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Today we're talking about some things you can learn about short humor from a surprising source. After that, we’ve got a couple of recommendations of things we’ve been into lately: a tender Spanish romance with a unique premise and a new video game.

Some Lessons About Short Humor From a Children's Book

Luke here! As you already know from reading this newsletter, James and I spend quite a lot of time reading short humor, thinking about short humor, teaching short humor, writing about short humor, and so on and so on. Being so immersed in the world of this very particular type of writing means it can sometimes be tough to turn off the short humor analyzing part of your brain, as I recently discovered while reading the children’s classic Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

While reading the book (which is great, for the record), I couldn’t stop thinking about what kind of notes I’d give it if it were a short humor piece. (When you’re reading the same book to a kid for what feels like the thousandth time, you have to find some way to amuse yourself.) Earnestly noting a kids’ book in this way would obviously be wrong-headed and missing the point to a huge degree. After all, kids books and short humor have very different goals and are trying to do very different things. (Though sometimes there is overlap!) But I couldn’t stop looking at the book through that lens, and so I decided to go ahead and do a full write up of the notes I’d give to Brown Bear if it were a short humor piece. It’s an absurd exercise—as is evidenced by the fact that this write-up is many many many times longer than the text of the book itself—but I think there may actually be a lesson to be learned here about short humor.