A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #387
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For April 2-8, 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 heard from a few folks that they had some trouble getting last week’s Newsletter — if you experienced any issues please let us know! And don’t forget, you can check out last week’s issue (and all our issues) in our archives!
What We Enjoyed This Week
You Love the Office by Dennard Dayle (The New Yorker) We really enjoyed the structure and pattern of this piece. After the intro paragraph, each beat consists of a quote from an employee, their job title, and a little comment about that employee from the narrator. Dennard crams jokes into all three of these elements, and it’s very satisfying to see how each bit evolves over the course of the piece.
Copy and Paste Any of These Out-of-Office Replies for Your Personal Use by Dan Kennedy (McSweeney’s) Another fun piece related to work/life balance! (A total mystery why that would be on people’s minds at the moment.) Dan doles out details about this character at just the right pace, and we particularly enjoyed the extra-sized penultimate paragraph.
The End of Roadside Attractions by Jane Stern (The Paris Review) And finally, we go from out-of-office to on the road. This isn’t a traditional short humor piece, but it does contain a lot of delightful details about some deeply strange roadside attractions. The centerpiece is a deep dive into “Nash-ional Dinoland,” located in South Hadley, Massachusetts, but it’s also fun just to hear the names of some other roadside attractions. The World’s Largest Ball of Twine! The Rare Fur-Bearing Trout! The Tree That Owns Itself!
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An Old Favorite
The Best Restaurant in New York Is: Ralph Lauren's Polo Bar by Caity Weaver and Rich Juzwiak (Gawker) A standout entry in a series of articles in which two intrepid writers try out restaurants at various New York tourist destinations. This article really makes you feel like you’ve experienced the Polo Bar, and is also filled with great prose, including some classic Caity Weaver (a newsletter favorite) lines like, “Our legs buckling under the weight of a thousand best wishes for our evening, we were directed into the lower level of the restaurant, where yet more employees greeted us, and bade us check our coats.”
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
James had a few pieces on Lit Hub this week that humor fans will enjoy: a funny piece about the unlikely literary collaboration between Mr. Beast and James Patterson and an interview with McKayley Gourley about Reductress’ new Book Club project.
Don’t forget to come out to The Francis Kite Club on April 23rd at 7PM! We’re hosting a show with McSweeney’s to celebrate Jason’s Roeder’s book Griefstrike!, which is a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor!
The show will feature readings by Jason Roeder, Josh Gondelman, Jiji Lee, Colin Nissan, Jen Spyra, and us! It’s free and there’s no need to register or RSVP. Hope to see you there!
Other Humorous Writing News
Courtesy of the New Orleans Book Festival, check out this video of the great Mike Sacks moderating a panel discussion with the editors of some of our favorite humor publications. Mike does a terrific job steering the conversation between Emma Allen (The New Yorker), Christopher Monks (McSweeney’s), Lauren Moser (The Onion), and Beth Newell (Reductress). You won’t want to miss the editors’ insights into things like submitting, topical pieces, and 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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