HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories

Mark Twain falls into conversation with a pleasant gentleman who has mild opinions on weather, crops, literature, scandal and religion. Then the talk lands on burglar alarms, and the gentleman is suddenly not mild at all. His was the most imposing alarm in America. It had a gong the size of a washbowl, forty-seven little tags, and an expert from New York who always came when called, and always remembered to send a bill. Twain, who had an alarm put into his own Hartford house the year before he wrote this, lets the man talk. First published in Harper’s Christmas supplement, December 1882.

Somebody left a paperback on the bus. A man brings it home, settles into his easy-chair, and makes a discovery the rest of us have missed: Earth has been invaded, and the author knows all about it. The proof is right there on the page, and it gets worse with every chapter. He wrote to the Government. They sent back a pamphlet on the repair and maintenance of frame houses.A comic gem from 1953 by Philip K. Dick, the mind behind Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report.Follow HumorUs and each new story will show up in your library as soon as it's released. No searching, no remembering.This show is one corner of Short Storyverses, a family of fiction podcasts. Some lean literary. Some are funny. Some will keep you up with the lights on, and some belong by the fire in December. There are classics nobody reads anymore and should, and original stories you won't hear anywhere else. They're all read by Don McDonald from his studio booth, and all short enough to finish on a drive, a walk, or a sleepless night.Come explore at shortstoryverses.com. Pick a universe. Stay a while.

Wall Street, a spring morning at the turn of the century. The ticker is running hot, the telephone won’t quit, and Harvey Maxwell, broker, is handling it all like a man with springs where his heart should be. His clerk thinks the boss is slipping. His stenographer has something on her mind. Then a window opens, and somebody on the Exchange starts clubbing the stuffing out of Union Pacific.O. Henry at full gallop, in a nine-minute comedy from The Four Million, read by Don McDonald.HumorUs is part of the Short Storyverses network of fiction podcasts. More stories, more feeds, at shortstoryverses.com.

Every house party has a guest who knows too much. A mild little man named Cornelius Appin has spent seventeen years on one problem. He believes he's solved it: he has taught a cat to speak. The company around Lady Blemley's tea table does not believe him — and that, as it happens, is the last comfortable moment anyone in the house will enjoy. Pour yourself some tea. Mind the saucer. Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), the sharpest wit of the Edwardian age. Born in Burma and raised in Devon by a grandmother and two aunts he could not abide, he became a foreign correspondent before turning his pen on polite society. He borrowed his pen name from the cupbearer in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. When war came in 1914, he enlisted as a private at forty-three and refused a commission; he was killed by a sniper in France on November 14, 1916. His last words were “Put that bloody cigarette out.” “Tobermory” first appeared in the Westminster Gazette in 1909 and was collected in The Chronicles of Clovis in 1911. Read by Don McDonald. HumorUs is part of the Short Storyverses network. shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this one, tell a friend, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and leave a review. It genuinely helps. Also, check out my multiple short story universes at shortstoryverses.com 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.

Nobody in New Orleans had ever made Bernard de Marigny look foolish in public. He was rich past counting, small as a foil, and very likely the most dangerous man in Louisiana with a pistol in his hand. Then a blacksmith from a far parish, seven feet of him and slow to speak, said something true on the floor of the legislature, and the whole chamber laughed.The card came to the forge two days later.The blacksmith was no duelist. He was, however, a man who had spent his life learning where something hard gives.From Short Storyverses. More at shortstoryverses.com.

A man in a country pub insists his story is true. It concerns his brother Wilfred, a chemist of some genius, a jolly outdoor girl with a wholesome sunburn, and a Yorkshire baronet who spells his name with four small f's. Somebody is being kept behind a locked door on the second floor. Somebody else is about to regret asking what's true to life.This is P.G. Wodehouse, 1926, at his most gleefully unreliable.First published in Liberty, August 7, 1926; collected in Meet Mr. Mulliner, 1927. Read by Don McDonald. HumorUs is part of the Short Storyverses network. shortstoryverses.com

An errand, a name, a question. That's all it takes.Sent east to west on a friend's behalf, a traveler walks into a decayed mining camp in Calaveras County and asks one polite question of one agreeable old man. He is then backed into a corner, blockaded there with a chair, and told at enormous length about Jim Smiley, a gambler who would bet on a horse race, a dog fight, a camp meeting, or two birds on a fence, and who once spent three solid months in his back yard teaching a frog to jump.The frog's name was Dan'l Webster. He was, by every account, the finest jumper in the county.Then a stranger came through camp.Mark Twain published this in the fall of 1865 and woke up famous. Sixty years of American humor start here, on a barroom floor, with forty dollars on the line.Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in Missouri in 1835. Printer's devil, riverboat pilot, and, briefly and disastrously, a silver prospector. He went west in 1861 chasing a fortune he never found, and came back with something better, which was a way of hearing how Americans actually talked.He heard this story in a tavern in Angels Camp in the winter of 1865, wrote it down, and watched it run in a New York paper that November. It was reprinted everywhere, pirated almost as fast, and read aloud in parlors and barrooms coast to coast. He was thirty and unknown that fall. By spring he was Mark Twain. Tom Sawyer was still eleven years away.If you enjoyed this one, tell a friend, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and leave a review. It genuinely helps. Also, check out my multiple short story universes at shortstoryverses.com

A December afternoon, a fire going down, and a marriage stalled halfway through a quarrel nobody bothered to finish. Egbert comes in for tea prepared to be reasonable, then conciliatory, then almost penitent. Lady Anne, rigid in the armchair by the tea table, declines to participate. Somewhere above them a bullfinch works through the only tune it knows, and on the rug a Persian cat named Don Tarquinio waits with the patience of an animal who has already decided something.Saki at his most precise: eleven minutes of drawing-room comedy built entirely out of one person not speaking, and a closing line that reorganizes everything you just heard."The Reticence of Lady Anne" was collected in Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches (1910). Read by Don McDonald.Litreading is part of Short Storyverses. shortstoryverses.com