A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #403
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For July 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. This week we’ve been workshopping some new sayings in the vein of “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” So far we’ve got “Don’t hate the mailman, hate the mail.” We’d love for some readers to test it out by using it in everyday conversation—if you do, let us know how it goes!
What We Enjoyed This Week
“Emma” Unrated by Ian Frazier (The New Yorker) You’ll find lots to like in this piece, even if you’re not a fan of Jackass—or Emma, for that matter. Narrating dumb stunts in a highbrow literary tone is real funny. (Ian Frazier’s classic “Coyote V. Acme” operates in a similar way, using a restrained legal tone to describe wacky Looney Tunes hijinks.)
We also really like the note at the beginning of the piece. It’s a clean and simple way to explain the origin of the juxtaposition at the heart of the premise. Sometimes your premise does need a little extra explanation and justification, lest it wind up feeling too random or unearned—though often your title can do the work of providing that explanation/justification. Certainly a title like “Jane Austen’s Jackass” would also have done the job equally well here, but then we’d have missed out on hearing about the very funny real-life situation that inspired this piece.
Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Isn’t Good If It Isn’t Bright Green by Bettina Makalintal (Eater) We love it when people have strong opinions about subjects that are, in the grand scheme of things, relatively trivial and/or esoteric. Another thing we love? A phrase in this article: “Real mint chipheads.”
Signs You're About To Get Hit With A Pie In A Pie Fight by Daniel Lavery (The Chatner) This is an impressively comprehensive compendium of pie fight tropes, packaged in a fun and clever way. And you’ll note that what drives the humor here is similar to what generates the laughs in the Austen/Jackass piece above: Dry descriptions of zany physical comedy are funny!
-- AD --
Are you laughing enough? Probably not. Good thing there's CHORTLE! We send funny, original writing from a rotating cast of writers to your email inbox every weekday morning. Perfect for fans of McSweeney’s or Slackjaw. Check out some of our most popular posts to get started!
(Do you have an ad you'd like to place in the Newsletter? Fill out this form!)
An Old Favorite
Hemingway's "For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn" After He Was Told It Had to Hit a 500-Word Minimum by Emily Bressler (Points in Case) Hemingway’s birthday was last week, so it’s the perfect time to read this piece, which is a great example of how repetition, redundancy, and delay can be used to humorous effect. There’s also one tremendously funny paragraph towards the end (SPOILERS): “Tears welled in the man’s eyes. But then he saw the next ad which read, ‘For Sale: Adult Roller Blades, Gently Used.’ The man clapped his hands together like a young boy. He took out his pen and circled it for later.”
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
Over at Lit Hub, James wrote about a very weird, Jane Austen inspired scientific name and a great short book of essays to read right now.
Other Humorous Writing News
Regular newsletter readers know that in addition to being big fans of humor writing, we’re also big fans of food writing. (And if you give us funny writing about food? Forget about it—especially if the food in question is hot dogs.) We also love stories about classic New York characters. So this week’s profile of Robert Sietsema in Hell Gate felt like it was engineered in a lab to appeal specifically to us. We’ve enjoyed Robert’s food writing and recommendations a great deal over the years, and the article did a wonderful job capturing his inspiring, seemingly endless enthusiasm for his chosen subject matter. We were also very happy to find out through this profile that Robert now has a newsletter of his own. The most recent edition featured a list of the top french fry spots in New York, and we can’t wait to check some of ‘em out.
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!