite writers. As opposed to the wacky premise of the previous piece, the seed of this idea is much more grounded. Maeve adds layers of assumption and exploration to this simple bar order, and follows them to some really fun and heightened places.
YOUR AD HERE!
Do you have an ad you'd like to place in the Newsletter? Fill out this form!
And feel free to send us an email if you have questions.
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 #45.
Look Out Folks... It's Horse Flu Season by Dan Caprera (McSweeney's) This piece is amazing. It goes in about 12 different, insane directions, and we love them all.
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 Newsletter
Luke's got just TWO spots left in his short humor writing workshop starting on May 13th! Writing from previous workshops has gone on to be published by The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and many more outlets you know and love from this newsletter!
Other Humorous Writing News
Jack Handey has a new book out, called Escape From Hawaii: A Tropical Sequel! It's a sequel to his previous novel, The Stench of Honolulu, and looks like it's only available on his website. Hat tip to Jon Hendren, whose tweet alerted us to this news and the fact that Handey seems to only be promoting this by direct email to people who bought his last book.
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!