HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories

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. Despite a few suspicious reviews, every story you hear is narrated by an actual human—me, Don McDonald. If you enjoy the show, please rate it five stars and help me prove I’m not AI—which is, admittedly, exactly what AI would ask you to do. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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…

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. Despite a few suspicious reviews, every story you hear is narrated by an actual human—me, Don McDonald. If you enjoy the show, please rate it five stars and help me prove I’m not AI—which is, admittedly, exactly what AI would ask you to do. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Despite a few suspicious reviews, every story you hear is narrated by an actual human—me, Don McDonald. If you enjoy the show, please rate it five stars and help me prove I’m not AI—which is, admittedly, exactly what AI would ask you to do. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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…

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 Despite a few suspicious reviews, every story you hear is narrated by an actual human—me, Don McDonald. If you enjoy the show, please rate it five stars and help me prove I’m not AI—which is,…

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. Despite a few suspicious reviews, every story you hear is narrated by an actual human—me, Don McDonald. If you enjoy the show, please rate it five stars and help me…

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 Despite a few suspicious reviews, every story you hear is narrated by an actual human—me, Don McDonald. If you enjoy the show, please rate it five stars and help me prove I’m not AI—which…

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. Despite a few suspicious reviews, every story you hear is narrated by an actual human—me, Don McDonald. If you enjoy the show, please rate it five stars and help me prove I’m not AI—which is, admittedly, exactly what AI would ask you to do. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Despite a few suspicious reviews, every story you hear is narrated by an actual human—me, Don McDonald. If you enjoy the show, please rate it five stars and help me prove I’m not AI—which is, admittedly, exactly what AI would ask you to do. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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…

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. Despite a few suspicious reviews, every story you hear is narrated by an actual human—me, Don McDonald. If you enjoy the show, please rate it five stars and help me prove I’m not AI—which is, admittedly, exactly what AI would ask you to do. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Despite a few suspicious reviews, every story you hear is narrated by an actual human—me, Don McDonald. If you enjoy the show, please rate it five stars and help me prove I’m not AI—which is, admittedly, exactly what AI would ask you to do. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is a parable set in a village where things run smoothly—because they always have. Problems are addressed. Responsibilities are shared. And when questions arise, there is a structure in place to handle them. Over time, that structure has grown more refined, more comprehensive… and more ridiculous.. Despite a few suspicious reviews, every story you hear is narrated by an actual human—me, Don McDonald. If you enjoy the show, please rate it five stars and help me prove I’m not AI—which is, admittedly, exactly what AI would ask you to do. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Some stories ask you to believe. These just want to humor us. Here's a narrated collection of short fiction with a straight face and a crooked grin. Despite a few suspicious reviews, every story you hear is narrated by an actual human—me, Don McDonald. If you enjoy the show, please rate it five stars and help me prove I’m not AI—which is, admittedly, exactly what AI would ask you to do. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Eph Deacon sells pies for a living, or rather his wife bakes them and he carries the basket, which suits his philosophy just fine. Then Phineas Doolittle starts undercutting him from across the river, and what begins as a squabble on a bridge turns into something much bigger, and much sillier. Before long the two men have talked themselves into buying up farms, bakeries, and even a railroad, all in the name of cornering the pie market once and for all. Ellis Parker Butler, the man who gave the world "Pigs Is Pigs," turns small-town rivalry into an empire of hot air, one slice at a time. Ellis Parker Butler was an Iowa-born humorist who wrote more than two thousand stories, essays, and poems over a career spanning four decades, though he never quite escaped the shadow of his most famous creation, "Pigs Is Pigs." Published in 1904, "The Great American Pie Company" shows off the same gift for watching ordinary ambition curdle into absurdity, set against the folksy backdrop of a small Midwestern town not unlike…

He only wants to open an account. That's all. Fifty-six dollars, a polite request, and maybe two minutes of a bank manager's time. But the moment our narrator steps inside the building, something happens to his brain, and every word that comes out of his mouth makes the situation worse. Stephen Leacock built an entire career on watching ordinary people crumble under ordinary pressure, and few pieces do it faster, or funnier, than this one. Stephen Leacock was a Canadian economist, political scientist, and, by wide agreement, the funniest English-speaking writer of the early twentieth century, with Mark Twain among those who said so. Drawing on his own academic training, Leacock had a particular gift for turning institutions, banks, universities, small towns, into stages for quiet human panic, and "My Financial Career," first published in 1910, remains one of the sharpest few minutes of comic writing he ever produced. Despite a few suspicious reviews, every story you hear is narrated by an actual human—me,…

Henry Adams has one dollar to his name, a coat gone thin at the elbows, and a hunger that's stopped being polite about it. Then two rich old brothers hand him an envelope and vanish for thirty days, leaving him holding the single strangest piece of paper in London. It isn't counterfeit. It isn't a joke. And it is worth more than Henry can spend, prove, or even safely admit to owning. Mark Twain turns a penniless clerk loose on Victorian high society and lets the absurdity do exactly what it wants. Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, remains one of America's sharpest satirists, a writer who could turn a tall tale into a mirror held up to an entire society. Published in 1893, "The £1,000,000 Bank-Note" takes his gift for skewering wealth and appearances and sets it loose on Victorian London, decades before Hollywood borrowed the premise more than once. Despite a few suspicious reviews, every story you hear is narrated by an actual human—me, Don McDonald. If you enjoy the show, please rate it five stars…

