For October 28 - November 3, 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. Hope your Halloween was fun! As we do every year, we went out trick or treating and came back with a massive candy haul. And as we do every year, we put all of that candy into a lobster pot and slowly boiled it down into a thick dark paste that we’ll use to sweeten our coffees until next year.

What We Enjoyed This Week

Internet Searches to Exonerate You for Murder by Natalia Ballinger (Points in Case) A simple, relatively broad premise, but explored widely. For a short piece, Natalia finds an impressive amount of variety here. By the end of the ten bullet points, the reader feels like we’ve gotten somewhere, without Natalia having to resort to getting plotty or gimmicky.

Common Scams to Avoid by Jack Handey (The New Yorker) Jack Handey is the king of deadpan prose. The key, to my eye (James here), is simple sentence construction. Jack’s sentences are always direct, active, and uncluttered by clauses. It lets him set a deliberate tempo, and the punch lines/surprises/subversions arrive almost unexpectedly.

The Headless Horseman Doesn’t Want to Bother the ER by Nathan Cowley (McSweeney’s) An evergreen take on a spooky season favorite. Nathan makes a fun, grounded personality choice for the Headless Horseman, one that juxtaposes well with his Headlessnes, and then plays it out to great effect.

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An Old Favorite

What Guys Say vs. What They Really Mean by Jen Spyra (McSweeney’s ) Natalia’s piece, where she explores a simple idea broadly, reminded us of a piece that does the opposite: This one explores a simple idea deeply and specifically. We’re big fans of Jen Spyra’s work around here, and she’s the master of going all in on a wacky detail or backstory. We won’t spoil the punchline of the piece here, but notice that, like Natalia’s piece, Jen’s is short and its title is very simple, and could conceivably go in a lot of directions. But instead of offering a wide variety of jokes, Jen focuses on heightening one joke. Also Jen’s piece is factually true: this is exactly what guys mean.

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 reminder that I (James) will be in conversation with Adam Peterson next Friday at 7pm, at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn! I’d love to see you there! Adam’s new book is a collection of short, funny fiction and it should be especially interesting for humor fans, like you. Tickets are available here. If you come out, I’ll let you take one guess at my true name — if you utter the name bestowed upon me at The Beginning, you will hold my very life and fate in your hands!

Other Humorous Writing News

In Bookforum, Friend of the Newsletter Ed Park reviewed a lost novel by Don DeLillo, a hockey sex romp called Amazons that DeLillo published under the name “Cleo Birdwell.” The piece is a great introduction to the book and its weird backstory, but it’s also full of great Parkisms (the homonym of the pseudonym Cleo and the library database CLIO, etc.) A funny writer on a funny book — not to be missed for readers of this newsletter!