A Newsletter of Humorous Writing

For January 4-10, 2019, 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're only halfway through the second week of the new year, and unfortunately, we have already messed up one of the Collective Resolutions we chose for the three of us to follow. The rule is, if one of us breaks the resolution, we ALL break the resolution, but on this one, we all blew it. Yes, we're sad to announce that the three of us each individually allowed a different smooth-talking grifter into Humorous Readings Headquarters (HRHQ), and the three con artists scammed us out of nearly all our possessions. That's something we were really hoping not to do this year. Ah well! There are still nine more Collective Resolutions we HAVEN'T broken. We'll keep you posted!
 

What We Enjoyed This Week

How to Bathe a Horse by Casey Rand (McSweeney's) That's some good heightening.

Clues That You Are the Unorthodox Detective in a Murder Mystery by Ellis Rosen and Colin Stokes (The New Yorker) A piece like this lives and dies on the quality of its specifics, and this one has some very well-observed details.

Quiz: Porn or Lifetime? by Kat Thek (The Belladonna) This is a genuinely difficult quiz. Also, check out the author's website, it looks like she's up to a bunch of neat stuff.
 

An Old Favorite

Mind-Blowing: This Incredible Fan Theory Suggests That Mr. Bean Is A Weird And Goofy Dude (Clickhole)

As a general rule, we try to avoid featuring articles that don't have bylines, because part of the mission of this newsletter is to highlight individual writers rather than outlets. Our hope is that you'll come to recognize certain names, and discover people whose work you like enough that you'll want to check out what they've got going on outside of what you see in the newsletter--maybe even drop 'em a line to let 'em know you appreciate what they're doing. We're trying to provide a modest corrective to the way that the internet and social media encourage people to see writing as being produced by publishers rather than actual authors. For example, consider how often you see people on twitter post articles with comments like "McSweeney's does it again!" or "Spot-on satire from The New Yorker" without mentioning a specific writer, as if everything on those sites were produced by an anonymous writers room or committee. One factor in all this is, of course, that publications often DO have a voice that writers try to emulate, which can tend to make pieces sound a little samey--but that's a topic for another day, and our original point still stands.

ANYWAY, long story short, The Onion and Clickhole don't often get spots in the newsletter, but this piece was too good to pass up. It's an astute parody of the consistently inane discourse about art and culture that you find on Reddit (and all over the internet, really).
 

Updates From Your Hosts and Friends of the Show

Nothing this week! We're too busy dealing with the fallout from being hoodwinked by those smooth-talking grifters.
 

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.