A Newsletter of Humorous Writing: End of 2020 Edition
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
For 2020, a roundup of the year'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. 2020: Good riddance.
What We Enjoyed This Year (In Chronological Order)
After a lot of deliberation around the End of Year List Decision Table (EoYLDT) at Humorous Readings Headquarters (HRHQ), we've decided on fifteen of our favorite pieces from this year. It was naturally a tough task to winnow the field down to just this crop, and lots of wonderful pieces didn't make the cut--but don't worry, the rest are all safely archived in our Vault of Humorous Writing (VoHW). We hope you enjoyed these as much as we did.Things I Should Talk to My Therapist About Vs. Things I Do Talk to My Therapist About by Dan Caprera (McSweeney's)
Zillow Listings of New York City by Jen Spyra (The New Yorker)
Email Signatures in Ascending Order of How Nervous I Am to Be Emailing You by Maeve Dunigan (McSweeney's)
Welcome to My Store For Women by Kady Ruth Ashcraft (McSweeney's)
Our Gang is Only for Tough Guys Who Will Also Participate in Our Thought Exercise About Which Dogs Would Be the Prettiest as Human Ladies by Drew Zwetchkenbaum (McSweeney's)
Well, Stranger, It Seems This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us, on Account of My Torso Mysteriously Growing Larger Every Time I Say the Word "Ain't" by Spencer Roth-Rose (Points In Case)
Why I’m Choosing to Ask a Black Stranger How to Be a Better Ally, Even Though Google is Free by Taylor Garron (Reductress)
I Am A Man With A Grand Piano by Libby Marshall (Slackjaw)
Why Are Men Are Judged On Their Potential and I Am Judged On That Time I Keyed Dylan’s Car? by Alyson D'Lando (Reductress)
22 Ways I Will Destroy You With Karate by Tom Laplaige (McSweeney's)
The New King Of Pop? This Man’s Joints Are Fucked Up by Bethel Afful (Flexx)
Data 4 Sale by Evan Waite and River Clegg (The New Yorker)
I Hope You Don't Get Anxious When a Run-On Sentence Is Internally Fragmented (Due to Parentheses or Lengthy Digressions) Before It Is Grammatically Resolved by Woody Fu (Points In Case)
List: The 3 Sleeves on My Sweater, Ranked by How Much I Really Need Them There by Kyle Goulston (Points in Case)
What Is Your State's Official Beverage? by Allie Rubin (Points in Case)
Some Brian-y Old Favorites
This year we lost our friend, newsletter/show co-founder, and collaborator, Brian Agler. We hope you'll take a little time to reread some of Brian's work, which you can find collected in our all-Brian edition of the newsletter, and on McSweeney's. We miss Brian, and we hope that every laugh from a well-written joke reminds you of him, too.
See you next year!
@lukevburns & @jamesfolta
We started this newsletter with our dear friend Brian Agler, and we want it to always honor his memory and his love of all things humorous. You can find our newsletter tribute to Brian here.
This newsletter is free, but if you enjoy it and want to support the work we do putting it together, you can send us a tip here. Any amount is greatly appreciated, and 1/3rd of each donation will go to Stand Up To Cancer.
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!
See you next week!
@lukevburns & @jamesfolta
We started this newsletter with our dear friend Brian Agler, and we want it to always honor his memory and his love of all things humorous. You can find our newsletter tribute to Brian here.
This newsletter is free, but if you enjoy it and want to support the work we do putting it together, you can subscribe to our paid tier, or you can send us a tip here. Any amount is greatly appreciated, and 1/3rd of each donation will go to Stand Up To Cancer.
If you'd like to place an ad in the Newsletter, please fill out this form.
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!