A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #340
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For May 8-14, 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. Happy birthday to the nickel! That’s right, all the way back in 1866, the US Congress got together and birthed the five-cent coin. So the next time you accidentally drop a nickel in the trash and think, “I’m not putting my hand in there for a nickel, it’s barely any money,“ think of industrialist Joseph Wharton and the hardworking Congressmen that he bullied into buying a ton of his metal to mint a new coin!
What We Enjoyed This Week
Parents, Unfortunately We Are Disbanding Our School’s Curling Team by Tyler Gooch (Points in Case) Tyler heightens this one expertly, and on a few different axes at once. As the piece reveals more information with each bullet point, the Coach Jensen character gets stranger, his curling team con gets more elaborate, and the school admits to more and more incompetence. Since all of these heightening threads are working in roughly the same direction and are firmly within the same world, they can all move quickly to absurd places without overshadowing or contradicting each other.
Deciphering Your Daughter’s “MOM” Texts by Dani Bostick (McSweeney’s) Dani finds lots of variety and jokes within this cleverly constrained premise. The use of repetition in the texts is very funny, and the last beat is a great turn too.
Meet the Chain Groupies by Amy McCarthy (Eater) The word “specific” has probably appeared thousands of times in this newsletter over the years, but it bears repeating: specifics make writing (of all kinds) pop. This piece is all specificity, no filler: Amy has crammed these short, empathetic portraits of superfans with so many eyebrow-raising details. Incidentally, if this Newsletter were to be a superfan for any restaurant, it would without a doubt be a hot dog chain. (Do any hot dog proprietors out there want to be the official dog sponsor of our Newsletter? We’d be a cheap get! Just a couple dogs would do it.)
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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 #87.
Back In My Day, Kids Didn’t Watch TV… No, They Played Outdoors Because They Heard A Rumor That A Dead Body Was Out By The Quarry by Dan Caprera (Weekly Humorist) Along with creepy manors, misty bogs, and creaky ships, old quarries are consistently reliable settings for humor pieces.
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
On May 22nd at 7PM, Luke is performing on the inaugural edition of the brand new show Letters and Sodas! The lineup is looking great, tickets are just $5, and as the name promises, there will indeed be sodas available for consumption.
As you may have noticed, the first subscription edition of the newsletter hit your inboxes on Sunday! If you haven’t signed up for our Premium Edition yet, or if you signed up after the first one went out, don’t worry, you can still check it out! Subscribers can access it (and all future Premium Editions for as long as you’re subscribed) in our archive! And thank you to everyone who’s already signed up: thanks for supporting the Newsletter!
Other Humorous Writing News
We’ve been eagerly following news about The Onion’s change in management, and The Chicago Sun-Times has a great piece on the new owners and their dreams for the site. We’re feeling optimistic, knock on wood! Some details from the piece: the new owners met because of a Bluesky post and a “‘sup dude, how do we buy The Onion?“ LinkedIn post, the new owners hated G/O Media as much as we all did, and they’re planning to bring back some form of the print edition.
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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