A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #381
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For February 19-25, 2025
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’re hosting another hangout in March! Join us and other writers and humor fans at Peculier Pub, 145 Bleecker St. NYC, on Wednesday March 19th starting at 6 PM! We’d love to see you there!
What We Enjoyed This Week
How I'll Spend Every Minute of My Fifteen Minutes of Fame by Jason Siegel (Points in Case) This piece is nicely restrained. Jason introduces so many funny, silly ideas — the unusual thing the narrator got famous for, their charity, the Rizzler — but he avoids getting bogged down for too long, focusing instead on exploring the excellent premise. A great example of how strong joke-writing is so often about not overstaying your welcome!
New York Isn’t What It Used to Be by Seth Reiss (The New Yorker) We’re big fans of Seth’s writing, and this is a great example of how good he is at simple premises that almost feel too broad to be workable as a piece. Seth’s jokes are top-notch, but what really impresses us about these pieces is how he manages to find emotional specificity with characters that are pretty generally defined. His narrators aren’t given elaborate biographies, but we always know where they stand and how they feel.
I Gave a Thousand Typewriters to a Thousand Monkeys, but Instead of Hamlet, They Just Keep Writing Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar by Patrick Coyne (McSweeneys’s) Speaking of emotions, they’re also super useful in finding ways to explore really wacky ideas. This set-up is hyper-specific and pretty involved, but rather than getting bogged down in rearticulating how wacky it is, Patrick finds more surprising ways to explore by following the scientist’s opinions and feelings — easier and more satisfying to heighten and develop!
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An Old Favorite
I Played ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ on a Bar Jukebox Until I Got Kicked Out By Timothy Faust (Vice) When I was growing up, adults always told us that whatever ends up on the internet will be there forever. This has ended up not being the case at all — too often I’ve had to scramble to archive my writing as one site or the other is blinked out of existence or starts to corrode into senility. This piece on Vice is a classic, and one that I periodically check to see if it’s still live — Vice has been sold and rejiggered so many times, and I’m always afraid this one will disappear. But it’s still up, so enjoy this masterclass in being annoying at a bar while you can!
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 March 8th! It’s the last one he’ll be doing until September (at the earliest) so if you don’t want to wait, jump in now!
We also got a question from a funny writer who’s heading out to LA for a bit that has us stumped. We’re hoping you all might be able to help us: are there any reading-centric comedy shows or mics in LA that are worth checking out? Thanks in advance!
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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