A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #291
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For May 31-June 6, 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. We’ve all heard of Continental Breakfast, or American Breakfast, or English Breakfast, but have you heard of the Humorist Breakfast? It’s two eggs served funny, a dry piece of toast, and a big coffee that gets stronger and stranger the more you drink it.
What We Enjoyed This Week
Our Lemonade Stand Is Powered by AI by Devin Wallace (McSweeney's) Premises that are based around things that AI or Chat GPT have written can too often fall into the "bad doctor" trope, where the joke doesn't go much beyond watching someone be bad at their job. In this piece, Devin makes the smart choice to satirize the people using and boosting AI, and explores their motivations, making it clear that the bad AI is a tool being deployed by annoying and incompetent business guys with their own dumb logic and desires.
How to Find Your Size in Blue Jeans by Tori Multon (McSweeney's) Tori does a nice job exploring this piece's format and letting it inform the heightening. The parenthetical jokes about the scoring and the nice button at the end of the questionnaire make for a piece that manages to move to surprisingly absurd places in a relatively short amount of time.
These Are the Things That Must Happen to You by Tom Papa (The New Yorker) A piece like this, with a broad and general premise, requires very strong writing and jokes. It's the sort of thing that our favorite writers (Seth Reiss, John Howell Harris, Jen Spyra, etc.) excel at, but can be maddeningly hard to replicate. Tom's excellent joke writing pulls us along through the piece, snowballing and building to a very fun conclusion.
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
No, I’m from New York by Susanna Wolff (The New Yorker) Speaking of excellent execution on a simple idea--Susanna takes the nearly delusional attitude we New Yorkers have about our city and blows it out of the water. The nearly immediate heightening never lets up, and Susanna fills the piece with wonderfully strange specifics. Of course, we also like this piece because we've got a lot of hometown pride: We're an NYC Newsletter through and through, and we've got the petrified dragon eggs to prove it.
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
If you'd like to learn the essentials of short humor writing and meet other funny folks, Luke's got a workshop for you: Where to Start With Short Humor, starting on July 8th! (Scholarship spots available!) And if you're an experienced humor writer looking to write more drafts, and get deadlines and feedback in a supportive environment, he's got advanced workshops starting on July 8th and July 11th too.
And our event at Tribeca next week is sold out, but if you got a ticket, we can't wait to see you there! And the pilot of our show Scriptulated!, starring a very funny cast of improvisers--Peter Kim, Guillermo Martinez, Kelley Quinn, and Rehka Shankar--will be debuting soon! We'll let you know when you can give it a listen.
Other Humorous Writing News
And in WGA strike news: SAG-AFTRA overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike, with 97.91% of members saying yes to a strike. You may have read that the Directors Guild is close to negotiating a contract with the studios and whether or not it ends up being a good deal, Mike Royce notes that this means the WGA strike has already worked. Netflix's shareholders also recommended that the company not give their execs more money (seems like the shareholders are better than Netflix's management at reading the room). And some inspiring words from WGA co-chair Chris Keyser.
As always, there's lots of info and ways to show solidarity on the WGA's Strike Hub!
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!