HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories

Short StoryVerses
Short StoryVerses
  • 4.2 (33)
  • Comedy Fiction
  • Updated Weekly

Classic Tales and New Laughs from Twain to Today Comedy is the oldest trick in the book (or the short story), and HumorUs goes digging for the funniest classic tales with a few new ones sprinkled in. Each episode is one short story, narrated with care and a raised eyebrow. Bureaucratic guinea pigs that simply will not stop multiplying, courtesy of Ellis Parker Butler. A backwoods divorce that doubles right back into a wedding, by way of O. Henry. A shipwreck that strands exactly the wrong man, from the dry wit of W.W. Jacobs. A town so devoted to oversight it forms a committee to oversee the committees. Some of these tales are a hundred years old. Some are brand new. All of them prove the same stubborn little fact, that a good laugh never goes out of print. So pour something, settle in, and let the great humorists, famous and forgotten alike, humor us. A comedy fiction podcast from Short Storyverses. All episodes are narrated by professional voice actor, Don McDonald. Please help me out. If HumorUs makes you smile, please take ten seconds to give the show five stars in Apple Podcasts. A couple of recent one-star ratings (one stating that I am actually AI) have had an outsized effect on this young show. Your rating genuinely helps. Thanks. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  1. 2d ago

    A Slice of Life — A Classic Story by P.G. Wodehouse

    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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    A Slice of Life — A Classic Story by P.G. Wodehouse

  2. Sep 8

    The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain

    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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain

  3. Sep 1

    The Reticence of Lady Anne — A Classic Short Story by Saki

    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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    The Reticence of Lady Anne — A Classic Short Story by Saki

  4. Aug 25

    Gipsy — A Classic Comic Tale by Booth Tarkington

    Duke is a little old dog with a pessimistic worldview and a well-earned suspicion that life rarely improves. Gipsy is a rangy, scarred, yellow-eyed stray cat who lives by his own code and has never met a creature he could not intimidate. When Gipsy helps himself to a fishbone resting near Duke's sleeping nose, the afternoon explodes into a comic war of nerves, claws, and theatrical yelping that draws every boy in the neighborhood running to witness the spectacle. Booth Tarkington, one of only three writers to win two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, brings his gift for sharp character comedy to this brief, savage encounter between two animals who understand each other perfectly. The battle is brief, the casualties are mostly to dignity, and the ending involves a cistern, a miscalculation, and one of the most memorable splashes in American humor. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Gipsy — A Classic Comic Tale by Booth Tarkington

  5. Aug 18

    A Wasted Day — A Classic Short Story by Richard Harding Davis

    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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    A Wasted Day — A Classic Short Story by Richard Harding Davis

  6. Aug 11

    The Whirligig of Life — A Classic Short Tale by O. Henry

    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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    The Whirligig of Life — A Classic Short Tale by O. Henry

  7. Aug 4

    Chain of Custody — An Original Comedy of Errors by Don McDonald

    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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Chain of Custody — An Original Comedy of Errors by Don McDonald

  8. Jul 28

    The Good Little Boy and The Bad Little Boy by Mark Twain

    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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    The Good Little Boy and The Bad Little Boy by Mark Twain
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Classic Tales and New Laughs from Twain to Today Comedy is the oldest trick in the book (or the short story), and HumorUs goes digging for the funniest classic tales with a few new ones sprinkled in. Each episode is one short story, narrated with care and a raised eyebrow. Bureaucratic guinea pigs that simply will not stop multiplying, courtesy of Ellis Parker Butler. A backwoods divorce that doubles right back into a wedding, by way of O. Henry. A shipwreck that strands exactly the wrong man, from the dry wit of W.W. Jacobs. A town so devoted to oversight it forms a committee to oversee the committees. Some of these tales are a hundred years old. Some are brand new. All of them prove the same stubborn little fact, that a good laugh never goes out of print. So pour something, settle in, and let the great humorists, famous and forgotten alike, humor us. A comedy fiction podcast from Short Storyverses. All episodes are narrated by professional voice actor, Don McDonald. Please help me out. If HumorUs makes you smile, please take ten seconds to give the show five stars in Apple Podcasts. A couple of recent one-star ratings (one stating that I am actually AI) have had an outsized effect on this young show. Your rating genuinely helps. Thanks. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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