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Today we’re running down some of our favorite sentences from pieces and articles published in 2025. After that, we’ve got a couple of recommendations of things we’ve been into lately: A new TV show and three, simple, red holiday cocktails.

Some Favorite Sentences of 2025

We talk a lot about sentence-level joke writing in this newsletter (in fact, we’re long overdue to dedicate an entire premium edition to the topic), and so, as part of our end-of-year wrap-up, we thought it would be appropriate for us to get real granular and highlight some of our very favorite sentences that we read in 2025, and write a little about what makes them so great.

Putting together this list made us appreciate even more just how incredibly challenging it is to write a single sentence that is funny entirely on its own. The vast majority of funny sentences in short humor pieces rely on context to make them funny: The context of the title and premise, a previous sentence that sets up a punchline, the way the piece as a whole is heightening, and so on.

There were lots of hilarious paragraphs and two-sentence combos that we were tempted to include, but in assembling this list we were adamant that we were only going to pick SINGLE sentences that might, entirely in isolation, make someone laugh. (Show this list to someone who hasn’t read any of the pieces and let us know how it goes!)

The fact that we were so strict about this rule also means that there’s actually little overlap between this list and our list of our favorite PIECES of the year (which will be hitting your inbox next weekend, with no paywall). While there are tons of great sentences in our favorite pieces of the year, many of them work best as part of a whole, while the sentences below stand on their own, and stand out, in a very particular way.

THE SENTENCES (PRESENTED IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER)