A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #401
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For July 9-15, (W-Tu) 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’ve been getting all of our doctors’ appointments for the year out of the way this week, which included a full check-up on the Newsletter from our newsletter doctor. We got a clean bill of health, though we’re told we have to start watching our italic usage now that the Newsletter’s in its 400s.
What We Enjoyed This Week
Notes to the Editor of a Watch Commercial by Seth Reiss (The New Yorker) Seth’s been one of our favorite writers for a very long time now — one thing that our general practitioner and eye doctor confirmed for us is that we’re clinically Seth-Heads. He excels at finding lots of jokes and specifics in seemingly mundane or overly broad premises. The more vague notes are especially fun here (“00:00:34: Not good.” and “00:00:58: YES!!!”), and leaving us to imagine what’s on the screen is a very fun choice.
The Correct Serving Sizes by Anne Reiner (Slackjaw) Pieces that temporarily shift the way you think about the world are always so fun. After reading Anne’s piece, it was hard not to look around and imagine naming serving sizes for different things in our life. One of the marks of a particularly fun premise is that it makes you want to riff on it too.
How to Determine Whether the Person You’re on a First Date With Is Actually Shaquille O’Neal in Disguise by Tyler Gooch (Points in Case) Speaking of fun premises, this piece has a very clear set-up that is not only easy to get on board with, but also has a great format and character. Tyler makes the fun choice of balancing the justification between the narrator being dumb and Shaq being quite wily, which is a real fun choice that avoids exhausting either avenue too quickly and gives the piece lots of room to explore.
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An Old Favorite
Let Me Try Out Pregnancy in the Metaverse by Kady Ruth Ashcraft (Jezebel) The Metaverse was such a gigantic flop, but the one thing that it did give us was a lot of very fun writing about how dumb it was. Josh Gondelman’s “vacation in the Metaverse” piece comes to mind, but one of my favorite’s is Kady Ruth’s smart, incisive, and very funny piece on pregnancy in VR. The idea for this piece is so specific and surprising, but it also serves as a fascinating entry point into deeper conversations about pregnancy, identity, and the internet. And being a comedy writer, Kady Ruth has lots of great lines in here. “I reached out to Meta to ask about getting my avatar knocked up but have yet to hear back” and “Club Fuego not exactly popping off in Horizon Worlds” really got me on this reread.
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 piece for Lit Hub ranking different reading technologies, from wax tablets to e-reading glasses.
Nothing else from us! We’re trying to figure out how to reconcile our hand doctor telling us to give our hands some typing breaks “if we’re going to be so forceful about it,” and our podiatrist telling us we “absolutely cannot use our feet to type.” If you’ve got any ideas for other typing methods, we’re eager to hear!
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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