A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #351
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For July 24-29, 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. In case you missed the announcement last week: We’re hosting another Hangout of Humorous Writing in August! Stop by Peculier Pub (145 Bleeker St.) on Wednesday, August 28th at 6PM, to meet writers of short humor and fans of short humor writing. Hope to see you there!
What We Enjoyed This Week
My New Thing by Riane Konc (The New Yorker) Newsletter favorite Riane Konc gives a masterclass on how to write a joke bucket piece. Joke bucket pieces, which have broader premises and move from joke to joke extremely quickly, are hard to pull off, and often run the risk of feeling overly random or disjointed. The throughlines that hold this piece together are simple, but extremely effective. The repetition of “my new thing” and the way that Riane builds out a character via the jokes are more than enough to keep everything feeling of a piece. Oh, yeah, and the jokes in this bucket are great too: “My new thing is embracing my spiritual nature and becoming a large, which is a job in which I communicate only with humongous ghosts.”
Look Alive—The Dish You Ordered at This Restaurant Is Coming out on a Different Type of Plate from Everyone Else’s by McKayley Gourley (McSweeney’s) The way that the details about the restaurant heighten is just fantastic. A worthy addition to the “weird things about dining out“ short humor canon that includes such greats as The Onion’s Restaurant Patrons Entranced By Sizzling Order Of Fajitas and Seth Reiss’s We Do Our Own Little Take on Ketchup.
Reckoning with the Dead at the Sphere by Nick Paumgarten (The New Yorker) We’re big fans of Nick Paumgarten here at Humorous Readings Headquarters (HRHQ). We’ve previously featured his article on the Margaritaville retirement community, and his other work is very much worth seeking out as well. (Good places to start: This Billy Joel profile and a dispatch from Davos.) While he doesn’t write short humor pieces, his eye for funny details and his wry turns of phrase add just the right amount of comedy to his reporting. Two sections we particularly loved:
“Matty’s first Dead show was Boston Garden, 1973. He carried a laminate of the ticket stub in his wallet, and had flashed it in the bathroom that night, as a kind of urinal V.I.P. card; the guys ahead of him escorted him to the front of the line.”
“They hissed insults at the backs of our heads. I could feel their scorn scorching my bald spot, like the equatorial sun.”
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An Old Favorite
Things Are Looking Up for Bob Dylan by John Cafiero (McSweeney’s) A classic McSweeney’s list piece: Short and sweet and a little on the esoteric side. Though this will certainly hit harder for Dylan fans, John sticks to Bob’s well-known tunes, so a broader readership will likely still get a good number of the jokes. And even if you don’t recognize references to specific lyrics, there’s still a lot to enjoy about the silliness of lines like, “The wind blew the answer into a tree and I was able to climb up and grab it.” A great example of how sometimes you’ve just got to write about the things that interest you, and if not everybody gets it, that’s okay.
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 weeknight advanced humor workshop starting on Tuesday September 3rd! But unlike his previous weeknight workshops, this one has just five spots and will run just 90 minutes, so we’ll be wrapped up by 8:30PM Eastern. Perfect for folks who have an early start in the morning but still want to get notes, support, and deadlines!
Other Humorous Writing News
If you’ve been feeling weird about using Twitter and want to cut down (and there are more and more good reasons to feel that way each day), but haven’t been able to get into Bluesky, the alternative that James and Luke use, here’s something that might help! Luke made a Bluesky starter pack to help you find short humor folks on the app. It’s a list of 50 great writers to follow on Bluesky. And if you’re already on Bluesky and want to be added to a humor writer starter pack, just let Luke know! (The starter packs are limited to just 50 accounts, so Luke’s planning on making more.)
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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