Humor

By Muriel Spark, from The Informed Air, a collection of essays to be published this month by New Directions. This essay originally appeared in the Observer, as “Eyes and Noses,”…

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From 2012 and 2013 blotters of the police department in Unalaska, Alaska, a town of 4,400 in the Aleutian Islands. Read More

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From annotations written by John Stuart Mill on his personal copies of the first editions of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays, which were published in two volumes, in 1841 and 1844.…

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From The Charleston Bulletin Supplements, dictated by Virginia Woolf to her nephew Quentin Bell when he was a child. Between 1923 and 1927, Bell and his brother Julian hand-produced a…

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From a letter to Mark Twain, postmarked October 1, 1879, from Carl Jensen, a customs officer in Stubbekøbing, Denmark. Twain’s annotation reads, “Preserve this remarkable letter.” Dear Mark Twain: Letters…

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From an 1851 “list of imitation book-backs” sent by Charles Dickens to a London bookbinder, who fabricated mock books with the fake titles. The New York Public Library re-created part…

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From source material quoted by al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, an eleventh-century scholar, in his humorous survey of Islamic scholarship concerning uninvited guests. Selections from the Art of Party-Crashing in Medieval Iraq, abridged and translated…

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From an 1851 “list of imitation book-backs” sent by Charles Dickens to a London bookbinder. Read More

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“A paleoanthropologist determined that prehistoric man ate pandas, researchers disproved the Five-Second Rule, and a cat discovered 2,000-year-old catacombs in Rome.” Read More

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