A Newsletter of Humorous Writing

For August 9-15, 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. We were wondering: What's your favorite thing to grill? Hot dogs? Hamburgers? Fish? A nice selection of summer veggies? Short humor pieces? Let us know!
 

What We Enjoyed This Week

If You Want My Blueberry-Muffin Recipe, You Must Read This Crazy-Long Preamble First by Rekha Shankar (The New Yorker) This piece perfectly captures the maddeningly precious tone of cooking blogs.

Two Truths and a Lie: Job Interview for a Data Entry Position Edition by Rachel Van Nes (McSweeney's) Combining Two Truths and a Lie with a job interview is a genius premise, and provides a really nice structure for this piece. Also there's a great reversal at the end. 

Chopped Narrates Me Cooking a Summer Side Dish by Julie Vick (McSweeney's) "The figs aren’t going to save this."

Major English Poets, Evaluated By Whether or Not They Fucked by Mariah Kreutter (McSweeney's) Title says it all.

An Old Favorite

Selections From H.P. Lovecraft’s Brief Tenure as a Whitman’s Sampler Copywriter by Luke Burns (McSweeney's)

Luke here! I know what you're thinking: "They picked one of their OWN pieces for the old favorite? What an utter bunch of self-aggrandizing braggarts!" Ordinarily, you'd be right. However, yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the publication of this, my first McSweeney's piece (and it's a real "first Mcsweeney's piece" kind of piece, if you know what I mean), so I just wanted to take a moment to reflect. Getting this piece accepted was a big deal for me. It gave me the confidence to think that maybe I wasn't totally wasting my time with the whole writing thing, and was a nice bit of recognition at a time when I really needed it. (That kind of recognition is one thing we hope to provide--in a much smaller way--with this newsletter!) Those kinds of milestone moments don't come along all that often, so you've got to appreciate them when they do. Plus, I have become a famous billionaire from writing short humor, which is one nice outcome of the whole situation.
 

Updates From Your Hosts and Friends of the Show

Though he spent all week wrestling with his own mortality (see above) and brooding, Luke still has a sketch show coming up on Monday that you should check out. 9:30PM at the UCB Theatre in Hell's Kitchen!
 

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.