For May 6-12, 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. Exciting news: This week we bought a toast-making robot for Humorous Readings Headquarters (HRHQ)! The robot lives in a little box with two horizontal slots on the top, and you put bread in the slots, then push down a little lever to let him know that the bread is there, and the robot makes the toast and tosses it back up out of the box when he’s done! This little guy is very shy—whenever we look into the slots to try to see him he goes and hides somewhere—but we really want to pay our compliments to the chef, so we’re thinking we’re going to try to scoop him out of those slots with some kind of metal utensil so we can personally thank him for doing such a great job with our toast.

What We Enjoyed This Week

Lines, Ranked by Luca Clark and Luke Herzog (McSweeney’s) This is such a fun idea for a list. The specificity of the premise—ranking words and phrases that end in “line”—gives the piece a deep sense of unity, allowing Luca and Luke to riff freely without the jokes feeling overly random. A really nice way to approach a joke bucket piece, which, as we’ve previously discussed, is a very challenging type of piece!

My Memory Palace Of Embarrassing Moments by Johanna Gohmann (Slackjaw) All the embarrassing moments are really funny and are filled with great details, and using a memory palace as a device to string those moments together is quite clever. There’s also a really nice runner involving (spoiler alert) nipples.

The Secret to That Great New York Pizza Is… by Dustin Mark (Points in Case) The chain of logic that drives this piece is really satisfying and well-calibrated. Each new beat follows from the previous one in a way that feels logical, but never logical in a way that makes the heightening feel predictable. We’re also suckers for pieces that not only have lots of New York City specifics (wait til you see the penultimate paragraph), but also poke fun at a certain type of New Yorker’s outsized self-regard.

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An Old Favorite

This week's Old Favorite is a Brian Agler Selection (TM)--a piece whose accompanying note was written by Brian--from Newsletter #95.

In The Locker Room at Halftime by Zhubin Parang (McSweeney's) Something fun to think about is how any professional sports team of today--even a bad one--could absolutely crush a team from the 1970s. There's just no question. Every player is so strong and so fast. BUT, and hear is out, what if there were robots involved? Zhubin Parang answers this question, and more germane to this newsletter, does so quite humorously. The jokes hit. The voice is clear. The whole piece is snappy. It's a joy/terror to read.

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

Next Wednesday May 20th, James is going to be on a panel for the Freelancers Union’s Freelance Isn't Free Day. The programming lasts all day and features panels, a workshop, and some networking. James will be on the 1:15 PM program called “Creative Workers, Real Power: Rights, Voice & the Future of Freelance” talking about creative labor and collective power. More info and tickets are here — hope to see you there!

Luke just announced his slate of short humor workshops starting in June! It includes two single-session workshops that he’ll be running for the first time in a while: One is focused on how to give and get great feedback and the other is on how to find the right form or narrator for your short humor piece. If you can’t take a full four-week class, these two are great ways to practice your short humor skills in a shorter time frame.