A Newsletter of Humorous Writing

For March 21-27, 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. There's a lot packed into this edition, so we'll keep the patter up top to a minimum. But we did want to flag that we have surpassed 500 followers on the Newsletter! Thank you! And congratulations, 500 followers mean you've unlocked a bonus and now get to find out what our favorite animals are! Brian's favorite animal is the noble falcon, Luke's is the wily fox, and James' is the gentle seal! Keeping sharing the Newsletter with friends to unlock more Exclusive Content!
 

What We Enjoyed This Week

A dev trained robots to generate “garbage” slot machine games—and made $50K by Sam Machkovech (Ars Technica) There are so many good and weird specifics in this piece. It's nice to know that we can all have a laugh as profit generation is increasingly untethered from anything resembling useful production.

I Rode an E-Scooter as Far From Civilization as Its Batteries Could Take Me by Joe Veix (Gizmodo) Speaking of bizarre technology, Joe is a fantastic and funny gonzo writer who is always finding the weirdest sides of tech. If you haven't already, look up some of Joe's other writing about The World Online.

Report: 80 Percent of Vegan Leather Jackets End Up in Landfills, On Cool Seagulls by Lauren Lavín (The Hard Times) Come for the great mental image of birds in jackets, but stay for some really good jokes.

Movies As I See Them by Becky Mandelbaum (McSweeney's) This really simple piece is a great example that strong specifics can really make a piece.

For sale, ‘IT’S MUELLER TIME’ sweatshirt, lightly used by Alexandra Petri (The Washington Post) This piece is so searing that when we read it, we all spit out coffee from our $19.99 "Covefe," "Hamburder," and "Stable Genius" mugs. 

The Job Creator Rises at Dawn by Evan Waite and River Clegg (The New Yorker) Friends of the Show River and Evan have spun gold again from a specific and ubiquitous turn of phrase.
 

An Old Favorite

I Made the Pizza Cinnamon Rolls from Mario Batali’s Sexual Misconduct Apology Letter by Geraldine DeRuiter (The Everywhereist)

This essay was recently nominated for a James Beard Award, and it's a great reason to return to this brutally funny example of rage sharpened to a very fine point.
 

Updates From Your Hosts and Friends of the Show

Thanks so much to everyone who came out to our show and to the Satire & Humor Festival! The show and the entire festival were such a blast, and we had so much fun getting to meet so many of you and to put on a giant version of the show. It was the perfect way to celebrate five years!

Luke had a great piece run in The New Yorker called "Real Men Hate Toxic Masculinity."  Reading it will put some hair on your chest, we're told.

Luke, James, and Friend of the Show Lucas Adams debuted a new series on Topic.com called "Platformed." Each piece will be a parody of a different online platform, and we started by imagining what would happen if your Twitter feed became unstuck in time.
 

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.