A Newsletter of Humorous Writing

For July 19-25, 2018, a roundup of the week's finest prose humor and prose humor-related news.

Hello and welcome to A Newsletter of Humorous Writing, the email propaganda arm of the acclaimed humorous readings show, An Evening of Humorous Readings. This week at Humorous Readings HQ (HRHQ) we ate too many cookies and now our stomachs hurt, but we can't stop eating them, they're too good. Someone please come over and put these delicious cookies on a high shelf where we won't be able to get them.
 

What We Enjoyed This Week (Aside From Cookies)

How to Beat LinkedIn: The Game by Joe Veix (The Outline) All social networking sites are terrible in their own way, but this article makes a compelling case that LinkedIn might be the worst of them all. It's hard to tell what's more horrifying: The idea that so many people are investing so much time in something that is utterly meaningless, or the idea that people might actually use it as a basis for making decisions that actually affect people's lives (but oh no you could say the same of any social media site). Also, this: "I’m currently the Vice President of Butt Communications, the Hot Dog Man at Goldman Sachs, and the Big Bad Pig Boy at Pig Boys, Inc."

Cooking with Leonora Carrington by Valerie Stivers (The Paris Review) Not a typical humor piece, but we think you'll find it well worth your time. (Also, Carrington's descriptions of bizarre dishes would not feel out of place in a modern work of short humor on, say, foodie culture.)

God Bless Young Christine Baranski in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again by Kyle Buchanan (Vulture) It's great to see genuinely funny prose used to celebrate something that the writer loves. A nice reminder that not all jokes have to be at someone else's expense.
 

An Old Favorite

My Wedding Hair by Emma Rathbone (The New Yorker) Let's really over-analyze this one, shall we? The central joke of this piece is that specificity does not equal clarity. For the joke to work, the specifics have to be detailed enough to paint a vivid picture of what the narrator wants, but at the same time be vague enough that it feels utterly impossible that anyone could execute this vision in any practical way. If it hit even one false note--if one of the examples was too vague, or too specific and outré--the whole thing would fall apart, but it balances all its elements wonderfully. The piece also strikes a similar balance in its tone: You understand who the narrator is, but it never gets bogged down with too many character-y details.
          Because it's so focused on nailing the right level of specificity, this is a great one to learn from. Too often, other pieces will have a beat that gets into such detailed specifics, that it starts to feel like the joke is the fact of having gotten so specific, rather than any of the specific specifics themselves. And of course, it's even more common to see pieces with jokes that are so general they fall completely flat. It's a tough thing to navigate, and we can use as many positive examples as we can get.
 

Updates From Your Hosts and Friends of the Show

This week, Brian wrote a piece for the New Yorker about how he WILL NOT be replaced by robots. (Full disclosure: James and I are trying to replace Brian with an advanced artificial intelligence, but we just can't get the algorithm to give us the right mix of Brian-y goodness.)

And a teaser dropped for James' upcoming episode of Paperweight (a new comedy podcast). Start getting hyped up for it now!
 

See you next week!

@brianagler, @lukevburns, & @jamesfolta

Did we miss a piece you loved? Did you love a piece we mentioned? Let us know! This is an experiment and we're hoping to continue to make it better and better. If you have any thoughts, notes, wishes, or dreams for this newsletter, please email us or respond to this email and tell us what the score is.