A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #414
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For October 8-14, 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. As you get older, the way you think about certain things changes. For example, when we were kids, we always thought it was unbelievable that Houdini died just because he got punched in the stomach. But now that we’ve grown older and wiser, we know that if someone punched us in the stomach, no matter how lightly, it would absolutely kill us immediately. So please don’t do that!
What We Enjoyed This Week
Play-by-Play of This Year’s Goody Two-Shoes Quarterfinal by Clay Troup (Points in Case) The goody two-shoes vocabulary and specifics in this piece are just terrific, and juxtaposing them with the tone of a play-by-play announcer is hilarious: “Certainly, he is a great goody two-shoes in the making, although if you look at his game, he really plays more like an egghead or a poindexter than your traditional toady.”
Cheater by Andrew Graham Martin (HAD) Though this piece is working in a more literary, experimental mode, it has a real short humor core: It’s got eleven distinct beats; it heightens beautifully; and it’s about a guy who can’t stop getting hit by busses. This is a great example of the effect titles and paragraph breaks (or lack thereof) have on a piece. If you retitled this something like, “All The Times You Survived Getting Hit By A Bus”, and separated each bus incident into its own paragraph, it would feel much more straightforwardly short humor-y. (For more on paragraph length and short humor, check out this edition of our premium edition from back in May.) By the way, the connection to short humor makes perfect sense—Andrew’s also written for McSweeney’s.
How French Should a Restaurant Be? by Helen Rosner (The New Yorker) When a restaurant review is funny it’s usually also negative. After all, it’s a lot easier to make jokes in a review when you can make them at the expense of a restaurant you didn’t like. This, however, is the rare positive review that is also quite funny. The great lines ooze from this piece the same way that “broiled cream and cheese… ooze lustily from the shell” of Chateau Royale’s lobster. Two particular favorites:
“If, in a haze of butter and white Burgundy, you sat down to write a parody of the ur-resto for our current culinary Franco-cacophony, you could do worse than to title it ‘Chateau Royale,’ a phrase both spectacularly generic and hilariously evocative.”
“I’ve often felt that diners ought to receive a complimentary handful of Lactaid pills along with the bread and butter.”
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An Old Favorite
This week's Old Favorite is a Brian Agler Selection (TM)--a piece whose accompanying note was written by Brian--from Newsletter #57.
What I Think My Friends Do Because I Was Too Nervous To Ask And Now It's Too Late by Karen Chee (The New Yorker) Friend of the Show, Karen Chee, puts to paper that feeling we've all had. Karen is an exceptional...I want to say, writer? Who, writes? Maybe? Can you get paid for that? I dunno.
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
Luke’s only running THREE more short humor workshops in 2025! One is on Wednesday afternoons in November, one is on Thursday nights in November, and the last is on Saturday afternoons in November. Snag a spot now so you don’t have to wait til 2026!
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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