A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #397
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For June 11-17, 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. Happy Juneteenth! A day to remember that even if it’s often insufficient, America is capable of recognizing and righting its wrongs when we stand up for each other.
What We Enjoyed This Week
Creative Ways to Hide Your Mouth from Your Date While Eating Tacos by Patrick Coyne (Points in Case) Patrick does an excellent job of neatly calling out the reality of the situation in a funny way, without spending so much time on it that it becomes distracting: “Obviously, not eating tacos isn’t an option.” And we’re obviously biased towards writing like, “Your date gets to feel worldly as they respect your made up heritage, and you get to slime it up like a disgusting Euro-hog.” A fun piece!
I’m Every Romantasy Novel Heroine by Lizzie Logan (The Belladonna) Lizzie has some great zingers here: “You care about me and my one hobby, which is reading, because we are in a book, and readers of books can relate to people who like reading, because they’re reading a book.“ There’s also a nice variety—Lizzie satirizes many of the genre’s tropes and trends.
The Pages of "Hop On Pop," Ranked By Our Fourteen-Month-Old Son by Daniel Lavery (The Chatner) And rounding out a week of great joke-writing is this piece, which is full of great lines (“Druid! Scribe! Leech! — You there! The book is jabbed in our direction. Interpret! Decipher! What scribblings are these? What does your god say about these markings?”) By assigning characters to the child and parents, Daniel adds a very fun layer to the piece which makes it much more memorable than your average “kids do the darndest things” premise.
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An Old Favorite
Obituaries for Teenage Girls If They Actually Died When They Say They’re Dying by Karen Chee (McSweeney’s) This is a wonderful piece by one of our favorite writers, but it’s also a nice one to return to see just how much the youth slang has shifted in a decade. Will Karen’s piece still make sense to the kids today? This question is also inspired by seeing the phrase “le tired” in a book blurb, which compared to Karen’s premise feels downright Paleolithic.
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 is going to be performing on the Letters & Sodas show next Tuesday, June 24th at The Greats of Craft LIC!
The show hosted by Lana Schwartz and featuring Meg Reid, Shem Pennant, Just Lunning, Pooja Reddy, Tyler Wetherall, and James. Doors are at 7:00 PM, and there’s more information and tickets are here!
And James also read a humor piece on the latest Lit Hub Podcast, and the show’s host and producer, Drew Broussard, did some very fun sound design on 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.
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