HeyJaredKarim Shamsi-Basha
- Indexed articles, last 90 days
- 3
- Latest publication
- Sep 24, 2026
- Outlet visibility, for Writer's Digest
- Top 500K sites
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 22, 2026
Latest articles
Every Joke Has a Family: How to Stretch a Bit Into Prose and Keep the Laughs Coming (On Humor) (opens the original)
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In his 1895 essay "How to Tell a Story," Mark Twain wrote that the humorous story is an American art. It can be spun out as long as the teller likes, wander wherever it pleases, and "arrive nowhere in particular." The comic story, he said, is simply told. I would add that the humorous story must also be raised, like a child, and it takes about as much patience. (Go Deep Without Getting Wet: How to Invite Reflection and Still Get the Laugh.) Most of us write jokes the other way. We find one good
Go Deep Without Getting Wet: How to Invite Reflection and Still Get the Laugh (On Humor) (opens the original)
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Erma Bombeck once wrote about the thin line between laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt. She would know. She wrote about laundry and carpools for 30 years, and somewhere in the middle of a paragraph about a washing machine, you would suddenly find yourself thinking about mortality, and then you would laugh again, and then you would put the paper down and stare at the wall. (How Open Mics Will Sharpen Your Writing.) That is comedy at its best. Readers do not come to humor writin
Test-Drive Your Jokes on Fellow Humans (On Humor) (opens the original)
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A few weeks ago, I tried out a new bit on my girlfriend while we were making dinner. She laughed so hard she dropped the carton of eggs. Naturally, I assumed I had written comedy gold. Two nights later, I told the same joke to a room of 13 people at an open mic. Silence. Someone in the back coughed politely, which in the South is a disguised, “Bless your heart!” That gap—between the kitchen and the open mic—taught me something important. A joke is not one fixed thing. It changes shape depending
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For Writer's Digest, the outlet · Measured Aug 1, 2026
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