A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #399
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For June 25-July 1, 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. Here’s a little tip that we learned the hard way: If you’re looking for notes on your short humor piece, don’t ask a Terran Marine from Starcraft. Sure, it’s validating when a draft comes back and the only comments on it are “Outstanding!” “Rock and roll!” and “Jacked up and good to go!” But in the long term, you’re not going to become a better writer if the rare critical feedback you’re getting is “[guttural death cry]”
What We Enjoyed This Week
I Can’t Wait to Enjoy This Baseball Game After About Two Hours and Thirty-Six Minutes of Getting Settled In by Chandler Dean (McSweeney’s) Chandler does a great job heightening this premise. The way reality and time begin to slip and shift as the piece goes on even reminded us a bit of John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer”—not too shabby!
All My Dentist’s Feedback So Far by Emily Menez (The New Yorker) A great addition to the canon of humor pieces about the deeply relatable frustrations around dentistry and dealing with teeth. If you’re interested in more, we suggest Emily Delaney’s “Human Teeth Development Meeting Notes” and, if you’ll forgive some self-promotion spilling into this section of the newsletter, Luke’s own “I Am a Person Who Flosses Every Day”.
Excuse Me, but Your Theme Park Is Actually a Motif Park by Caleb Coy (McSweeney’s) Talk about a slam dunk title. This is a classic McSweeney’s premise: Very literary and very highbrow. Caleb keeps the piece from feeling overly esoteric by making sure the jokes are about the pedantic and obtuse narrator, and the way they’re missing the point of theme parks. This is a character with a terrific voice: “What thematic concept, in the abstract, are you going for? Amusement? Yes, but what about amusement are you saying?” What a huge difference it makes that in that last sentence Caleb doesn’t use the more conventional construction, “Yes, but what are you saying about amusement?”
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An Old Favorite
How to Defuse a Bomb, According to My Mother by Laura K. Duncan (McSweeney’s) The juxtaposition (unexpected character in high stakes situation) at the heart of this premise is great, and gives us lots of terrific lines, such as: "Now, I’m going to be looking for a pretty blue wire. Here it is. Don’t you think that’s a lovely shade of blue? I’d like a sofa in this color.”
But there’s plenty of other things to like in this piece too. The bomb defusing details are satisfyingly granular and feel genuinely authentic. (Not that we’d know—but if there are any bomb squad members who subscribe to the newsletter, please weigh in.) It’s also quite difficult to write a prose monologue in which a narrator describes their own physical actions to another character. It can often lead to lines that feel forced or unnatural, but Laura does an excellent job avoiding those potential pitfalls. The jokes are smooth and we always have a clear sense of what the character is doing.
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 Newsletter
Nothing from us this week! We’ve been too busy trying to make sense of this new note: “You wanna piece of me, boy?”
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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