A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #391
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For April 29-May 6, 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. Did you know that in the Star Trek original series episode “The Enterprise Incident”, there’s a background character who looks exactly like Eric Bogosian? There’s also a background character in the episode “Last of the Archons“ who looks exactly like Elaine Stritch. Have you spotted any other celebrity lookalikes in the backgrounds of episodes of Star Trek—TOS or otherwise? Write in and let us know!
What We Enjoyed This Week
This Bouquet of Branches Will Change Everything by Maeve Dunigan (The New Yorker) With this piece, Maeve sets out to answer an important philosophical question: What IS up with those stick bouquets anyway? Even if this question can never fully be answered, Maeve, while in pursuit of the truth, writes some really great jokes: “‘Look, I have sticks!’ I shout, like a gorgeous rottweiler.”
Choose Your Own Adventure (Endings Only) by Justin Bendell (McSweeney’s) This is such a compelling, original concept, and a great example of how you can find inspiration in a specific observation about form. Showing us JUST the endings of this Choose Your Own Adventure story allows Justin to quickly drop us into a bunch of wacky scenes while still maintaining a nice sense of cohesion to the piece. It’s also satisfying to try to infer what the heck might be going on in the rest of world of this book based just on the endings that we’re seeing.
King Kong Takes A Break From Doing My Taxes To Share Some Personal Thoughts by Lillie E. Franks (HAD) As regular readers of the newsletter know, we’re big fans of Lillie’s writing, and so we were excited to see her working in a more experimental, but still very funny, mode with this, her first piece for HAD (a great outlet for this sort of writing). “I wish more problems could be solved by killing dinosaurs.” Don’t we all... Don’t we all…
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An Old Favorite
Everyone Hates My Big Stupid Horse in Red Dead Online by Cass Marshall (Polygon) Strange edge cases and weird glitches that crop up in video games are always fun to read about. This is a particularly well-executed version of that genre of article, with some truly delightful prose: “On more than one occasion, Jake has turned around after accepting a quest only to see Hayseed’s giant head poking through a cabin door or gate, and I can hear him howl over voice chat.”
We wanted to highlight a piece of great writing from Polygon this week, because, as you may have heard, the site, which was part of Vox Media (the owner of New York Magazine and Eater, among others), was sold last week to Valnet, a company notorious for its terrible labor practices. As a result, 20 Polygon staff members were laid off.
The timing of the sale and layoffs are particularly egregious because, per the above article on The Wrap, they happened “one month ahead of the expiration of the company’s current union contract, but after three months of negotiations in which the WGA says Vox has ‘thus far rejected our economic proposals, refused to offer meaningful counter proposals and, frankly, shown a lack of interest in reaching anything close to an acceptable deal.’”
Writing jobs, especially for digital outlets, are more precarious than ever, and so we just want to remind our readers to support the publications and writers that you enjoy. (One way you might show some support for newly unemployed Plygon staff members is to contribute to the fundraiser for them that is currently underway.)
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 Editors and Friends of the Show
Speaking of supporting, James wrote for Lit Hub about the slashing of literary art grants. A full list of who has had funding revoked is here — it’s a good time to subscribe to a small magazine or donate to an arts organization, if you can.
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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