A Newsletter of Humorous Writing

For February 14-20, 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. Say! If the newsletter had a theme song, what do you think it would be? We're looking for something that's not too self-serious, but also not overtly jokey. Let us know if you have any ideas!

What We Enjoyed This Week

Notable Moments in the History of Fashion by Sam Saulsbury (The New Yorker) This piece is filled with excellent, punchy joke writing. Each of the beats is short, but they never feel disconnected or random, because there's such a strong structure and throughline.

The Subtext of Every Cold Email I’ve Sent Since Graduating — I’m Definitely Fine Though by Jennifer Kim (McSweeney's) A clear, relatable premise, well-executed. A very good McSweeney's debut.

Toward a Theory of the American TV Commercial of, Oh, Say, About 1990 by Ian Dreiblatt (The Believer) The prose in this article is witty and wry, and in analyzing its subject matter it touches on a number of questions that are also useful to the writer/reader of short humor pieces: "Who are we to understand is speaking?" "Who constitutes the imagined audience?" What are the assumptions the writer is making about their audience, and what do they assume the audience assumes? On what level of reality is a piece operating? What kind of norms does the piece, implicitly or explicitly, "embody and transmit" and what "aesthetic and narrative conventions" is it drawing on? Heady stuff, but all very much worth pondering, especially if you're someone who is interested in exploring more experimental work.

The Communal Mind by Patricia Lockwood (London Review of Books) Here at the newsletter we're very interested in the places where short humor writing overlaps with poetry--a territory that is very much the domain of Patricia Lockwood. In this piece (which also talks about how the way the word "piece" is used), Lockwood document the delights of the internet and social media, and also the ways that they are slowly breaking all our brains. 

Digitally Erase the Rat From the End of The Departed by Adam Sacks (Kickstarter) This newsletter is also interested in conceptual humor, humor that shades into performance art. One could be forgiven for thinking that this is nothing more than a silly idea and a clever gimmick, but the writing in the descriptions is also quite good and very funny. You could take the text and put it up on McSweeney's and it would work--but actually having it on Kickstarter makes it that much more compelling.
 

An Old Favorite

How to Talk to Your Kids About Almost Anything by Wendy Molyneux (McSweeney's)

Very often when you read a piece written as a dialogue, you wind up thinking, "This should have just been a sketch." And also, "Gee, the author is spending a lot of time and words trying to imitate speech patterns, but none of that work is translating into actual laughs." Not so with this piece! Here, the dialogue form is set up and justified quickly and efficiently, and the structure allows Molyneux to pack in a lot of jokes, and get to them fast.
 

Updates From Your Hosts and Friends of the Show

On March 5, Brian is hosting SpeakEasy, a show about speeches and speechwriting, at Caveat. And if that's not enough, it'll feature friend of the newsletter, Karen Chee! Come on down!
 

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.