A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #390
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For April 23-29, 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. In the film Princess Mononoke, there’s a character called “The Deer God.” But what if, instead, the character was “The Beer God”? That’d be pretty chill!
What We Enjoyed This Week
Insufficient Reasons for Using the Bat-Signal by R.J. Kushner (Points in Case) Not only does this piece contain a nice wide variety of funny situations for Batman to be roped into, it also paints a hilarious portrait of the Gotham City cops who keep calling up The Dark Knight at the drop of a hat. There’s also some great joke writing, including this wonderful use of a parenthetical: “We can ask to feel his muscles in passing when he’s here on a more legitimate matter. And if he says ‘not right this minute’ or ‘maybe next time’ we have to be respectful of that (Derek).”
Sunshine La Croix by Leslie Ylinen (McSweeney’s) A very funny exploration of how to put into words the taste of “Sunshine,” a new flavor of La Croix. As Leslie says, “With Sunshine, La Croix admits that we’ve pushed reality about as far as we can, and now it’s time to pivot towards the intangible.” The results of Leslie’s efforts are great: “Maybe what they mean by ‘the taste of wonder’ is ‘I wonder why this tastes like something I drank out of a trash can during my second year at Tulane.’”
Marky Mark for Lent by Pat Cassels (Slate) Pat downloaded and spent over a month on Mark Whalberg’s prayer app so you don’t have to. This fun bit of reportage is filled with weird and wacky details, but also has some interesting things to say about the current relationship between religion and the tech world.
YOUR AD HERE!
Do you have an ad you'd like to place in the Newsletter? Fill out this form!
And feel free to send us an email if you have questions.
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 #60.
My Trip To The Tattoo Shop... As Imagined By My Mom by Cara Michelle Smith (The Belladonna) This piece features great character work--something that you don't always see in humor pieces. We know exactly what "Mom" thinks, and how she views the world. All in just a few sections.
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 wrote a humor piece for Lit Hub: a field guide to the different readers you’ll see in the wild. See how many you can spot out there!
Nothing else from us this week! We were too busy trying to get Hayao Miyazaki’s email so we could pitch him our Beer God idea. We think he’s gonna dig it!
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.
This newsletter is free, but if you enjoy it and want to support the work we do putting it together, you can subscribe to our paid tier, or you can send us a tip here. Any amount is greatly appreciated, and 1/3rd of each donation will go to Stand Up To Cancer.
If you'd like to place an ad in the Newsletter, please fill out this form.
If you have any thoughts, notes, wishes, or dreams for this newsletter, please email us or respond to this email and tell us what the score is!