HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories

Arnold Thorndike buys a Correggio before breakfast and can price his own time to the minute. Two hundred dollars of it. So when he stops his car at the Court of General Sessions to say a word for a young stenographer who got drunk, lost five hundred dollars of his employer's money, and is due up for sentence, he figures the errand will run him about a thousand.The court has other ideas. Richard Harding Davis, the most famous reporter of his generation, sets the Wisest Man in Wall Street down on a hard oak chair and leaves him there, unrecognized and unimportant, admitted only because he's "with Mr. Andrews," while the whole sorry parade of the city files past the bench.This is a comedy of manners with a soft heart. If you enjoy well-narrated short stories, check out our many story-telling podcasts at shortstoryverses.com

Ransie and Ariela Bilbro come down out of the Cumberland Mountains to have their marriage undone. Justice of the Peace Benaja Widdup can find no law on the subject, so he invents one, and prices it at five dollars, which happens to be every cent Ransie made on his furs. Then Ariela wants alimony. What follows is a night ride, a masked man, a bill rolled tight and pushed down a rifle barrel, and a decree that nobody much wants by morning. O. Henry watches a single five-dollar bill travel in a perfect circle, and two stubborn people get carried around with it. A love story for anyone who ever meant it when they said they were leaving.

In Maple Glen, nothing ever happens. This week, nothing happens in three separate backyards, after dark, and everyone involved would prefer you didn't ask.A deadpan comedy about honesty, neighbors, and one very patient dog.Find more stories at ShortStoryverses.com — a multiverse of audio fiction spanning seven shows: classics on LitReading, original voices on New Tales Told, children's stories on Readastorus, holiday tales on Season's Readings, horror on FRIGHTLY!, romance on Love Lit, and comedy on HumorUs. Every story sized to fit a commute, a walk, or the quiet stretch before sleep. We have stories buried everywhere.

Mark Twain had a bone to pick with the Sunday-school storybook — that pious little genre where good children are showered with rewards and bad children are struck by lightning, broken by apple trees, and buried under weeping relatives by the final page. So he wrote two stories to set the record straight.In this paired episode we run both, back-to-back, framed like an old-time radio hour. First, The Story of the Good Little Boy: meet Jacob Blivens, who obeys his parents, learns his book, never plays hooky, and longs above all else to be printed in a Sunday-school book of his own — funeral illustration and all. There is only one small problem. The world has not read the same books Jacob has, and it declines, spectacularly, to cooperate.Then, in counterpoint, The Story of the Bad Little Boy: meet Jim — not "James," though the books would prefer it — who steals the jam, robs the orchard, frames the good boy, boats on Sunday without drowning, and grows up to prosper by every kind of rascality. His luck, like Jacob's misfortune, never quite runs out.Twain's targets are sentimentality, easy moralizing, and the comfortable lie that the universe keeps a fair ledger. Told with a wink and a warm lamp, this is satire that still lands a century and a half on. Be good if it suits you. Be careful regardless.

Atop Orange Mountain, in Mr. Jacobus's summer boarding house, a bored married couple finds relief from their tiresome fellow guests in the arrival of the Bredes — a graceful, good-looking young pair who seem, in every visible way, to be "nice people." But their charming small talk keeps springing leaks.Henry Cuyler Bunner (1855–1896) was a poet, novelist, and the longtime editor of the humor magazine *Puck*, celebrated for polished short stories that find real feeling inside social comedy. "The Nice People" is one of his warmest — a story about gossip, appearances, and the whole hidden other side of people that we never see from the heights of our own self-esteem. 

O. Henry usually saves his surprises for the last line. This time he starts with one: the narrator is a dog. In *The Memoirs of a Yellow Dog*, a mangy, good-natured mutt gives us his candid review of apartment life, married humans, and the fine art of knowing when it's time to go. Wry, tender, and very funny — it's a small classic told from just below the dinner table.Few writers could make a stray dog sound this much like a philosopher. O. Henry's yellow dog sees his humans clearly, loves them anyway, and still knows a good exit when he smells one. It's humor with a soft heart underneath.