For April 29-May 5, 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. This year’s spring bird migration is underway, which means you’ll find us spending a lot of time in Central Park, hoping to catch a glimpse of some warblers so that we can convince them to come down out of those dang trees and let us read them some short humor pieces.

What We Enjoyed This Week

Parents’ House Writing Residency by Nina Sharma (Slackjaw) The details that get revealed about the parents over the course of this piece are just terrific. Nina gives us a nice feel for who these characters are, but not at the expense of exploring the nuts and bolts of how this residency works. We also love the figure of the omnipresent leaf blower man.

RE: Met Gala Coat Check by Helen Laser (Points in Case) We particularly enjoy how Helen lets the reader connect the dots themselves in this piece. Rather than simply list and describe all the unusual items of clothes that might be left at the Met Gala coat check, lines like “charging stations for electronic gowns are not available“ and “sopping wet accessories are not permitted“ give us the space to infer and imagine what those items might be in a very satisfying way. It would be difficult to come up with fictional clothes that are more heightened than the ACTUAL clothes people wear to the Met Gala, and this is a very clever strategy for getting around that potential problem.

I AM IN LOVE WITH YOU BUT I AM CURSED TO SPEAK LIKE GUY FIERI by Megan Williams (HAD) A poem that manages to be funny and heartfelt at the same time. Who among us has not felt, at one time or another, that the language we have access to is inadequate to express what we feel in our heart? The idea of being cursed to speak like Guy Fieri is also just hilarious.

-- AD --

Sun. May 17th, 2-4pm EST (online & recorded): Riane Konc (New Yorker, McSweeney's, etc.) will lead a virtual 2-hour humor writing session focused on using mapping, juxtaposition, & known forms to generate memorable humor pieces. We'll dissect specifics of how to make these strategies work, dig into examples, cover generative approaches, & probably all have our lives changed forever? (TBD)

“Riane’s class was information dense in a way that felt generous.”
“Riane had a deep well of knowledge and her class was incredibly in depth for a two hour seminar.”
- Recent Writing Co-Lab students

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An Old Favorite

The Ultimate Personality Test: Are You Myers or Briggs from the Myers-Briggs Test? by Tyler Gooch (Points in Case) The idea of that Meyers and Briggs would work through their interpersonal tension via a new personality test that the two of them put together is brilliant. The quiz form provides a nice setup/punchline structure, and there are a ton of really well-calibrated wacky details throughout. (“Allow flexibility within your workday so you have time to do things like wrap yourself in toilet paper and go, ‘Myers, I guess I must be Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking and Perceiving because I-N-TP!’”)

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

Nothing from us this week! A Wilson’s warbler is sitting on a low-hanging branch right by us and we think he’s really digging this Jack Handey piec—never mind he flew off.