Writing Humor Essays

The follow-up to Caitlin Moran's breakout hit, How to Be a Woman - a hilarious collection of award-winning columns, available to American listeners for the first time ever.

What If is an essay about the power of daydreaming, and why you should never, ever, ever, become a writer. James J. Caterino is the author of Jordan Rose and the Tomb of Resurrection, The Anti-Matter Girl, Dreams, True Stories, To Meghan, I Want to Believe, Ghost Stories, Pop Star, Time Travel Stories, The Girl from the Stars, and much more.

One of Esquire's best books of spring 2022 An extended meditation on late style and last works from "one of our greatest living critics" (Kathryn Schulz, New York). When artists and athletes age, what happens to their work? Does it ripen or rot? Achieve a new serenity or succumb to an escalating...

Are you sick of writing factual reports that put you and your audience asleep? Do you wish there were a way to write research that both informed and entertained like your favorite non-fiction books do? Do you need a laugh? Do you want to make your teacher laugh? Congratulations! You hold in your hands the key to facing the facts with fun. 51 Wacky We-search Reports will teach you how to hunt for the best facts and turn them into cartoons, parody performances, jokes, wacky poetry and much, much more. For students or teachers, this latest book from author and teacher Barry Lane will add ...

Dear Diary, It Got Weird Again The Works of Mr. Joe This isn’t a diary. It’s a legacy stitched from the strange, the sincere, and the sentences that refused to stay quiet. Inside are fragments that became foundations—moments of insight, humor, heartbreak, and clarity gathered over years and held together by a single thread: the need to make meaning in a world that doesn’t always offer it freely. This collection speaks to those who feel everything a little too deeply, think a little too sideways, and laugh in the middle of their most serious questions. It’s for anyone who’s ever ...

Chrome Dome is an essay by James J. Caterino, the author of Jordan Rose and the Tomb of Resurrection, The Anti-Matter Girl, Dreams, True Stories, To Meghan, I Want to Believe, Ghost Stories, and much more.

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he described it as a “comic weekly.” And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder’s description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists of the modern era. This anthology gathers together, for the first time, the funniest work of more than seventy New Yorker contributors.

Back when restaurant menus were still printed on paper, and wearing a mask—or not—was a decision made mostly on Halloween, David Sedaris spent his time doing normal things. As Happy-Go-Lucky opens, he is learning to shoot guns with his sister, visiting muddy flea markets in Serbia, buying gummy worms to feed to ants, and telling his nonagenarian father wheelchair jokes. But then the pandemic hits, and like so many others, he's stuck in lockdown, unable to tour and read for audiences, the part of his work he loves most.

Girl Pop is an essay about my favorite sub-genre of music. James J. Caterino is the author of Jordan Rose and the Tomb of Resurrection, The Anti-Matter Girl, Dreams, True Stories, To Meghan, I Want to Believe, Ghost Stories, Pop Star, Time Travel Stories, The Girl from the Stars, and much more.

"An utterly brilliant and wonderfully executed idea." –Jennifer Clarke (singer/songwriter) and Lenny Clarke (comedian/actor) Told from two different perspectives, The Cringe Chronicles is a unique father-daughter memoir following Kristin Tougias on her teenage tribulations and strange family vacations. Kristin’s father, author and travel writer Michael J. Tougias, is a bit eccentric and a true nonconformist who inadvertently adds to Kristin’s woes. At the end of each chapter chronicling their misadventures, Kristin’s father Michael gives his personal and humorous point of view, ...

Who would have thought the turn of the last Century would one day be ancient history? In "More Slightly Off the Mark, Why I Hate Cats, and Other Lies", former newspaper columnist Mark R. Hunter went back to collect his humor pieces from 2000 and 2001—the earliest ones to be put on a computer. In DOS format, on a floppy disk. The amount of change in just twenty years resulted in Hunter completely rewriting the columns, and inserting his present self (and his dog, Beowulf, through pictures) into the work—mostly to make fun of his older self. Along the way Mark riffs on everything from ...