A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #345
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For June 12-18, 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. Hope you’re staying cool out there, folks! Don’t forget that soaking your short humor pieces in ice water before reading is a great way to beat the heat.
What We Enjoyed This Week
It’s Time to Schedule Your Annual Friendship Checkup by Zoe Pearl (The New Yorker) This is such a fun form for a humor piece. It’s a very clever way to package a bunch of great details about those hangouts with friends who you just seem to see less and less frequently as you get older.
A Nostalgic Reverie for My Youth, When I Wasn’t So Nostalgic All the Time by Simon Henriques (McSweeney’s) Simon fills this piece with tons of great sentence-level jokes that use repetition to wonderful comedic effect: “I wish it could be how it was, when I never wished it could be how it was, because it still was how it was, and had not yet become how it is.” The syntax of these jokes continues to get even more hilariously tangled as the piece goes on, all the way through the terrific ending.
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! by Stephanie Monohan (Screen Slate) A delightfully witty appreciation of a truly unique film. Stephanie does tremendous work wrangling into prose the things that makes this movie so odd and compelling: “When the camera looks up at Santana as she stands proudly and sneers, with her chest aimed at her victims, she might as well be Dirty Harry.”
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Hosted by Lana Schwartz (The New Yorker, The Onion, McSweeney's), Letters & Soda brings together standup comedy, humor pieces, fiction, and essay readings in a way they never have been before (or at least not in recent memory).
The next show is Monday, June 24 at 7:30 p.m. at Greats of Craft in Long Island City and features:
Jennie Egerdie
Paris Adkins
Nina Sharma
Jason Adam Katzenstein
Kenice Mobley
Emily FlakeTickets (only $7.18) are available here!
On Sunday, June 30th at 5 PM, SOME FUN LINES: A SATIRE AND HUMOR SHOWCASE is back at Caveat! Come see some of the best satire writers in New York City, and therefore planet Earth, read some of their best short humor pieces. Featuring Aarushi Agni, Jenny Arimoto, Michelle Cohn, Jennie Egerdie, Madeline Goetz, and Chloe Radcliffe. Hosted by Johnathan Appel (Last Week Tonight), Chandler Dean (Lovett or Leave It), and Maeve Dunigan (The New Yorker). Get $5 off with promo code somecheaplines.
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An Old Favorite
A Sibling’s Wedding Toast by Eddie Small (The New Yorker) Essential wedding season reading. Eddie absolutely nails the tropes of these kinds of speeches, and strikes an excellent balance between keeping the jokes in the piece universal (as the premise requires) and making sure the details are also nice and specific.
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’s got another advanced short humor workshop starting on Tuesday, July 9th! He’s also got a Summer Fridays workshop, on Friday afternoons from 1PM-2:30PM Eastern, coming up on August 2nd. Write three pieces in four weeks, get support and feedback and deadlines, and meet other funny folks.
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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