Out in the Nevada mining camps of the 1870s, men learned to speak a language all their own, part slang, part swagger, part pure invention, and woe to the outsider who couldn't keep up. When a rough-hewn miner named Scotty Briggs marches into town to fetch a proper burial for a fallen friend, he finds himself face to face with a young, freshly minted clergyman who speaks only the King's English, and neither man has the faintest idea what the other is talking about. What follows is one of Mark Twain's funniest, and strangely most tender, character sketches, a collision of two American dialects, two worlds, and two men who, despite everything, manage to understand each other where it counts. Before he was Mark Twain, he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a Missouri riverboat pilot who traded the Mississippi for the Nevada silver fields and, when the mining didn't pan out, picked up a pen instead of a pickaxe. He spent the 1860s knocking around the boomtowns of the Comstock Lode, filing dispatches for the Territorial…

Where Adam's diary gave us one grumpy, bewildered account of those first days in Eden, Twain gives Eve her own version, and it changes everything. She's curious about everything, endlessly talkative, and cheerfully certain she's right about most of it. It's Twain at his funniest, and, by the end, at his most tender. This one will surprise you. Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, remains one of America's most enduring literary voices, celebrated for wit as sharp as his social criticism. Eve's Diary stands apart in his body of work, a companion piece to Extracts from Adam's Diary that reveals a gentler, more affectionate side of a writer usually known for satire. Twain wrote it, in part, as a tribute to his own wife, Olivia. For more great stories, visit shortstoryverses.com Despite a few suspicious reviews, every story you hear is narrated by an actual human—me, Don McDonald. If you enjoy the show, please rate it five stars and help me prove I’m not AI—which is, admittedly, exactly what AI…

Before there was marriage counseling, there was Adam's diary. Mark Twain's comic monologue imagines the Garden of Eden's first resident keeping a running, increasingly exasperated account of the strange new creature who's moved in, started naming his animals, and rewritten the rules of the place without asking. It's Genesis as domestic comedy, and it's every bit as sharp as Twain at his best. Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, remains one of America's most enduring literary voices, known for wit as sharp as his social criticism. From The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to shorter satirical pieces like this one, Twain had a gift for finding the absurd in the everyday, even when the everyday happened to be the Garden of Eden. Despite a few suspicious reviews, every story you hear is narrated by an actual human—me, Don McDonald. If you enjoy the show, please rate it five stars and help me prove I’m not AI—which is, admittedly, exactly what AI would ask you to do. Hosted on Acast. See…

Major Richard Dumbarton and Emily Carewe haven't seen each other in years, not since old grudges and other marriages got in the way. A chance reunion aboard an eastward-bound steamer changes that fast, deck chairs bribed into place and all. But romance runs into arithmetic when the subject of children comes up, and the resulting scramble to make the numbers work is pure Saki mischief. A quick, witty shipboard farce about love, superstition, and creative counting. Hector Hugh Munro, better known by his pen name Saki, was a British writer active in the early twentieth century, celebrated for short fiction that pairs drawing-room manners with a sly, sometimes wicked wit. His stories favor sudden reversals and characters whose composure cracks under the weight of their own absurdities, whether the setting is a country house, a dinner table, or, here, the deck of an ocean liner. Saki wrote several of his pieces as brief one-act playlets, letting dialogue alone carry the comic timing. He died in 1916, but his…

This story a small masterpiece of exasperation from 1905. Ellis Parker Butler wrote "Pigs Is Pigs" as a jab at corporate red tape, and somehow, more than a hundred years on, it has only gotten funnier. Two guinea pigs arrive at a railway express office. A clerk named Mike Flannery decides they are pigs, the customer insists they are pets, and a single nickel of disagreement sets off a cascade of letters, departments, and, well, arithmetic. You'll see. Ellis Parker Butler, 1869 to 1937, was one of America's most prolific humorists, an Iowa-born writer who turned out thousands of stories, essays, and poems across a long career. He published more than thirty books, helped found the Authors' League of America, and wrote for nearly every major magazine of his day. Yet it was a single short story, "Pigs Is Pigs," dashed off in 1905, that made his name. It sold in the hundreds of thousands, inspired stage and screen adaptations, and quietly seeded a whole comic tradition of small creatures multiplying beyond all…

Frank Norris could grind a man down to nothing in three hundred naturalist pages. He could also, when the rent was due, write something this loose and this funny. "Two Hearts That Beat as One" sends two soldiers of fortune, one American, one English, gunrunning down the Pacific coast, where they make the oldest mistake there is and fall for the same woman. The cure they settle on is a boxing match. It does not cure them. Frank Norris was thirty-two when he died, in 1902, which is the kind of fact that stops you cold, because by then he'd already written McTeague and The Octopus, the big grinding novels they still hand out on syllabi. But he wrote lighter things too, and the Three Black Crows were his rowdiest invention, three guns-for-hire who turn up in four different stories getting into trouble on land, at sea, and once or twice somewhere stranger. This was their first time out. It was collected after his death, in a book called A Deal in Wheat, in 1903. If you liked this one, there's a whole shelf of…