A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #361
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For October 2-8, 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. Fall has officially arrived in NYC, which means one thing: until further notice, we will be jumping into big piles of leaves and pretending to do the backstroke.
What We Enjoyed This Week
What My Next Week Would Have to Look Like for This Swiss Army Knife Purchase to Be Worth It by Jordan De Padova and Dan Gutenberg (Points in Case) Great framing device work from Jordan and Dan. Finding increasingly elaborate situations to be solved with the knife’s many features is fun, but adding the layer that all the crises are happening daily, to one guy, for a week, is excellent. It gives the piece a bizarro character layer that heightens and enhances the whole thing.
My Enemies, A-Z by Molly Young (The Paris Review) This kind of highbrow silliness and specific griping is exactly in our wheelhouse, and the sort of stuff that distinguished older, humorous publications like Spy and certain sections of McSweeney’s Quarterly. Molly’s list is surprising, personal, and very funny — exactly what you want with a premise like this. If you like this piece, Molly’s paired recommendations for the Times are always excellent, and she makes cool zines, too!
You Think Losing to Air Bud Is Bad, It’s Even Worse Being the Team That Beat Air Bud by Devin Wallace (McSweeney’s) The premise of Air Bud is an all-time classic of setup and justification: it’s a completely absurd but instantly understandable situation, and the “there’s no rule against it” justification is just enough — perfectly thin. Devin’s piece imagines a fun situation in that sandbox: what must it feel like to beat the basketball dog? It has that “what have we done” quality of the last shot of The Graduate.
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An Old Favorite
My Wedding Vow by Jen Spyra (The New Yorker) Reminiscing about our show for our last Premium Newsletter got us thinking about all the excellent pieces we were lucky enough to hear performed before they were published. Jen’s stuff is always hilarious on the page, of course, but she is also a great performer, and always set up her pieces on stage with just a dollop of preamble. The piece is so great — a classic Jen premise where a wacky situation unfolds, told by a narrator who is aggressively on board with the wackiness. And a fun fact: this piece ran on Jen’s actual wedding day!
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 just THREE spots left in his intro to short humor workshop starting on November 9th! Learn the essentials of short humor writing and write a draft of your very own piece in just four weeks. (He’s also got an advanced workshop starting on November 12th!)
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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