A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #329
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For February 21-27, 2024
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. It's Leap Day! A bonus day and the temporal home of the world's most infrequent newspaper. We're using the day to catch up on sleep and reorganize our spice rack from "Most Similar to Dune's Spice Melange" to "Least Similar to Dune's Spice Melange."
What We Enjoyed This Week
Do We Need to Take This Outside? by Henry Block (McSweeney's) Henry's premise is such a fun, simple juxtaposition and his writing is excellent. His sweeping odes to the natural world crash in such a satisfying way against the honking bar insults ("The birds’ dreams are our dreams, motherfucker. You got that? We all want to be held.").
How To Make Him Notice You by Emerging From the Bushes by Malia Simon (The Hard Times) This piece is never static, making it very engaging for the reader. Malia builds her idea throughout, adding details to the situation and revelations about the character right up until the very end.
How I Keep My Skin Dewy and Moisturized by Riding a Log Flume Twice a Day (Reductress) A fun, silly premise plus great parody work. The tropes of a chatty skincare article ground the piece and set up lots of silly jokes. ("...none of the harmful chemicals that other moisturizers rely on and, statistically, a lot more particles of piss.") And as we've said in the past, if anyone has any info on who wrote this headline and article, let us know so we can shout them out next week!
-- AD --
Have you ever circled back, followed up, and just checked in so hard it turned into a death threat? Have you ever wanted to? Come to Death Threat: A Cancer Story, a solo show about how rage at the healthcare system and its appendages makes decorum dissolve between a cancer patient and HR professional. Performed by Rima Parikh and featuring Carly Kane, it’s part-standup, part-Powerpoint, and fully bedtime-friendly (it’s at 4 p.m. on March 2nd at Caveat). Tickets are $15 until 2/24 before they go up to $18 standard.
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humor and satire website greener pastures presents a night of humor readings, improv, sketch comedy, stand up, character work, and music with guests: alison leiby (oh god, an hour about abortion), ely kreimendahl (funny or die), max gross (the onion), sydney duncan (comedy central), carlos greaves (the new yorker), irina chelidze (meat cats comedy), and queer window sketch comedy (new york comedy festival).
The show is this upcoming Monday, March 4th at 7pm at Caveat in NYC. Tickets are on sale now, come laugh and hang with fellow satire writers!
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An Old Favorite
This week's Old Favorite pick and writeup come from Tobi Pledger, a fiction, nonfiction, and humor writer. Thanks for writing in, Tobi!
I Love When the Leaves Turn Beautiful Colors and Fall to Their Deaths by Alexis Pooley (McSweeney's) Tobi writes, "This piece makes the reader consider that what they love about fall/winter results largely from the death of leaves. It's impressive how many different ways Alexis found to describe the dead and dying leaves."
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
Luke's got two advanced short humor workshops starting in March, one on the 9th and the other on the 14th! He's also doing a special workshop about translation on March 13th to celebrate the release of Masters of the Nefarious, the cult classic comedy comic he translated. The translation workshop is COMPLETELY FREE for those who have ordered the book.
Some Fun Lines, NYC's premiere humor open mic, is hosting an anniversary showcase at Caveat on March 24th! James is on the bill, and the rest of the lineup is full of Newsletter faves: Josh Gondelman, Rima Parikh, Freddie Shanel, Charu Sinha, & Jen Spyra! And hosted by great writers and Friends Of The Newsletter Johnathan Appel, Chandler Dean, & Maeve Dunigan! There's more info here, and tickets are available at a special pre-order price, so snag 'em now!
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.
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