For December 10-16, 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’re excited to announce that we’re working on a kids book! It’s a riff on Is Your Mama a Llama? that we’re calling Is Your Vasco da Gama? We can just do that, right?

What We Enjoyed This Week

Red and Green Flags, According to Protagonists of Hallmark Christmas Movies by Madeline Goetz and Will Lampe (McSweeney’s) This piece is full of great riffs on Hallmark movie details, and the structure (with its seasonally appropriate colors) lends itself to some really satisfying setups and punchlines. But what we particularly enjoyed was the turn this piece takes around the halfway mark, when it becomes clear that all of these red/green flags are being experienced by the same person, and a delightfully strange version of a Hallmark movie narrative emerges.

The Show Must Go On by Adrian Tomine (The New Yorker) This is a fun and funny short autobiographical comic about how your relationship to certain things in the place where you live changes as you get older. Though it’s a quick one, Adrian manages to bring everything full circle in a very satisfying way.

There Will Never Be a Sale This Good Until Next Week by Alex Laskey (Points in Case) This piece perfectly captures how, when shopping online, you sometimes wind up rationalizing the choice to spend a bunch more than you originally intended. It’s so funny the way the narrator’s tone switches from being disingenuously ingratiating to quietly menacing (and later to being outright threatening):

“Although, you know what… and I just thought of this now, if you can get that subtotal above $75, we’ll just get rid of that shipping cost all together. I mean I’m no mathematician, but that seems like an obvious choice to me! Hahahaha! Here’s some more of our products.

Good boy.”

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Humor and pathos and then humor again (because who wants to end on pathos?). Low Swank is a good read, and totally worth the inbox space.

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Points in Case is looking for a part time editor to temporarily take over some work at the site next year! If you think you might be a good fit, send an email to james@pointsincase.com with the subject “Temporary Editor” and include a few details about your background and what you’d bring to the role!

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An Old Favorite

Translation of a Seemingly Pleasant Conversation Between My Two Aunts At Christmas by Rose O’Shea (McSweeney’s) We included this back in the day in Newsletter #117 and we’re pleased to report that it’s still as great as we originally thought it was. The form is terrific, allowing Rose to quickly shift between banal pleasantries and the heightened tone of the translations, generating a ton of laughs. As we said at the time, some damn good prose! “‘Yes, it’s just so good to all be together.’ (Your wickedness has poisoned our bloodline. I weep for your children, born they of a gargoyle.)”

The turn the piece takes at the end is also a very nice, unexpected use of the form, and wraps things up in a way that feels satisfying and completely earned.

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

A BUNCH of Luke’s January short humor workshops are SOLD OUT, but he’s still got spots in his advanced workshop on Thursday afternoons and his intro class on Saturday afternoons! He JUST also added a section on Wednesday nights that has just TWO spots left. A great way to kick off the new year and get a head start on those writing resolutions.