Humor
Story Stream
Speaking Humor to Power January 01, 2025
Traditionally, Christmas was seen as ghost story season. Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol may be universally praised as one of the genre’s crowning holiday achievements, but one of America’s contributions to the canon—1984’s Ghostbusters—deserves ju...
Work, Love, and Humor May 28, 2024
Two hundred and fifty years from now, Americans will probably not be watching a television series about Jerry Seinfeld, the way some of us are following Michael Douglas’s starring turn in Apple TV’s Franklin. No matter how profound Seinfeld’s comedy ...
“Seinfeld” and the Art of Comedy May 27, 2024
Though the Harrison Butker commencement speech at Benedictine College in Kansas and the subsequent attempt at a media lynching has dominated the internet during the 2024 graduation session, his was not the only good commencement speech this year. Jer...
The Work of Bob Odenkirk May 17, 2024
If you’ve not read Naomi Odenkirk’s excellent and long out-of-print Mr Show - What Happened?: The Complete Story and Episode Guide, remedy that oversight tout de suite. Alongside hundreds of pages of interviews with the show’s cast and crew, Naomi pr...
Alice Munro Reinvigorated the Short Story May 16, 2024
“I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was ‘call attention to yourself,’ or ‘think you were smart,’ ” Alice Munro, who died on Monday, at age ninety-two, once said. She rebelled against this edict, of course, but it stayed wit...
Who’s Afraid of the Internet Novel? May 07, 2024
“Why would anyone want to remember last week’s internet,” writes Calvin Kasulke in his 2021 novel, Several People Are Typing. “We don’t, but we want to remember the fifteen-years-ago internet and that was last week’s internet, once.”Humorously, this ...
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Nowhere March 20, 2024
Four years ago this month, my northern California county closed the schools, offices, and shops, and went into pandemic lockdown. I was four months into being a national humor columnist for The Saturday Evening Post.This is my story.When I began writ...
22 of the Funniest Novels Since ‘Catch-22’ March 15, 2024
When it comes to fiction, humor is serious business. If tragedy appeals to the emotions, wit appeals to the mind. “You have to know where the funny is,” the writer Sheila Heti says, “and if you know where the funny is, you know everything.” Humor is ...
How Rita Bullwinkel Wrote Headshot March 12, 2024
On a semi-regular basis, I interview authors about their writing processes and new books—you can find previous entries here—and this week I’m excited to publish an interview with Rita Bullwinkel about her excellent novel Headshot that comes out week....
Pinochet’s Supernatural Staying Power March 08, 2024
“Why would I want to keep on living in a country where people hate me?” So says Augusto Pinochet, who, after two centuries of life as a vampire, has finally decided to die. The Oscar-nominated film El Conde, directed by Pablo Larraín, bitterly satiri...
