A Newsletter of Humorous Writing

For September 27-October 3, 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. If we were going to release our own brand of Humorous Readings Cider, what do you think we should call it? Should it be hard cider or non-alcoholic? Or should we not bother expanding into cider-making at all? Let us know soon, we've got all these apples and they're starting to rot.

What We Enjoyed This Week

If Guys Knew How to Correctly Interpret My Texts by Ginny Hogan (The New Yorker) This piece is a great example of how to get laughs by letting the reader do a little work. The humor comes not only from the disparity between the initial text and the replies, but also from allowing the reader to infer what the proper "translation" of the first text should be.

Area R&B Singer Won’t Do You Like That by Dylan Fugel (Flexx) Short and, additionally, sweet.

A Sneak Preview of the Menu for Antoni from “Queer Eye"’s New Restaurant by Blythe Roberson (The New Yorker) This one works even if you don't know anything about Antoni, which means it's gotta be good.

How to Carve a Pumpkin, as Explained by Ronnie the Pumpkin by Megan Schwartz (Weekly Humorist) You very quickly get what the pattern is going to be, but it's well-written and has plenty of great specifics that keep it fresh.  

Problems Only Guys Who Have Tarantulas Instead of Hands Can Understand by Brian Boone (Robot Butt) Just go on the ride with this one.
 

An Old Favorite

Twelve Things They Don’t Tell You About Being A Ghostly Ghoul by Daniel Spenser (Medium)

It's October, which means that instead of Humorous Writings, you get BOO-merous WRAITH-ings (we're so so sorry for these awful puns). This piece gives you the inside scoop on what it's like to be a ghost (it involves more cereal than you might think). This piece gets pretty crazy pretty quickly, and it has a decidedly zany narrator, but it never feels overly unfocused. Often, when humor writers are trying to surprise the reader, they'll throw in a bunch of jokes that are too self-consciously "wacky and out there," and these jokes wind up feeling out of place, distractingly disconnected from the premise. (And honestly, when one is trying too hard to be surprising, the specifics and themes one reaches for often wind up being not terribly original anyway.) Here the jokes are surprising, but never feel like they're edging too far into "random for the sake of being random" territory. It also does a great job of dispensing new information about the world of the piece in unexpected places, and has a number of nice running jokes layered throughout.
 

Updates From Your Hosts and Friends of the Show

Luke's (other) sketch team, A Few Sandwich Lovers, has written an hour-long romantic comedy that is going up at the UCB Theatre in Hell's Kitchen in three weeks, on October 25th at 6:30PM. We're letting you know about this now because the performance is a kind of audition for getting the show an extended run at the theater, and if more people come see it, that is very helpful!
 

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.