A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #376
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For January 15-21, 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 hope you’re all taking care of yourselves out there, and more importantly, taking care of the less vulnerable in your communities. If you’re feeling stuck about how to be of service to others, here is a document with ideas of how you can get involved politically.
(And a reminder that our 2025 reader survey is open — let us know how we’re driving.)
What We Enjoyed This Week
A Pre-Game Pep Talk by a College Football Coach Who Recently Audited a Class on Nietzschean Thought by Andrew Humphries (McSweeney’s) This is a classic McSweeney’s premise, crashing a scholarly reference into a quintessential pop culture form. The success of this kind of piece, especially Andrew’s, is in the details on both sides of the juxtaposition. Look at the specificity of “We are the Overmen, the Supermen, the dadgum Tech Cougars” — the capitalization of the Nietzche terms sells them, and the Dick Van Dyke era corniness of “dadgum” is specific and evocative enough to work as a punchline.
I’ve Been A Metal Head My Whole Life, Now I Can’t Dance At My Wedding by Fernanda Laertez (Slackjaw) The metal specifics are very fun here, but what really elevates this one is the emotional weight behind this character premise. You really do feel bad for the guy not being able to dance at his wedding.
Brainstorming Notes of the Typical Male American Spy Novelist by Tom Ellison (McSweeney’s) Excellent parody, and an amazing job heightening. It’s particularly impressive how Tom ratchets things up while keeping the scope of the piece relatively narrow — the book never gets more complex as the piece goes on — which becomes yet another part of the bit.
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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.
Casting Call For My Internal Biopic by Joyce Miller (McSweeney's) This piece has some fun specifics and solid jokes, but is really worth returning to for the distinctive format. Styling a piece as a casting call is a fun way to get directly into specifics about characters and lets Miller draw two stories in parallel, one set in real life and the other in the always-more-sparkling imagined life.
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
In addition to something more serious about a favorite writer, James wrote some short humor for Lit Hub this week, pitching some ideas to reboot books that are newly in the public domain this year. See if you can guess which beat his editor called “deranged.”
Luke’s got another advanced humor writing workshop starting at the beginning of February, on the 4th! Check out this thread to see some of the great work that’s come out of previous workshops and has been published in outlets like The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and more!
And if you have a second to respond to our 2025 survey, we really appreciate the feedback!
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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