A Newsletter of Humorous Writing #419
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For November 12-18, 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’re excited to announce our next Hangout of Humorous Writing will be on Wednesday, December 10th at 6PM! Join us at Peculier pub to celebrate the end of the year and meet other humor writers and humor writing fans.
What We Enjoyed This Week
Effigies of Me by Jack Handey (The New Yorker) Classic Jack Handey from top to bottom: A hilariously absurd premise that only he could have thought of, amazing specifics, and fantastic turns of phrase. “Some customers question the idea of paying money to the very same person they’re hanging or burning. To them I say that we make the very best effigies of me. Each one is stuffed with the finest French rags and rare old newspapers—some even collectible.“
Connecting the Dots by Madeline Cash (Granta) Not a traditional short humor piece, but a funny exploration of a particular texting tic that we suspect many of our readers will have encountered. (Or perhaps engaged in themselves…) This also reminded us in the best way of the McSweeney’s classic, Hemingway or My Mother’s Email?
Evidence That My Kid’s Daycare May Actually Be a Blues Joint by Tommy Smith (Points in Case) Tommy has a lot of fun with how oblivious the narrator of this piece is and how they calmly accept all the weird stuff that’s going on at the daycare: "I guess it’s also strange that instead of being picked up, he is let out in front of our house at 4:00 AM by a 1978 Buick Regal." This is packed with tons of great blues joint details and specifics too.
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An Old Favorite
Bad Names for Undercover Police Officers by Wendy Molyneux (McSweeney’s) A short-but-sweet list piece by one of the great McSweeney’s contributors, Wendy Molyneux. Brief, high-concept list pieces like this were staples of McSweeney’s back in the day, and we always have a good time revisiting them. And if you like this piece, you might want to pick up the very funny print collection of McSweeney’s lists, Mountain Man Dance Moves
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
Over at Lit Hub, James and the staff have been running a bracket to figure out What Was Literary Twitter? They compiled a list of the best tweets, scandals, and hot takes, ordered them in a bracket, and set them loose to be voted on by our readers. We’re into the fourth round (which you can vote on right now!), but if you want to see the write-ups for all 64 of the first round picks, check out the first post, here!
Luke’s got a whole bunch of short humor writing workshops starting in January (including an intro workshop)! Get a jump on those new year writing resolutions by getting notes and feedback in a supportive environment, and meeting other funny folks.
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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