A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #339
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For May 1-7, 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.
We’re going to be sending out our first bonus newsletter this Sunday! We’ll be doing these extra editions every few weeks as a thank you to people who support the newsletter with one of our new subscriptions. Subscribe now to get the first bonus edition. And thank you to everyone who has already subscribed or donated—we couldn’t keep the newsletter going without you!
What We Enjoyed This Week
Arrow Retriever by Jack Handey (The New Yorker) Listen, you know we could go on all day about all the things we love about Jack Handey. This truly original premise, and the unexpected ways it gets explored (“At the induction ceremony, I received my retriever’s gloves, after being struck across the face with them the traditional three times.”), are vintage Handey.
Our Neighborhood Watch Is Just a Guy Holding a Plastic Bag Watching Women Parallel Park by Heidi Lux (Points in Case) This piece is full of great, specific details, but the plastic bag is a particular delight. Lux even gives us more and more funny specifics about the plastic bag as the piece goes on, leading to some great descriptions, such as how the bag is “laden with several dollars worth of $1-only Arizona iced teas, so much so it’s about to break.”
We’re Not So Different, You and I by Simon Rich (The New Yorker) Simon Rich has, particularly in recent years, blurred the line between short humor and short stories, but it’s notable that this is the first time his work has appeared in the fiction section of The New Yorker, rather than in Shouts and Murmurs. There’s a lot to say about the differences between short humor and short stories (see our interview with Jen Spyra for more on the subject), and a lot of ways that this story demonstrates those differences, but we’d particularly like to draw your attention to the way the story foregrounds character. Giving Death Skull a full character arc (including reveals about his backstory), is the priority here, in a way it wouldn’t be in a short humor piece.
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Writers Write About Their Own Writing
Kimberly Harrington Writes About If Goodreads Users Reviewed Your Life the Way They Reviewed Your Book (McSweeney’s)
My first book was published May 2018 so this piece was brewing for a few months. On behalf of every author who accidentally (or not so accidentally) stumbled upon a stupid review of their stupid book on stupid Goodreads, I wrote this. Because Goodreads isn’t some glorious critical platform, it’s Facebook for books: self-congratulatory, pretty mean, and wildly missing the point. And there is no good way for an author to defend themselves. Writing this felt like forming comebacks when I was a kid — the equivalent of saying stuff like, “Oh yeah? Well, how about YOUR FACE.” The tiniest of victories.
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 Editors and Friends of the Newsletter
Luke did an interview with French comics great Pierre La Police for The Comics Journal. Get to know more about the artist behind the pseudonym! (But not his real name or true identity.) Hopefully it will also whet your appetite to pick up Luke’s translation of La Police’s Masters of the Nefarious.
Other Humorous Writing News
The Onion was sold by G/O Media to “a group of digital media veterans.“ You can read the full details in this article. We’re curious to see how it all shakes out, but our main hope is that The Onion will avoid the fate of so many online publications, and will be able to stick around, without being meddled with, for many years to come.
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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