For March 4-10, 2026

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. The Academy Awards are this weekend, and we’ve only JUST found out that not only are we NOT nominated, the Oscars don’t even HAVE a “Best Short Humor Newsletter” category. This is a particular bummer because we really needed a boost after what we went through earlier this year at the winter Olympics. Let us know if anyone has suggestions for things to do in LA this Sunday night. Aside from trying to get a refund on our rental tuxedos, our schedules are suddenly wide open.

What We Enjoyed This Week

I Am the Last Drop of Yogurt, Begging to Be Thrown Away by Jessica Camargo (Points in Case) Jessica has given this narrator a hilariously distinctive voice and a wonderfully specific point of view: “I don’t want you to fight for me. Believe me, a disproportionate amount of effort will be needed to capture me. I need you to know that I am not worth it.” A great example of how the key to success for a character monologue piece like this is getting as specific as you possibly can.

A Birthday-Gift Guide by Your Most Absent Aunt by Pratima Mani (The New Yorker) We particularly love the jokes in this piece that touch on a very relatable family dynamic: How relatives can seize on an offhanded comment you make, or a seemingly-innocuous action you take, read way too much into it, decide it must be your whole deal, and give you gifts related to that comment or action for the rest of your life.

Sometimes Two People Just Fall Out Of Cahoots (The Onion) Mapping “being in cahoots” onto “being in love” is just brilliant, as is the choice to start this piece at the point where the two characters have already fallen “out of cahoots.” This article is packed with a ton of great lines and the kinds of old-timey crook details that we just love: “There we were, reaching for the same crowbar, and suddenly my whole world changed.”

One of the main missions of this newsletter is to put the spotlight on specific writers, and because The Onion doesn’t include bylines on their articles, that means we can’t heap praise on a individual writer for this one. However, we can encourage you to take a gander at The Onion’s masthead, and think about all the folks who, together, make The Onion one of the best humor publications out there.

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An Old Favorite

How to Make New York City More Car-Friendly by Charlie Dektar (The New Yorker) Adding satire to a joke bucket piece is a real challenge. (And, as we’ve written in the past, writing a joke bucket piece is already incredibly challenging to begin with!) Because a joke bucket piece, as the name suggests, is a collection of loosely-connected jokes, those pieces often wind up being more wacky and less grounded in a way that could potentially undercut the satirical point you’re trying to make. In a satirical piece, you also often need to take a bit of time to set up and frame your satirical point of view. Because a joke bucket piece is just one punchy joke after another, you often don’t have the breathing room to do that kind of framing, which could lead to a lack of clarity about what you’re satirizing.

It’s important to have that in mind so you can appreciate what an impressive feat Charlie has pulled off with this piece: He’s written a terrific joke bucket piece with tons of great lines (“Take out the two bad traffic lights under the green one”) that also makes a nice clear satirical point about our car-obsessed culture.

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 still got a few spots left in his Wednesday afternoon and Wednesday night advanced short humor workshops starting on March 25th! Write three drafts in four weeks, get feedback and notes in a supportive environment, and meet some other funny folks.