A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #407
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For August 20-26, 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. One last reminder: Our next Hangout of Humorous Writing is coming up next week on Wednesday, September 3rd! Come on out to Peculier Pub (145 Bleecker St.) at 6 PM and meet other humor writers and humor writing fans. Hope to see you there!
What We Enjoyed This Week
Try Our New Limited Edition Bad Flavor by Brandon Talley (Points in Case) The voice that Brandon developed for this clueless but well-meaning narrator is hilarious. It’s hard to pick a favorite line, but we particularly love this one, which is also a very nice justification for how the narrator ended up in this situation: “Anyway, we used up every other flavor trying to fix this one, so now it’s all we have!”
Male Fantasy Football Talk, Translated by Reese Cassard (McSweeney’s) We really dig all the funny, cutting details in the “What he means” sections, and we love that this reminded us of another great piece of comic writing about football and male emotions, one of our favorite funny novels, The Throwback Special. (We wrote about why it’s so good in this Premium edition!)
When It’s Acceptable to Be on Speakerphone in Public by JiJi Lee and Patrick Clair (The New Yorker) We’re sure that none of our beloved newsletter readers would ever engage in behavior like this, but just in case someone out there needs to hear it: Get some dang earbuds. We also appreciate JiJi and Patrick including the detail about people loudly playing videos on their phones in public. Everybody knock it off with that sort of thing too.
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An Old Favorite
Taste Test: Pizza Beer by Genevieve Koski (The AV Club) The Taste Test was one of our favorite features in the glory days of the AV Club, but for a while, we thought all these articles had been lost. The AV Club archives are in rough shape as a result of the site changing owners so many times in the nearly 20 years since this piece, a standout write up of “Pizza Beer,” was published. Fortunately, a good number of Taste Test pieces seem to have been preserved on the site The Takeout. We’re broken records about this, but don’t assume the things you love on the internet will be there forever!
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
Friend of the Newsletter Ed Park has a newsletter of his own, and one of his first editions is on a subject that will surely be of interest to our readers: Don DeLillo and the Comic Novel. Ed’s written humor for McSweeney’s, he’s a Pulitzer finalist, and his new short story collection is terrific (and very funny). All by way of saying, you’ll definitely want to be getting his newsletter in your inbox.
Luke’s got just FOUR spots left in his advanced humor writing workshop starting on September 13th! Writing from previous workshops has gone on to be published by The New Yorker (print and online), McSweeney’s, and more! And you can check out some of the work that’s come out of previous editions of the class in this thread.
Okay one LAST LAST reminder: Come on out to our next Hangout of Humorous Writing on Wednesday, September 3rd at Pecuiler Pub (145 Bleecker St.) at 6PM!
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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